Post Script

Pierre Tarno, creative director, Sloclap

Absolver is Parisian studio Sloclap’s debut game – and now Devolver Digital’s most successful launch to date. Here, creative director Pierre Tarno discusses the pressure and promise behind an indie title’s early popularity, and the curious process of discovering your own game during development.

Absolver is Devolver Digital’s biggest-ever launch, and you had almost 20,000 concurrent players in the first few days. How has that been for you? We’re really happy we’ve generated this kind of interest. For an independent game, it was nice to see that so many people cared. Thing is, it wasn’t exactly reason to rejoice, because as a lot of players came in, we also saw issues and framerate problems that we hadn’t had in our dev tests or in beta. We couldn’t really relax and celebrate, party and drink. It was pretty much business as usual – even worse, because we hurried to fix the most urgent issues. The dev team, especially the programmers, have been working like crazy in the early hours of the morning, fixing as many issues as fast as possible. That went on until patch 1.05, which improved things quite a bit. We’re going to try and avoid burning ourselves out, but still have a pretty intense rhythm of updates in the weeks and months to come.

Speaking of grind, there’s a lot of it in Absolver. Why design a system that requires the player to repeatedly fight low-level NPCs? When I talk about ‘farming’ moves, I don’t think of it in a negative way. It’s actually something I really enjoy. As I learn a move and start to understand how to react to it, my character is learning it too, and when my character has unlocked it, it’s also a point where I, the player, know the ins and outs of that move. I find the process almost like a game of cat and mouse, where you’re kind of toying with an NPC. You’re trying to bring them down to very low health, then keep them there to understand their sequences, avoiding, absorbing or parrying the attack that you want to learn.

Was it your intention to create a game around the culture of respect in martial arts, in the hopes players would behave a certain way? No, that’s something that came up later. We had our original intentions – making a martial-arts game with both beauty and depth – but you kind of discover a game as you’re making it. And as we developed further and iterated, and came to a better understanding of what our game really was, things actually coalesced. Once we understood the experience better, mechanics started to merge into it, such as the attack learning mechanic, and the mentoring system. We were hoping that this is the way that players would interpret the game for themselves, and how they would react and behave.

Obviously, you have some people getting ganked. But my experiences in the world have been mostly positive, and when I start a PvP match, I can’t remember the last match I started where the guy didn’t bow to me before we started fighting. Maybe the guy’s going to Shockwave you off a ledge, but he’s still going to bow first.

There is very little explanation of how the combat deck works in the game. Was it a purposeful decision to force players to work it out for themselves? If I’m totally honest, it’s because we’re an independent studio, and we have a certain timeline. If we had had six more months or one more year, we probably would have put more time into how you learn the combat deck. The way we made these final calls towards the end of the project was deciding that players who were interested in that system would take the time to really look at the interface and experiment.

That being said, it’s a shame if you get some people who are interested, but are put off by the apparent complexity. We’ve got a large backlog of things already that we want to do, so it’s always a matter of priority. But getting people on board with the combat-deck system and making it as accessible as possible is certainly something we’ll be paying attention to.

It’s a short game, and while we found the campaign a helpful introduction to PvP, others are disappointed in the lack of PvE. What’s your response to that? We never set out to make a narrative game. Our intention was to focus on the core gameplay: the combat system, and player encounters. The world is not there to offer 40 hours of exploration and story, it’s there as a place where players will meet to create interesting situations. What’s important to me is giving meaning and context to the universe and why you’re here, rather telling an actual story. Again, we’re an indie studio, and creating a big world takes a lot of time and money. Trying to spread it out in multiple directions would have been a recipe for failure. And for me, it’s the player-generated stories that are interesting: experiences that I’ve had in Journey or in Absolver are some of the strongest and most emotional ones I’ve had in gaming, where stories emerge from the behaviour of players and from the gameplay systems.

And we’ll keep on making it better, more accessible, and adding content. Pretty soon, there’ll be a prestige system in which players can invest points to respec their characters, and we’re also going to let you destroy items to get pigments that change the colour of other pieces of equipment. Fashion is king.

“If we had had one more year, we would have put more time into how you learn the combat deck”