Vampyr - vampire action-RPG from Life Is Strange devs

[Wirdschowerdn]

What's the point of these dumb and annoying interviewers?

Just cut out the middleman and give us a direct video feed!

 

[Infinitron]

 

[vonAchdorf]

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/your-choice-of-who-lives-or-dies-will-radically-alter-london-in-vampyr/

Your choice of who lives or dies will radically alter London in Vampyr
The ambitious RPG from the makers of Life is Strange could become the seminal vampire game.

A lot of modern RPGs boast about the power of choice. They preach about how I get to shape the story, when in reality, that story is more like a rubber band—no matter how I try to contort and stretch it, it’ll always snap back into the same shape. But when Vampyr’s game director Philippe Moreau tells me that it’s possible to kill just about every NPC and condemn London to become a wasteland of diseased monsters, I have flashbacks to killing Caius Cosades in Morrowind—ending the main quest entirely.

Coming off a game like Life is Strange, Dontnod’s Vampyr is a wildly ambitious RPG. During E3, I got a chance to watch nearly 45 minutes of unscripted gameplay and the whole time I kept thinking “Wow, this sure does look like The Witcher 3 and Vampire: Bloodlines had a baby.” Trust me, I’m well aware that I just compared Vampyr to two of the most cherished PC games of all time. But stick with me here.

Bump in the night
Vampyr’s 1918 post-war London is a grim place to live. Wracked by the Spanish flu, the city is already on the verge of chaos. What threatens to push it over the edge are the reports of cannibalism and vampires stalking the streets. Dr. Jonathan Reid, the main character, is all too familiar with these reports. As a vampire, he’s partly to blame.

At the heart of Vampyr is the tension between Jonathan’s hippocratic oath to protect life as a doctor and his need to take it as a vampire. It isn’t just a thematic concept, but is woven into nearly every one of Vampyr’s various systems. During the demo, I was offered a fascinating look into how all of this is married with the story. It looks very promising.

The walkthrough begins in the hospital where Jonathan works. His boss, Dr. Swansea, is aware of his vampiric condition but isn’t going to report him to the guild of vampire hunters called The Guard who patrol the streets. We learn that the hospital was recently attacked and several of the patients are missing. To return order, Swansea asks Jonathan to find one of the missing patients.

It’s here that I notice just how alike Vampyr is to The Witcher 3. The third-person camera, the dour dialogue, vivid setting, and the fact that Jonathan has ‘vampire vision’ almost exactly like Geralt’s ‘witcher vision’ all evoke CD Projekt Red’s seminal RPG. That’s not a bad thing—who wouldn’t love to play another RPG as well realized as The Witcher 3?

After using Jonathan’s vampire vision to investigate the hospital rooms of the missing patients and glean some clues about their disappearance, we set out into the night to track one of them down.

Vampyr's most exciting quality is the balancing act central to Jonathan’s story. Unlike most RPGs, there are no generic NPCs walking Vampyr’s dreary streets. Every person you see has a name, relationships, backstory, and associated quests. As a doctor, it’s your mission to try and protect these people from other vampires and the cannibalistic ‘skal’ who are starting to crop up in London’s seedier areas. But in order to do so, you’re going to have to feed on some of them to grow stronger.

In order for Vampyr to really succeed, it needs to weave those smaller stories both into the larger narrative of each district as well as Jonathan’s own personal arc.

Feeding too recklessly, however, has its own set of dire consequences. Each district has its own health bar, and by murdering the citizens or compromising their safety during quests, that district becomes more unhealthy. Early on, that might mean merchant prices go up or a side quest becomes unavailable because you’ve killed an important character. But feed too selfishly and the district will fall into utter chaos. Monsters will invade and kill everyone inside, closing the door on all of their stories and related quests. As Moreau stated, even if you abandon every district in London to this fate, you can still find ways to solve the main quest. It’s a captivating idea. I just hope Dontnod can actually weave it into Jonathan’s personal story in a meaningful and dramatic way.

To feed or not to feed
Sometimes the best moments in RPGs are when you get get wrapped up in a secondary objective separate from the main plot. While pursuing leads on the missing hospital patient, Jonathan encounters some powerful vampire hunters and Moureau explains that we’ll need to become more powerful if we hope to survive the fight. We shelve our main objective in order to look for a suitable victim to feed on.

In the docks district, we encounter Seymour, a rough-looking lad. Using our vampiric powers of persuasion, which is a learnable skill, we’re able to force him to open up to us so we can learn about him. One of Vampyr’s menus lists every character in London, logging information like who they are, who they’re related to, and their health. It’s a complex web of relationships that requires careful consideration when choosing who you should kill—their death could end up having some unforeseen consequences.

Fortunately, Seymour is a real twat. He tells us about a necklace he lost that was supposed to be a gift for his mother. After some sleuthing about, we find it on a pile of dead bodies under the docks. Seymour must’ve dropped it while partaking in his fun hobby of murdering folks. When we confront him about it, he doesn’t even try to deny it. He’s a sick bastard and seems like a perfect person to feed on.

Except there’s just one problem: Seymour is sick and that means his blood quality is poor. The amount of experience we’d gain from feeding on him is lackluster. Moreau explains that we could craft some medicine using ingredients we found in order to cure Seymour—but that’ll take several days of waiting. Instead, Jonathan decides to investigate Seymour a little further.

We follow Seymour back to his house and eavesdrop on a conversation he has with his mother, Stella, who is well aware of his murderous tendencies. We also learn that Stella is housing an orphan named Rufus—whom Seymour despises and frequently beats.

Because we’re pressed for time, Stella might make a better target for feeding than Seymour. And, hey, she’s kind of complicit in his crimes anyway, right? After Seymour leaves, we go to talk with Stella but can’t enter her home unless we’re first invited in—a classic bit of vampire folklore that's also a clever subversion of that dumb RPG trope where everyone’s house is basically public property.

Yet again, Jonathan makes use of his vampire persuasion to trick her into welcoming us into her home. Using all the information we know about Seymour, we confront Stella to learn her side of the story. It turns out Stella is just a coward. She knows her son is a monster but also can’t bear the thought of turning him in. It’s a somewhat sympathetic struggle, but then we analyze her blood quality and realize that she is basically a human-sized bag of delicious experience points. Oh well.

After luring her into a private area and sucking her dry, Jonathan needs to rest in order to level up and assign his newly siphoned experience points into his various skill trees. After waking up, we head back to the docks to see the impact Stella’s death had on the district. We find it abandoned and in quite a state of disarray. Seymour has taken ownership of the property and doesn’t appear to be handling his mother’s death all that well. What’s more, we find Rufus, the orphan, squatting in a ditch. Now that Stella is dead, Seymour has abandoned him to the streets. He’ll probably die soon. The district itself has taken a small hit to its overall health too and Moreau tells us we’ll feel a subtle change when dealing with the other residents of the docks that’ll grow more apparent if we continue to feed on people.

This has been the best insight into Vampyr’s web of quests I’ve seen to date, but it’s still not enough to get a sense of the broader repercussions. What I saw was awesome, but it was also on a small scale. In order for Vampyr to really succeed, it needs to weave those smaller stories both into the larger narrative of each district as well as Jonathan’s own personal arc. Dontnod is tackling a massive obstacle, as RPGs frequently falter when trying to account for every tiny decision we make during their story. Whether or not Stella’s death is just a superficial change to the environment or a deeply impactful change to the district remains to be seen.

Still, my tour through just one of Vampyr’s quests left a quite an impression on me. Before this demo, Vampyr was little more than a blip on my radar. Now it’s one of the games I’m most interested in playing this fall. I didn't find much cause to be skeptical, but what Dontnod is attempting is wildly ambitious and that always deserves a little caution. Though vampires have seen a resurgence in pop culture, the last great vampire game was 2004's Vampire: the Masquereade - Bloodlines. If Dontnod succeeds, Vampyr could unseat Bloodlines as the greatest vampire RPG this November. For now, I’m cautiously optimistic that it might.

 

[Infinitron]

Vampyr E3 previews: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/119231-vampyr-e3-previews.html

Polygon:

In Vampyr, players take on the role of Dr. Jonathan Reid, a World War I veteran practicing medicine in early 20th century London. The city is in the grips of the Spanish flu, which is somewhat complicated by the rise in canibalism. Not only are citizens dying from illness, they’re also prone to being turned into “skals,” a mutation that eats away at the mind while giving people a taste for human flesh. All along the Thames, in fact, skals lurk below the piers ready to leap out and devour passersby.​

But Reid has his own set of problems. There’s an order of vampire hunters hot on his trail, and in order to survive he must grow more powerful by feeding on the citizens of London. It’s up to players to determine who lives or dies.
​

HardcoreGamer:

Of all the options at your disposal, none are particularly pleasant. For example, you may opt to feed on an awful murderer. Sounds like a great target, right? The only problem is that they don’t exist in a vacuum. This murder, as cruel as he may have been in life, still has a loving mother. If her only son suddenly disappears, there will be ramifications for both her and the general sentiment of the town. What about feeding on the mother instead? Well, aside from potentially setting off her homicidal son, it would also harm the young orphan who looked up to her. These interpersonal relationships are key to Vampyr.

You’ll be able to pry into these relationships by interacting with the characters. They’re not just prey for Dr. Reid, but characters with stories to unravel. Chatting up folks offers up dialogue choices and the potential to positively (or negatively) influence their lives. With that said, all this town management is but one component of Vampyr’s gameplay. The other aspect involves fighting in action-packed battles against folks who seek to kill off vampires.​

TechRaptor:

There are some great benefits to sacrificing someone, however. Obviously, there is a big chunk of experience coming your way if you do, but you also absorb all of the memories of a person you sacrifice. This is important as there is a lot of locked dialogue with NPCs that you can only select if you have collected the correct information. While not all of that information comes from people, as you can find it out in the world, a great deal of it does. And, the more information you have on an individual when you choose to sacrifice them, the more experience you get.

For example, while playing we participated in a quick sidequest. Jonathan talked to a guy who seemed a little perturbed. We found out he lost his mother’s necklace and needed it returned, so we agreed to help him out. Well, the necklace was found in a pile of dead bodies, so Jonathan confronts him about it. Turns out the guy is a serial killer. That sounds like a good candidate for a sacrifice, right? Well, there’s still some more information to find out, so the demo went to go talk to this guy’s mother. She knows what he does but hasn’t done anything to stop it. We take a look at her profile and she has a higher blood quality than her son (more experience), so she gets killed. We swing by later and her son has taken over the house and it’s trashed.​

GameSpace:

You know, it sucks having an insatiable lust for blood and being an undead creature of the night. Imagine you’re a physician who’s been recently turned into such a beast and you decide to feast on a couple patients to satisfy your hunger. But your heinous and desperate act attracts the attention of an ancient faction of Vampire hunters who would love nothing more than to find you and put a stake through your heart. That’s where you find yourself at the beginning of Vampyr, an upcoming narrative RPG from Focus Interactive.

Much like in popular titles like Mass Effect or the Dragon Age series, all actions and dialog choices will have consequences. Every NPC ties into a social web and choosing one over the other to feed upon when your bloodlust becomes uncontrollable. You could choose to try and play through without ever eating a single person but it will be a serious uphill battle. In practice it’s much more reliable to investigate the characters inhabiting the various neighborhoods or boroughs and using the information you find to select the right victim.​

RPGGamer:

As you talk to citizens, do quests for them, and get more info about the world around you, you'll unlock bits of info about everyone. This information is presented in a menu to help make it easier for you to figure out if sacrificing a particular person is a good thing, a bad thing, or simply so tempting that it doesn't matter.

You see, while it's easy to justify sucking the blood of bad people, good people have higher quality blood and thus are worth much more experience. Once you've chosen your victims and drained out their blood, you can rest in a hideout to spend that experience in skill trees; your choice of skills can drastically alter how you play the game.​

RPGSite:

The combat was probably the least interesting thing in the demo. If you've played a 3rd person action RPG in the past few years, you've seen everything the combat in Vampyr has to offer already. Not only that but enemies seemed to soak up a ton of damage, that "squishy" feeling you often get in games like this.

After some more exploration Reed found the serial killer's mother, who knew of her son's crimes but protected him from the authorities all the same. The developer from Dontnod narrating this demo informed us that a boss battle with the serial killer was coming up soon and we needed to level Reed up in order to take on the challenge.​

Hey Poor Player:

As an action RPG, Vampyr has a level system. Ried was at level 13 when we got started, and encountered a point in his journey towards Hampton where the enemies around him were too strong to take down in his current state. This was the point where we were told how experience is laid out. In Vampyr, the main source of experience points and growth isn’t combat, but straight-up seduction and blood-sucking. Every single NPC in DONTNOD’s rendition of London has a name, a backstory, and most importantly, a lot of blood. All of London’s citizens are potential victims. It’s up to the player, then, to figure out whose life to take.

We watch as Reid meets a random man on the street. We learn that the man’s name is Seymour, and that he is taking care of his ailing mother. He mentions having lost a necklace he had bought for her. Using a Detective Mode-esque scan mode to follow a trail of blood, Reid discovers the missing article. The twist is that the dang thing is under a pile of fresh corpses. It comes out that Seymour is a murderer, a crime he readily admits to.​

Select Button:

Avoiding the Guard while roaming the streets is generally a good idea. When you do get into combat, you are equipped with standard weapons, as well as your vampire abilities. Your blood vision lets you track down potential targets, and using your speed you can overwhelm groups of enemies. Enemies are equipped with all sorts of vampire hunting gear, from wooden stakes to gas grenades that can render your powers useless. Damage is intended on Jonathan as he takes beatings, but his health will regenerate outside of combat. While this is one way to earn potential experience to gain additional powers, there is a much faster and lucrative approach.

The second half of the gameplay presentation focused on the social aspects. We came across a fellow, drunk, talking about a lost piece of jewelry. Being a kind person, we located it in an alley, surrounded by dead bodies. When confronted, he confessed to the crimes without remorse. Instead of feeding on the heartless murderer right away, we decided to visit his home, speaking to his mother about her son’s troubled lifestyle. It became evident through the conversation choices made that the mother has been covering up the deaths for quite some time. A third pillar to the story adds someone else that the mother takes care of, a young boy, who the son passionately despises.​

RPGFan:

The most concerning thing for me right now is that Vampyr doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on either concept, and I'd need a great deal of time to see if the jack-of-all-trades approach ends up working out. The combat looks quite rough, with a stamina bar à la Dark Souls and tons of unique vampire abilities that all seem to fling and fly without serious impact or sense of satisfying connection. Granted, Vampyr isn't billing itself as Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, but what I'm seeing is much more in line with DONTNOD's more forgettable Remember Me (gee, that's ironic) in terms of action. It doesn't help matters that things look quite rough in this current build. Character faces in particular lack any real detail, and some of the animations were distracting in places.

The city and NPC interaction, however, should be advertised and seen as Vampyr's true selling point. London itself is the main character, featuring districts that will deteriorate should you choose to make the citizens your preferred food source to power up your abilities for tougher encounters. Every character is named and has a set of relationships that you can use to exploit and manipulate. It's a bit strange that you can increase the experience bonus by learning more about your potential prey, but it gives you an incentive to investigate and interact with the world. In our demo, Dr. Reid spends a lot of time learning about a sweet old lady before finally doing her in so he can gain new powers in a pretty expansive skill tree. You'll have to be careful, however, as bleeding a district dry could eventually cut it off completely from the rest of London and lead to the rise of ghoulish vampire-like creatures called Skals that make life quite difficult for Jonathan.​

And Digital Trends:

With a little investigation, thanks to a blood-seeking vision mode unique to vampires, Reid tracked the locket to a murder scene. It turns out that Seymour is a menace to society as well as a devoted son, two facts the game logged on a special menu devoted to Seymour (there’s one for each citizen, it seems). Tracking Seymour back to his house, Reid was able to eavesdrop on his conversation. Reid discovered that while Seymour loved his mother, he was also a bit of a hothead, angry that his mom was caring for a local homeless kid called Rufus.

It was looking more and more like Seymour might make a good snack. Next, Reid mesmerized his way into Seymour’s mom’s house in order to ask her more about her son. Vampyr uses a conversation system similar one to what you might expect from a BioWare game. As you learn more about a given citizen, more options make themselves available to you.​

​

 

[Infinitron]

Interviews: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/119235-vampyr-interviews.html

GameWatcher:

GameWatcher: Speaking of the lore of vampires, this is an open-world game and you can travel through it as you please, but it would appear there are certain rules at work. Could you expand upon how you adapted traditional lore of the vampire?

Guillaume: Yes, so for instance. There is a very old rule in vampire lore that states a vampire cannot enter a home without first being invited in by that home’s residents. So Reed can’t just barge into a house. The rules of his curse forbid it. The world of Vampyr is open, but barriers and obstacles like this keep you from going wherever you please. For that purpose, we also adapted traditional vampiric powers and abilities. There are abilities and powers for fighting, such as pouncing from place to place to reach a target and blending with shadows. That said, Vampyr also has social spells like the classic vampire charm spell. So charm allows you to manipulate any citizen whose will is too weak to resist and that’s one of the ways you can gain entrance to their homes. You need to be investigative as well. If you can learn the secrets of people, you’ll have more power over them. Sometimes that means talking and charming it out of them. Sometimes that means using heightened sense abilities to investigate nearby areas for clues. The more hints you discover about them, the stronger your charming powers over them will be.

GameWatcher: And of course some people will be more resistant to a vampire’s magic than others.

Guillaume: Yes. Vampyr is still an RPG at its core. We have a lot of progression in the game. Some citizens are weak while there are others that are stronger. Just as well there are stronger enemies in combat that will require you to evolve Reed’s power throughout the game, and to evolve, Reed needs blood. He needs to drink blood and take the life of some citizens, which makes for the core decision in the game on whether to take life or not to save others and which lives you will take to sustain Reed.

GameWatcher: Let’s get into that a bit. Vampyr’s London is a living, breathing city broken up into districts of people each with their own lives and routines. How does your interaction with those people affect the districts and your progression?

Guillaume: So in Vampyr, the idea is that we don’t require you to kill anyone. We don’t require you to kill no one either. You can kill everybody, nobody, or somewhere in between. However, you must kill people and take their blood in order to evolve and become a stronger vampire. There are different routes to evolution. You can get a little bit of blood by fighting and killing enemies. You can also progress by getting information on citizens. That said, I will say that choosing to kill a citizen is much stronger means of experience and growth than combat. So the idea behind it is that you decide who you’re going to kill and who you’re going to spare in this city.

GamingBolt:

What kind of weapons are in Vampyr?

There are a lot of weapons. You have a great variety of melee weapons. You have left handed and right handed handed weapons which you can combine. You also have ranged weapons, small fire arms and crossbows.

Can players put together certain builds to fit their play styles in combat? Furthermore, what is the loot aspect of the game like?

We believe we have a unique take on the RPG evolution. Usually RPG’s tend to give you classes, to orient you to some sort of specification. We really didn’t want that for the game. The player is free to evolve at his own pace. To evolve you need to take lives, you need to embrace people. You don’t need to kill anybody, you can play the game without killing anybody; or you can play the game with killing everybody. So this plan of evolution can really vary in the game. With the decision the player takes, with the amount of blood you acquire, you will be able to evolve and gain vampire abilities.

We have a lot of them that you can acquire. We have three branches of abilities: shadow abilities, which allows you to blend in with the shadows. We have the instinct abilities, that are more beastly. We also have social abilities were vampires can turn into their targets. We have a broad range of abilities you can have.

We don’t have random loot in the game. We are not a game like MMOs where you’ll have to replay, and replay, and replay to maybe, at some point get some random loot that will work. The world is filled with content, with a lot of things to loot. We filled it with weapons, we have a crafting system that you can use to craft medicine, to craft new gear. Each area has specific challenges to access equipment.

 

[Zombra]

Very cool that they're using the "permission to enter" trope to gate content. Hadn't heard that before.

 

[mewt]

I'm interested, but I will wait. Remember Me had(has) a bug in it where beating a boss would not trigger post-boss event. I stop playing that game because of it.

 

[Modron]

I'm interested, but I will wait. Remember Me had(has) a bug in it where beating a boss would not trigger post-boss event. I stop playing that game because of it.

I just completed Remember Me a week ago (picked it up in steam sale) with no trouble if you're holding off.

 

[hackncrazy]

I want to believe that this game is going to be any good since the last good vampire game was made 15 years ago.

But I have no hope though. It's 99% sure it will be bad.

 

[mewt]

I'm interested, but I will wait. Remember Me had(has) a bug in it where beating a boss would not trigger post-boss event. I stop playing that game because of it.

I just completed Remember Me a week ago (picked it up in steam sale) with no trouble if you're holding off.

I owned the game before(on console before I sold the console) and the bug I described was the reason I dropped the game. I got past the part where you figure out what relation you had with the older woman in the game(don't want to spoil the story for readers here). The bug happened at two boss fights and that was enough for me to consider the game busted. I may try it again some day on PC if I get it on the cheap.

 

[circ]

Your choice of who lives or dies will radically alter London in Vampyr

In 2017. LOOOL no.

The ambitious RPG from the makers of Life is Strange could become the seminal vampire game.

LOOOOL. No.

 

[hackncrazy]

The ambitious RPG from the makers of Life is Strange

Fuck, I wish I didn't read this.

Definitely not going to buy or even care about it now.

 

[Lacrymas]

They consider blatant action games to be RPGs now? No wonder they are the less prestigious site.

 

[LESS T_T]

Delayed to Spring 2018: https://gematsu.com/2017/09/vampyr-delayed-spring-2018

Vampyr, the upcoming action RPG from Dontnod Entertainment, has been delayed from its previously announced November release window to spring 2018, publisher Focus Home Interactive announced.

Here’s the full message from Dontnod Entertainment:

Delaying the release of a project you hold dear is always a tough decision. However, we believe that meeting a deadline should never compromise quality. We were still convinced just a few weeks ago that we would be able to release Vampyr this year. Unfortunately, a technical issue – now solved – has set our teams’ schedule back at the end of the development.

This delay allows us enough time for all the polishing and balancing phase, much needed for a game of Vampyr‘s scope, with its ambitious, semi-open world, its complex narrative and deep RPG mechanics that give players a real impact on the world.

We want to thank our publisher Focus Home Interactive for giving us the means and time necessary to provide players a memorable experience… especially since so many of you are eagerly waiting for it.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.mcvuk.com/articles/devel...s-says-dontnod-as-it-prepares-vampyr-for-laun

‘There are too many zombie games’ says Dontnod as it prepares Vampyr for launch

Dontnod has had an unexpected journey in the games industry to date. On the verge of bankruptcy at the end of 2013 following Remember Me’s flop, the French studio then came back from the dead two years later with episodic smash hit Life is Strange.

With its future now secured, the extra breathing room has allowed Dontnod to refocus its efforts on an altogether different type of title – the action RPG Vampyr. Development on the game actually started long before Life is Strange came out, but the latter’s success doesn’t seem to have affected Vampyr’s production.

“If you start to worry about what people will think of your work based on your previous work, then you don’t work at all,” narrative director Stéphane Beauverger (pictured below) tells MCV.

“You have to go with your heart and your guts. You have to go with the way you feel; you want the player to feel emotions and to be tempted by the shades of grey you’re going to create.”

Of course, Dontnod is renowned for trying something new with each game, as none of its portfolio adhere to one specific genre. All of them, however, have something in common – a strong narrative – and Vampyr is no exception.

Pictured above: Dontnod's narrative director Stéphane Beauverger

If Beauverger jokes about the studio wanting to do this title because “vampires are cool and there are too many games about zombies,” he rapidly explains it was actually the scenario’s good story potential that attracted the team to the idea in the first place.

“I think what was the most interesting for me from a narrative point of view is that vampires are one of the very few creatures who are aware of what they are, what they were and they have their own duality,” he says. “Whereas the zombies, the ghouls, the werewolves are just stupid creatures most of the time.

“The vampire is a trickster. He’s living among the humans, he’s trying to manipulate them, so it was interesting to create someone who is torn by some kind of personal conflict. This is the kind of thing I wanted to explore – to become a vampire without deciding to be turned, to have to deal with this new condition and understand how it works, who you can trust, and who you can’t.”

This theme of internal conflict can also be seen in the game’s setting, which was initially supposed to be America in the 50s, but was then changed to early 20th century London.

“That was before I worked on the project,” Beauverger explains. “When I arrived, I said that, for me, the main interest of the vampire is the duality between light and shadow, believing in science and believing in supernatural things, science vs religion, humans vs creatures, and so on. So we looked at what could be a really interesting era for that.

“The beginning of the 20th century is very interesting because the laws of Darwin, the evolution theory, have been discovered, and slowly science is pushing away religious beliefs and superstitions.

“And Vampyr’s hero, Jonathan Reid, is from a scientific background. He’s a doctor, he believes in science, he believes in progress, and then he becomes a vampire and everything is twisted. He now has to understand that everything works with very different rules, so this is the first reason why we chose this specific era.

“It’s also the end of World War I. Millions are dead, and the Spanish flu epidemic is killing many people, more people than the war itself actually, and the city of London is really on the verge of scrambling down. So [as Reid] you come back to your hometown and realise that you’ve been turned into this creature and that the city is about to fall and it’s up to you, as a doctor, to make a difference. But what will you decide to do?”

Putting the story into players’ hands is another common theme in Dontnod’s games, but here, the path players choose to follow will have a much deeper impact on the game’s ending.

“Will you try to become a humanist vampire and just have a quick bite or, on the contrary, do you want to play a heartless creature who just wants to create mayhem? It’s up to you,” Beauverger smiles. “The game will not punish you or give you hints about the way you’re supposed to play, but there are different endings. There is one specific ending you can get if you manage go through the game without killing anybody.”

Of course, the most efficient way to progress and level up is to kill and drink citizens’ blood – you are a vampire, after all – but Vampyr will also reward players who don’t kill
at random.

“All your potential targets have secrets, friends, families, jobs and purposes,” says Beauverger. “Some are saints, some are desperate, some are mad, some are criminals, some are good people, some look like they’re good people, so it’s up to you.

“If you want to take someone at random and kill him, you have the right to do so, but if you want to investigate and understand who he is, you will get more interesting character sheets on your potential targets and then can make a better choice,” he continues.

“There will also be moral ambiguity; there are no good or bad actions. This is the most important aspect of the storyline for me – how do you cope with freedom of action when there are so many bad consequences? Because you are a creature of tragedy, you are a vampire, you are a character of a sad story, and there can’t be a good ending.”

GROW BIGGER OR DIE
After partnering with Capcom for Remember Me and Square Enix for Life is Strange, Dontnod is now teaming up with fellow French firm Focus Home Interactive as publisher on Vampyr (for more on the publishing side of things, read our interview with Focus' boss Cédric Lagarrigue).

“They gave us so much freedom on the creative parts of the project, it was a great pleasure to work with them,” Beauverger says.

Vampyr is a big project for both Focus and Dontnod, with a team of 60 to 80 people working on the title, compared to 50 to 60 for Life is Strange. But when asked if Dontnod has triple-A ambitions with Vampyr, Beauverger is categorical:

“Of course not,” he says. “Triple-A has become a strange thing. For me, it means millions in development budget, and that’s not the kind of game we create. You can’t compete with triple-A. You can only try to create a good game, with a lot of coherence, a strong narrative, good combat mechanics, good gameplay, and hope that when the player puts down the controller they say ‘Wow, that was a journey’.

“There is a rule in the video game industry: if you don’t grow bigger, you die or you get eaten. As long as you get success on your project, you can create more games, which cost more and are more ambitious, but it’s a very slow process.”

Life is Strange’s success allowed Dontnod to go even further with Vampyr and Beauverger very much hopes that the game’s fan base will follow the studio in this
new adventure.

“I think many people will come from the Life is Strange experience and try to face a new game by the Dontnod team and see what kind of stories and sadness and strange characters we have created this time,” Beauverger says.

“The main difference, perhaps, is that Vampyr is an action RPG, so you will have to prove some skills in combat. But people who like Dontnod’s approach on video games and narrative will be interested by the project,” he concludes.

http://www.mcvuk.com/articles/publi...ered-a-success-when-around-1m-copies-are-sold

Focus: “Vampyr will be considered a success when around 1m copies are sold”

FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE’S PRESIDENT CÉDRIC LAGARRIGUE

Focus Home Interactive’s boss Cédric Lagarrigue talks about the publisher’s ambitions for Dontnod's Vampyr and why he’d choose a sequel over DLC for the title. For more on Vampyr, you can also read our interview with Dontnod's narrative director Stéphane Beauverger.

How did you and Dontnod start working on Vampyr and how did the idea come to be?
These past few years, the vampire theme has been heavily-exploited with success in movies, TV and novels. Strangely, the game industry did not appropriate this phenomenon, even though the vampire universe suits it perfectly. With their emphasis on moral choices, character development, and narrative, we thought an RPG would be the perfect way to explore this. I played and loved Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, but it was released over ten years ago. We’ve been looking for years for a studio with a good vampire game project and Dontnod presented Focus with a new project. The artistic and narrative dimensions were exciting.

Last year we talked about Focus’ growing ambitions and move away from PC titles – is Vampyr the culmination of this?
Consoles have actually been weighing more than PC for a few years now. Our PC revenue is constantly increasing, but we now achieve 70 per cent of our global revenue on consoles. Our development budgets have increased a lot, and almost all our games are now multi-platform. Focus has, however, digital publishing embedded in its DNA. We have true expertise in digital releases. We now generate nearly 60 per cent of our revenue through digital sales on consoles and PC.

Vampyr certainly looks ambitious and it feels like it has the potential to compete with triple-A RPGs. How have you invested in Vampyr compared to your previous titles?
It is bigger than our previous titles, but is on-par with other games currently in production at Focus which will be released after Vampyr. Our budgets, even if they do increase, are that of games filling the space between blockbusters and independent games. It is true that the game is impressive and has a strong personality, but because of its budget, it is not a triple-A. However, the universe, theme and quality of the game all allow it to exist in stores next to the blockbusters. But this is also currently true for many games with smaller budgets, on less retail-focused platforms such as PC. Audiences have evolved a lot during the past few years. Players yearn for new experiences, originality and less generic direction. There’s room for blockbusters, but players are ever fonder of different experiences.

Vampyr was recently pushed back to Q1 2018. How has that affected your marketing campaign?
Many things we had planned for the coming weeks have been delayed to early next year. This has forced us to rework the communication schedule a little, but we are not completely turning it upside-down as the delay is just a few months. We decided to produce a few extra videos, including a big ‘making-of’ the game. We wanted to delay the game in order to give it the best opportunity to reach our objectives, which have not changed.

What are your sales expectations for the title?
It is always very difficult to make forecasts with a brand new IP. The game benefits from a solid budget, superior to most independent video games, however it is not a blockbuster, whose budget would be over €50m. From our investment, it will be considered a success when around a million copies are sold, but it will only need half of that to be profitable. These are numbers we now reach and exceed regularly with most our games. Vampyr benefits from strong recognition and expectations, which will only increase over the coming weeks. It has everything it needs to become a nice surprise on the market.

What features of the game are you most proud about?
The ‘Citizens’ system, which fits the curse aspect of the vampire, is very original. The player is doomed to kill in order to survive and become stronger. Players won’t just feed on unnamed prey. They will make difficult choices, as the main character is a doctor as much as a vampire. They save lives, but also kill to survive. By investigating potential victims, it’s up to the player to inform themselves on whether a character ‘deserves’ to be fed on or not. The impact of every choice will be felt through the story and the game’s various districts. It is very captivating and adds a lot to the experience.

How long are you going to support the title?
This is a purely solo experience; we did not plan DLC. We would prefer, if the reception of the game justifies it, to think about a sequel. We and Dontnod already have some ideas, as there’s so many incredible things to offer in such a universe.

 

[Immortal]

I was excited for this until I saw the gameplay. It looks like retarded shlopp.

 

[m_s0]

Focus: “Vampyr will be considered a success when around 1m copies are sold”

What could possibly go wrong?

 

[orcinator]

he rapidly explains it was actually the scenario’s good story potential that attracted the team to the idea in the first place.

As if we needed any more assurances that it'll be shit.

 

[Hines]

It looks like Focus is going to spend some money promoting the game in 2018, starting with a four-part webseries:

- Episode I: Making Monsters
- Episode II: Architects of the Obscure
- Episode III: Human After All
- Episode IV: Stories From the Dark

 

[Hines]

 

[Paul_cz]

That looks...

pretty damn promising.

 

[RepHope]

I’m not expecting Bloodlines but I do hope this is good and will be a success. I thought that first video was pretty good.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm hoping for Dishonored level of quality. The gameplay looks boring as fuck, but it might squeeze some drama out if handled right. I also hope you can stealth your way through the game, not be forced into no-brainer action combat.

 

[Zombra]

I'm still praying for a way to give the protagonist either a shorter beard or longer hair.