toys Bringing to life
Ubisoft unveils its riskiest game, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, a vehicular-combat game of its own creation
Ubisoft Toronto is getting into the toy business.
After more than a year of development in secret, on Monday the local studio unveiled its latest and riskiest game — Starlink: Battle for Atlas — at its parent company’s news conference in Los Angeles at E3, North America’s largest video-game show.
Last week, the Star got an exclusive look, learning about its inception and the ambitions it represents for Toronto’s biggest video-game studio. Starlink started out as a prototype and now has about 100 employees working on it at the company’s Wallace St. studio.
It belongs to a games category called toys-to-life, which includes the likes of the Skylanders series and
Lego Dimensions, where players collect physical toys that usually sit on a portal and then are playable in the video game on the TV screen.
In Starlink’s case, intricate, customizable models of spaceships attach onto controllers that then appear on screen as the player’s vehicle.
“This game has been a labour of love for us here. It is a completely modular, smart building toy that we have developed from the ground up,” Ubisoft Toronto producer Matt Rose says. “It is toys-to-life but we really kind of see it as the next generation of that.”
While Ubisoft Toronto has done work on a number of sequels including Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed Unity and Watch Dogs 2, Starlink is the studio’s first foray into what the industry calls new “IP,” or intellectual property — a completely new story. It’s a substantial gamble, but it’s the sort of big project that Ontario’s provincial government was probably hoping for in 2009, when it gave $263 million over 10 years to Ubisoft to set up shop here.
Ubisoft Toronto is creating its own universe and characters for this game, centred on pilots defending the world of Atlas and travelling to seven sprawling worlds to battle the Legion — dark forces that can consume and take over planets.
Starlink is a vehicular combat game, where the ships hover near the ground on planets, fly in the atmosphere or dogfight in space. The toys can be customized at any point — change a weapon on the toy and it will instantly appear in the game. Or swap one ship with another, or create Franken-ships from parts of several.
“We wanted to create this really on-the-fly experimentation, with adaptation and creativity in the game,” Rose says. “So, for example, if you’re taking on an ice enemy, you can switch out your gun for a flamethrower.”
The ships’ design has a very slick look and feel, while the pilots are rendered in a more cartoony style. The game will feature seven massive worlds to explore with the vehicles — the first one in the prototype features giant dinosaur-like creatures roaming across a vast wasteland.
Some of the prototype toys are very cool-looking but would-be players Starlink: Battle for Atlas will have to wait: Starlink is at prealpha stage, meaning it is still fairly early on in development, and it won’t come out until fall 2018. For now, the team is just excited for the world to see what they’re working on. “We want people to know that something this cool is coming out of Toronto,” says Daniel Ebanks, the art director on the game.
The idea for Starlink started out years ago — after Ubisoft Toronto delivered its first game, 2013’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist — with a mandate from the company’s top brass to find innovative approaches to gameplay. Ateam of10 brainstormed and created different prototypes and game ideas, two of which became Nuit Blanche installations, including one called Go Poser Go in 2014.
What would become Starlink was an idea that kept nagging at the team: In an early prototype, a small Lego spaceship sat upon circuit boards duct-taped to a Wii remote controller, which Rose describes as the game’s “humble beginnings.”
He adds that when the team started talking about the idea with colleagues, all the pieces started falling into place — for example, they found employees at the studio with industrial-design backgrounds who could help build prototypes.
There is still a lot unknown or undecided about Starlink. The game will likely come with one spaceship toy, but it’s not known how much it might cost. No one can say yet how much additional ships might be, and as any parent who got sucked into Skylanders knows, the collect-themall mentality can definitely add up.
As well, considering that Ubisoft is creating a new fictional universe from scratch, it is likely that there will be some sort of tie-in, like a cartoon or web series that helps to introduce and fill in the blanks about the characters and the universe, although at this point the company is not talking about any of those plans.
The team has had several playtests, and while the game is aimed at a younger audience, the slick-looking toys feel less kid-oriented than some of Starlink’s toys-to-life competitors.
“You can kind of see the kids pick up and play with the toys, which are just really cool, and then you can see the dads kind of wanting to get in there and play with them too,” Ebanks says.