![]() "So that's why we created this new crew, and not basically fuck up his guys." "But we wanted to give a more intimate view," he says. Rather, it was the "huge, board ideas" and philosophical questions he wanted to answer that always took centre stage in his work - and when you've got a novel such as The Invincible dealing with the moral quandaries of self-replicating machines, micro robots and artificial intelligence, those sorts of questions don't come much bigger than that. In his view, Lem "never really went that much into people's feelings" in his books. ![]() ![]() Yasna and her crew are totally made up by us, but they give the story a different spin, making it more personal and emotional." "You might see some of the characters from the book, but you're not playing them. "The gist and the core story is there, but we didn't touch the characters," Dobrowolski tells me. But it's not just her own crew that might be waiting for her, it seems. ![]() Over the next 20 minutes, Yasna re-establishes communication with Novik after finding and setting up a new relay satellite - rendered with pleasing tactility onscreen as you twist, rotate and push in thumbsticks to manoeuvre it into place - and sets about trying to find the other signals of her stranded friends. Sadly, not all of them have made it, but the ones who have survived seem to be afflicted with a strange, symptom-less illness that's left them completely dazed and unable to move. Here, Yasna is slowly getting her bearings, finding her crewmates after crash landing on the planet's surface. In this new GDC build, however, we're meeting them much earlier, just 40-50 minutes in from the start of the game, Dobrowolski says. When I first previewed The Invincible at the end of last year, Yasna was alone in the dusty ravines of Regis III, with only Firewatch-style radio chats with her remote astrogator Novik keeping her sane. Indeed, heroine Yasna and her crew of fellow astronauts are one of those "new" elements, he tells me - although how long you'll actually stay as a crew is a matter very much open to debate. "And if you read the book first, you'll find something new in the game, so they become complementary to each other." "When you play the game first and then read the book, you'll find something new in the book," he says. Despite all this, though, Dobrowolski insists this "isn't a one-to-one adaptation" of Lem's interstellar rescue story gone wrong, and that fans of the book will still find some surprises on the surface of Regis III as they explore its strange canyons, caves and crash sites. ![]() During the course of our conversation, Lem is described as both a "national treasure" and "mandatory reading in high school" for Polish students, and his hallowed cultural status is something the team's "had to deal with" in bringing the book to life. "People tell us, 'Don't fuck it up, this guy's important,'" Dobrowolski continues, and no wonder. And after spending the best part of a year convincing Stanislaw Lem's son (and current rights holder) of the same thing, Markuszewski finally had his something - and a new partner to help him realise it. It took a while to find, but after a fateful encounter with an investor who'd just sailed across the Atlantic with only a copy of Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible for company, the signs were too good to ignore, Dobrowolski says. Something that would capture the same kind of cultural Polish heritage as The Witcher - originally adapted from Andrzej Sapkowski's six-strong series of novels - but that would take him on a new, more introspective kind of development journey. When Marek Markuszewski had finished working on The Witcher 3's Blood And Wine expansion, he wanted to go back to basics and make something by himself, Starward Industries' chief marketing officer Maciej Dobrowolski tells me at GDC. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |