VA MP Y R
Will you give in to your killer instinct? Format PS4 ETA Q4 2017 Pub Focus Home Interactive Dev Dontnod Ent.
The illusion of choice has fast become the Holy Grail of gaming, and Vampyr is taking a large bite out of this challenge. As a powerful vampire in murky Victorian London you can kill with ease, but what will the consequences be?
“There’s no clear-cut, blackand-white karma system, with one path being good and the other bad,” explains art director Grégory Szucs. “All the situations that we try to depict are kind of grey, and even if you make up your mind about something, dig a little deeper and you’ll see there are more layers to it.”
NECKED AMBITION
These choices are made all the more profound as your character is actually a doctor. There’s a vein of black humour in the game that’s refreshing – do you heal or kill?
Narrative director Stéphane Beauverger explains NPCs have friends and relatives, ambitions, and well-formed lives: “We want the player to feel they just took the life of a conscious being who had thoughts, emotions, hopes, and issues,” he says.
If you kill a pub owners Tom and Sabrina, the boozer will close, affecting the game’s world. “I think that’s a good example of how your decisions have a big impact on the environment and people living there,” explains Beauverger.
It’s a big step forward for RPGs, which could result in us being able to write our own stories.