The road ahead of Asobo Studio was not easy before they managed to make their game a success.
The Europlayer interviewed Kevin Choteau, the director of the franchise, who retraced the development of the two games. He revealed that the beginnings of the first part, A Plague Tale: Innocence, proved to be very problematic. It all depends on Microsoft Hololens. The studio developed a game for it (it was Fragments), after which Asobo Studio wanted to experience something unique that was not related to any product. The Last of Us had a big impact on the developers, because the adult behavior of the characters, the atmosphere of the game and the morality shocked them.
Naughty Dog’s game was where they started from. The team then worked on story concepts. Ico and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons was behind Hugo and Amicia’s relationship, and the rat infection came from there. That’s when the external testers came into the picture, who were there during the development of the game. Many people have been very critical of the concept of A Plague Tale: Innocence. According to Choteau, many critics said that nothing was holding it together and that the game would have received 55-60% reviews had it been released.
This had a serious effect on the morale of the developers, as they had already been developing the game for two years. Then the director made a drastic decision: he asked all team members to play again and redo most of the work. Dialogue has been rewritten, story developments have been reworked, and gameplay hasn’t escaped either. All this was done to create the most successful product possible, which is why they ended up developing an extra nine months before releasing A Plague Tale: Innocence in 2019, which in return did not receive another internal test. Therefore, the first ratings were made by reviews a month before the release. The study was cautiously optimistic, and some were surprised by the high ratings.
This gave them new motivation to develop A Plague Tale: Requiem, the sequel, where they took into consideration where the first part received bad reviews and corrected the elements that didn’t work there. And they succeeded!
Source: GameRant
