Beyond Blue
Jump forward a decade with this stunning underwater mystery
biome balances have shifted, for reasons both positive and negative
Imagine getting a call from the BBC saying something like, “Have you thought about making a game inspired by Blue Planet II?” Apparently this is what happened in real life to E-Line, developer of ocean adventure Beyond Blue developer, E-Line. Choking down my jealousy I headed to their booth at EGX to find out more about the project. “After we released [ NeverAlone] we got a call from the BBC who were in the process of making Blue Planet II,” says E-Line CEO, Michael Angst. Blue Planet II is a BBC nature documentary brimming with spectacular footage of underwater (and underwater adjacent) life. “[They] thought it would be interesting to have an original game made that embraced the themes, embraced the science and some of the creature characters from the series.”
After experimenting with various genres for a year, the team landed on a narrative-driven light adventure game. The demo I played reminded me of the Wii’s beautiful EndlessOcean series. I had time to potter amongst the fish—a task made easier by the fact the AI was set to ignore me (outside specific moments). A sunfish did the water equivalent of sauntering past, while a foray into a gap in the rocks revealed a mass of jellyfish.
Tasks gave structure to my expedition—I needed to check a beacon which was stuck in an unlikely place. I realized I was investigating an octopus’s garden/midden just before disturbing the cephalopod and having it zoom off to safety. The demo concluded with a pod of whales rising from the depths featuring an injured baby whale; a concerning sight which signifies a mystery to unravel.
The game takes place a decade or so in the future. The oceans have changed somewhat in that time, but we’re not talking disaster movie fodder. It sounds more like biome balances have shifted, for reasons both positive and negative.
“We’ve ended up in a place where there are some biomes really thriving. It gives you a great opportunity to learn about things as a scientist. But you also find early in the game that there’s still pressure on the ocean, there’s still threat.”
A large part of what the team has channeled into the story comes via scientists—what they would do if they had a huge budget to use for ocean exploration, what questions they’d want answered. Angst also namechecks Firewatch and Oxenfree as inspirations— “games which really embrace character, voice acting and story”.
“We want everyone who plays the game—although there’s a lot of choice in terms of how you explore—to experience the same facts,” says Angst. “And then, where you have some very meaningful choice in the story is what you do with that and what values you apply to that, how you feel about that.”
Uncharted territory
Flowing around that fiction is your own exploration and encounters with creatures. But this is where the limits of our aquatic knowledge emerge. The team wants to represent naturalistic behavior, but sometimes we simply don’t have a reference for that and E-Line must decide whether to use speculative behavior models put forward by scientists.
Angst offers an example of sperm whales eating colossal squid. We don’t know how whales do it, but we find beaks in their bellies. “They’re clearly able to do it!” says Angst. BeyondBlue has both species so if the devs want them to meet, they need to decide how it would play out. “I would say the decisions of what to do when we’re on the edge of understanding have been the hardest ones for us.”