"We're trying to make a funny, optimistic first person explore 'em-up." Exploration is the key here, as you set foot on a colourful planet on behalf of Kindred Aerospace - proudly the fourth best exploration company in the universe - and scan the environment, charting the space and sending back word of your discoveries to your employer. "We're not trying to do everything for everyone anymore," explains Hutchinson. Journey to the Savage Planet plots its own course, somewhere between Metroid Prime and Dishonored, for a flavour that's very much its own. It's not, it turns out, and is something just as exciting - maybe more so. Maybe it's because I wasn't paying proper attention during its reveal at last year's Game Awards - look, it was late, and I might have had a drink or two - but having seen the first trailer I'd assumed it was a more intimate No Man's Sky, a sci-fi survival game set on some faraway colourful planet. That game is being properly unveiled here at GDC for the first time, and it took me a little by surprise. It became obvious to us we wanted to create a game that was unique, was its own thing, was created by a small team that we like." That's not an answer! You have to hit everything - multiplayer, single-player, co-op, UGC - anything you can imagine you have to fit into it so people can find the game that they want. "You're spending so much money that you need to appeal to everyone, you ask marketing who the audience is and they say 'everybody'. "When you're working on those big triple-a games, you're often doing the buffet lunch version of game design," says Hutchinson. And he certainly knows what he's talking about, having come from the world of triple-A development, alongside many of his team at the 25-strong Typhoon Studios, who count Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Army of Two - Army of Two! - among their past triumphs. ![]() I don't want an infinite game! I want it to finish!"Īlex is playing to the room, for sure - in this case, the room being a cozy hotel suite just on the outskirts of this year's GDC, the audience a couple of men like myself with more than a dash of grey in their facial hair - but good god has he got a point. ![]() ![]() "I want a game I can finish, I want a game that doesn't take a thousand hours, I want a game that kind of reminds me of the Sega blue skies stuff, that I feel happy turning it on instead of being miserable and weighed down by things I don't understand unless I've put in 100 hours. "In a sense," says Alex Hutchinson, creative director of Journey to the Savage Planet, "this is a game for middle-aged people." And in an instant, I'm sold.
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