Ori And The Will Of The Wisps
Moon Studios goes into all the Ori details of making a potential classic
PC, Xbox One
Moon Studios makes a point of sweating the small stuff. Its debut,
Ori And The Blind Forest, proved this admirably: every hand-drawn mushroom and tree unique, every button press delivering total control over the titular guardian spirit. Alongside a heart-wrenching story, the Metroidvania platformer’s detail-oriented approach made it a critical and commercial hit. But a perfectionist’s work is never done.
So when, at a hotel during The Game Awards 2015, producer Mark Coates bemoaned the lack of a sequel to play with his young children, the idea niggled at game director
Thomas Mahler. “He brought up the whole idea that it would be so great to finish the story, and look at it from a perspective of what Miyamoto did with Super Mario Bros 3, where you take what you have and try to perfect it,” he says. “And I think that struck a chord with us, because we are always very perfectionistic at Moon.” What fuelled Mahler was the chance to include some of the things that there weren’t enough resources for in Blind Forest. With a higher budget allocation from Microsoft – and a wealth of feedback from fans – Will Of The Wisps could be everything Moon always wanted Ori to be.
First, the basic structure had to be reconsidered. “If you look at last year with
Breath Of The Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, I think the way Nintendo designs is very much like we design at Moon,” Mahler says. “I studied traditional sculpture, and the way I learned to work is to block in at first, and keep things rough until it really works. And only then do you start filling in details.” While
Blind Forest was an excellent platformer, its ethereal world designed to unfurl alongside the movement abilities collected along the way, it wasn’t exactly a unified whole. Combat felt like an aside, perhaps a slightly crude one in a story about reconciliation. “But the combat system was one of those things where people wanted to have more depth,” Mahler says. “You look at all the feedback, especially the criticism. We are a studio that mostly looks at the negatives when reading forums.” Thus, Ori’s capabilities have been rethought, both narratively and structurally: a new role as protector of the sole remaining owl-child of
Blind Forest’s Kuro compels the player to put their best defence forward.
Ori now possesses an armoury’s worth of options. The spear-like Spirit Edge performs quick melee attacks, while the Spirit Arc bow can pick off enemies from afar. The hammerstyle Spirit Smash, unsurprisingly, offers a slow, heavy-hitting attack that sends enemies flying skywards – and, if you’re deft enough, a chance to juggle them in the kind of precise combo you might expect of a fighting game.
“In the combat system, we use a lot of really nitty-gritty stuff that you have in Street
Fighter and Killer Instinct,” Mahler says. “You have various frames in attacks where you can smoothly go into the next one, or understand at exactly what frame range you can dodge out of attacks. You can really master it.”
Each ability can be assigned to almost any button (only jump is hard-mapped to A), and a new Spirit Shard system works as an evolution of Blind Forest’s ability tree, letting you modify weapons to your liking. “If you design a typical Metroidvania or even an RPG or something, you might have a weapon in there that a person really likes – but then it was designed as a low-level weapon,” Mahler says. “But what if you really like playing with that playstyle? I think it’s kind of silly that in these games, the designers basically tell you, ‘You can’t, because that’s a low-level weapon and it does almost no damage.’” Find a Spirit Shard in Will Of The Wisps, however, and you can soup up anything in almost any way you please. You can add a broader spread or more damage (or both, the game balancing the extra shots and percentage damage at each upgrade level) to your bow with a Splinter Shard. Other shards allow you to regain health by hitting enemies, or boost the effectiveness of spells. And in Will Of The Wisps, you’re not obliged to buy abilities in a certain order to progress. Instead, exploration is emphasised, with shards, Life Cells and mana upgrades found throughout the world.
“Everything has to work together in this perfectly smooth and fluid way,” Mahler says. A new multipurpose Burrow ability is perhaps the neatest example of this philosophy. Ori drills, dolphin-like, through deep pockets of sand: the movement allows us to attack the vulnerable bellies of shelled enemies from beneath. It also provides a boost to upward momentum upon exiting the sand, meaning we can hop up to a remote platform. Nothing in Will Of The Wisps is wasted, Moon Studios providing a unified system of combat and movement that rewards skill and curiosity.
This has, naturally, created plenty of extra work. “With the Spirit Shard system, it was like, ‘Oh that’s really cool, we should do that’. And then after some time you freak out,” Mahler laughs. “Because suddenly if you have this one thing that adds fire to your attacks, then there are 12 weapons, and each has five or six different animation sets you need to now change. There are literally thousands of changes that come with that!” But watching playtesters create their own loadouts and playstyles in a one-hour ‘vertical slice’ demo encouraged him to go to Microsoft for a bigger budget. The new NPC system, too, has been a costly endeavour, with characters scattered around the map offering quests, each demanding their own storylines, voice acting and animations. But with a track record of excellence, Moon Studios has clearly been trusted to deliver. “I don’t think the pressure [from Microsoft] has changed much, simply because we approach making games in a very formulaic way,” Mahler says. “It’s almost like writing a symphony – or an episode of Seinfeld! There is always a formula to it, and if you don’t understand that, then it’s just random and it’s chaos and doesn’t work. I think it’s the same with games.
“The difficult thing is just making sure everybody in the team is happy, managing the company, and being the dad of the studio,” he continues. “I think that’s where the pressure comes from.” Then, of course, there’s Mahler’s own passion for Nintendo-esque levels of detail, which is pushing him to create a sequel that – while still struggling for some truly new ideas of its own – exudes a level of quality that could cement it as a classic. Mahler recently replayed The Legend Of Zelda:
A Link To The Past, he tells us, and discovered that you could take a fish from one of the dungeons to a shopkeeper for a unique interaction. “He actually has a line and gives you 100 rupees. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I played through the game 50 times and I’m still finding new things!’ So it’s important to me that you have things in there that even five years from now, people will still find and say, ‘That’s crazy, I never knew that’.”