Post Script

Moritz Wagner, head of design

When they made Shadow Tactics, the team at Mimimi Games created a tribute to beloved games of their youth, resurrecting a genre niche that had all but fizzled out. Its success let the studio take the reins of one of the series it was paying homage to in the first place – and try to bring it to a whole new audience, borrowing from and responding to games that have emerged in the years since.

With this kind of game having all but disappeared in the early 2000s, it seems likely a lot of players will be coming to Desperados III from turn-based tactics games like XCOM. The realtime element means there’s a lot more to juggle – how do you keep from overwhelming new players?

People who play tactics games, they like to take their time usually. Turn-based means they can just sit there and decide what approach they want to take – but then it’s a very simple execution. There is no skill in execution required. In realtime, that suddenly becomes a thing. It’s what makes the original games so great. But it does create even more of a niche within the [tactics] genre.

One thing we did… in the old games, you could never be 100% sure that you were safe, maybe you missed a guard that’s going to come through there. So we added the bushes as spaces where you can feel safe and watch what’s happening and process it all slowly. And then we’re managing how many guards are on the screen at one time – we try to build the levels in pockets where players can be like, ‘Okay, this is what I’m working with right here, and everything that’s outside of that pocket does not concern me.’

You mention the skill aspect – is that the main thing you think you gain from the realtime approach? Something rather beautiful that comes from the realtime aspect is that you actually get more player freedom. Because you can execute things fast and you can just try it ten times, you can do optimal moves.

In a turn-based game, I can do a move optimally mathematically speaking, but there is nothing that

I can then bring to that move and make it better. And this is something you can do in our games. You can sit there and be like, ‘Okay, this didn’t work out because I was 0.5 seconds too slow,’ and then you train yourself to do those 0.5 seconds, and it’s very rewarding.

And it allows players to do a lot more weird stuff. We’ve let go of the notion that we can control the players. We just give them the setups and we try to make it so they can’t break the game, and then they can just go crazy, as they would in an immersive sim game like Dishonored.

Something Desperados has in common with immersive sims is the inclusion of non-lethal options. But they’re very limited, and there’s no system that rewards you for zero-kill runs. So why did you decide to include this option?

We know there’s a lot of people who like ghosting these sort of games – to not kill anybody or maybe in the best case not even, like, knock out anybody. So we tried to support that, but also – and this is something where I’m not quite sure if it’s the right decision or not – I also think that people who play that way want it to be harder. And so we have certain skills that are only available if you’re playing lethally, like Cooper’s knife throw. If you’re ghosting, you can’t use that. And tying up enemies, which you have to do before you pick them up, the overall duration is longer if you’re using the knockout skills.

But something that we do not want to do is judge players and how they play. There is no S rank or anything, because we don’t see any value in that. We want you to play the game the way you want to play it. If you want to kill everyone, go ahead. If you don’t want to kill anyone, go ahead – we’re not going to tell you that you played it wrong or right.

We just give [the players] the setups and we try to make it so they can’t break the game, and then they can just go crazy

The one exception to that rule seems to be the post-mission ‘badges’ challenge system – where did that come from?

We built these huge, intricate maps, and if you just play through them once they’re wasted, almost. So we thought, is there a way to squeeze extra content out of them, but also to nudge players and show them what you can do inside the game? So we just look at the map and try to find things that are warping the way you play: ‘Don’t hide in the bushes’, ‘Don’t save’, ‘Don’t use the skills of this character’. Things that you think are completely impossible the first time.

Some of those challenges are intimidating, especially the speedrun times. We have to ask: how are those even possible?

The reaction when people see these is always disbelief. I think and hope that it’s cool, but for some players I think it can be demotivating. ‘I just took two hours on this mission and you’re telling me I can do it in ten minutes?’ But when you see what people actually do… Speedruns are starting to come out now, and

I think someone has already done the second mission in one minute, 50 seconds. So the challenge times, they’re not the hardest ones we can think of, they’re times that we can do at the studio, like, ‘Okay, this is doable,’ and then we add some time on top of it. But you can optimise it insanely.