NO REST FOR THE WICKED
as they dig a marked area on the ground with a shovel. There is more to Wicked’s downtime than smashing crates or opening chests. Gathering resources is important, whether you’re using a campfire to cook meals to restore health and boost stats or spending materials on crafting new equipment at the town of Sacrament – or, indeed, investing them in restoring the place to its former glory. We certainly didn’t anticipate Animal Crossing being an inspiration; this even shares New Horizons’ cylindrical world, giving Sacra’s environments a striking depth that makes them distinct from the locations in Wicked’s isometric peers.
According to Moon Studios co-founder and technical director Gennadiy Korol, all this is indicative of the studio’s “highly iterative nature” in developing its games. “We just try things – we’re not afraid to take risks or try stupid ideas,” he explains. “We just take whatever we like and we think could fit well from other games, and we just fuse it all together. Then we do another spin on it, and we let it bake.” Yet the team are selective in the ideas they borrow. It would be inaccurate to describe this as a top-down Soulslike, because while the rank and file may be almost as tough as its bosses – the first of which, combining elements of man and beast, would not look out of place in Yharnam – you needn’t worry about enemies respawning or retrieving lost experience when you die.
By incorporating Diablo’s randomised systems, it also addresses what Mahler sees as a typical Souls game’s shortcomings. “In Dark Souls, a chest in Undead Burg will always contain the same item for everybody, but I want players to have a different experience every time,” he explains. “Even if you find, say, the same Blood-rusted Sword, we roll it with RNG, so you might find it with new effects, with a fire gem or faster tech speed – all which affects your gameplay.”
The shift in perspective also makes a difference. “[In Souls games] your right thumb is always busy rotating the camera and trying to frame the action, whereas we can craft the camera algorithm to really perfectly frame everything,” Korol says. “And now you can do all these crazy moves, where you can dash backwards or forwards.” The kind of actions, in other words, that are hard to pull off from a traditional over-the-shoulder perspective.
Controls are different, too, with attacks mapped to the X button, while holding the right bumper opens up your current weapon’s special attacks. “In Souls, you fight bosses like Artorias who have these really cool moves,” Mahler adds, “but you as a player never get these moves – you never get to look as cool.” These attacks have to be used sparingly since they rely on a focus gauge, akin to a super meter in Street Fighter – though successful parries will instantly refill it, incentivising more daring play.
The studio has other ideas that it is aiming to iterate on with community input, hence the decision to release Wicked into early access. Having already proved enormously successful for Hades and Baldur’s Gate 3, the model makes even more sense given Moon’s past experience. “With Ori And The Blind Forest, the Definitive Edition had a development cycle of about a year where we were able to study the game and make all of these updates, and between Switch ports and Series X editions, we were just constantly iterating on the game and improving it,” Korol says. “As creators, this is so fun for us. So for a big, ambitious game, where we’re trying something different and wanting to get it exactly right, we really want to have that iteration with the community.”
Korol is hoping players will have the opportunity to find out for themselves what the game is – and, just as crucially, what it isn’t – without the preconceptions being labelled as a Soulslike or Diablo clone would raise. “If we do it right, and we keep iterating throughout early access, improving it and bringing all these additional inspirations, what we would like to have as an outcome is for it to become its own thing – its own subgenre within action RPGs.” Might we be about to witness the advent of the Wicked-like?
“We would like it to become its own thing – its own subgenre within action RPGs”