For Wild Bastards, the sequel to the 2019 first person roguelike, Void Bastards, developer Blue Manchu pretty quickly homed in on a wild west team-up, Magnificent Seven sort of deal. But there was a problem.
"In first person games, it's really hard to do a gang well, like AI teammates, even after 20 or 30 years of work on it, they're still really annoying most of the time, and we wanted to make a singleplayer game," explained Jonathan Chey, design director at Wild Bastards developer Blue Manchu and a veteran of Irrational Games and Looking Glass. "We had this problem, which is we want a group of people working together, but don't want to have the AI controlling your teammates. How are we going to do that? That's when we really focused on the swapping mechanic."
Wild Bastards lets you swap between two of its 13 different heroes on any given level of its roguelike campaign. It's as quick and seamless as switching weapons in any other FPS, but you're also juggling separate health pools, buffs, movement options, and special abilities. In action, it feels like if Overwatch let you swap between two of its heroes on the fly, with all the chaos and emergent possibility that entails.
There is no best outlaw.
Ben Lee, Blue Manchu creative director
If Void Bastards was more a game about avoiding or improvising your way out of combat, taking a page from the likes of Thief and System Shock, Wild Bastards is all about the power fantasy offered by this smorgasbord of special abilities, and how you combo them together. "It's kind of like when we were developing Bioshock. We call it the one-two punch, because in Bioshock you had your left hand power and your right hand gun," Chey said. "One super-effective early strategy you can use is to zap people with lightning, which stuns them, and then you shoot them.
"That kind of strategy is possible in Wild Bastards too, because you can flick between the characters rapidly."
Some of the possibilities Chey and his colleague, Blue Manchu creative director Ben Lee, outlined include:
- Setting enemies on fire with burning man Smoky, then swapping to a more direct damage dealer.
- Using a high-mobility hero to grab a vantage point for slow moving sniper, The Judge.
- Firing off an AOE stun with lasso snake Hopalong's ultimate, then cleaning up with headshots from The Judge.
- Pairing arachnid gunslinger Spider Rosa's decoy special ability with pretty much anything else—Lee called this "one of [his] most abused and lent-on" abilities.
Their focus, notably, was always on combos of two different characters—Chey and Lee were clear that this isn't a game where you want to "main" just one character, and their different functions will have a bit of a rock paper scissors thing going with Wild Bastards' varied enemy types.
"There is no best outlaw," Lee said. "There'll be an outlaw that's really good, maybe for four fights in a row, then you'll hit an enemy type that they're not suited to. If you don't have another outlaw partnered up that can compensate for their weakness, you probably lose the showdown."
With that in mind, Lee and Chey were keen to defend a character who proved slightly contentious in previews and demo feedback: Hopalong, a snake-person with a lasso who specializes in hard crowd control on single targets. "I watched a video preview of the game and they were basically saying 'I don't get why they made this character, he's so shit, what's the point of this character? This is a failed experiment,'" Chey recalled. "I'm just like, you need to play some more, because he could very well be the most powerful character in the game."
"Hopalong seems really weak, and if you're fighting very swarmy types of enemy, then yeah, you're going to be in trouble," Lee added. "But if you're fighting single, very strong, heavily-armored, big, deadly, monster-type characters, he pretty much just cancels them—he's so effective at killing one thing that he's the correct choice."
On the opposite end of the roster, there's Sarge, a bipedal horse cyborg with a lever rifle whose visual design piqued my interest, but it turns out he's actually one of the more "vanilla" options mechanically. The way Lee and Chey described him, Sarge sounds like your classic Soldier 76/Roland from Borderlands type, except perhaps a bit tankier. Sarge pairs an energy shield ability with a mid-to-long range battle rifle-style weapon.
"He's kind of a late game all-rounder," Chey explained. "I would say Sarge and Spider Rosa are the two classic all-rounders in the team. He's a bit longer range and lower rate of fire than Spider Rosa.
"It seems kind of weird to describe the robotic horse man as less odd, but it's all relative. Nobody is not odd. That's the linchpin of the character designs: They're all weirdos."
"That's at the narrative core [of Wild Bastards]," explained Lee. "You might have noticed that none of the Wild Bastards are humans, and that's because they're all being ostracized or hunted or exploited by humans."
It's all a far cry from the randomized, anonymous, doomed convicts of Void Bastards, and we don't have long to wait until we can see how it all plays out. Wild Bastards will release on September 12, and you can wishlist it on Steam.
