A Plague Tale Director Revealed the Game's Troubled Development

A Plague Tale director Kevin Choteau has recently shared a story behind the series' creation revealing that the first game might not have happened at all due to the troubled development.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Choteau said that there was one point during the development of the game when Asobo almost lost hope to create its first original title. The moment that, as the game director admits, he doesn't like to recall is when A Plague Tale: Innocence was already two years in the works and external reviewers were brought in to look over the game.

According to Choteau, those reviews were extremely harsh, essentially pointing out that nothing in the game was holding together. The critiques also predicted that the game will not get higher than a 50-60% review score and, as Choteau puts it, "You don't want to release that."

"The game was a mess," he said. "It was awful in terms of gameplay, of story, of everything – nothing was holding together, nothing was quite right. [...] And it was a huge punch in our face."

Choteau recalled this moment being a big blow to the team's morale, especially considering that the game was already two years in development at that time. In an attempt to rectify the situation, the game director came up with a drastic decision – he asked the team to stop everything including development, polishing, and debugging, and instead, take the time and play the game evaluating what good sides it had and what didn't work.

After the team took this step back they realized that they had to redo almost everything – from reworking gameplay to rethinking the plot and rewriting dialogues.

"At least, I would say, one-third of every chapter has been changed – it's the least we've done. But for some of them, like three or four [...] have been completely redone because it was a mess," Choteau shared. "We've rewritten every dialogue, we've reworked the gameplay, we've added the selection wheel [...] we've added some features [...] Everything!"

This resulted in additional nine months A Plague Tale's publisher Focus Entertainment granted Asobo, however, it also meant that the studio didn't have time to have internal reviews. So, the first feedback that Asobo received after this was reviews from the press a month or two before the game's release which, luckily, turned out to be quite positive.

The team remained cautiously optimistic about them until the game's release. When A Plague Tale finally launched it was warmly received by players which eventually resulted in newfound motivation to create the second part of the game and make it not a "lazy sequel" but a nice game that takes into account all the negative feedback from the original game and fixes all the flaws.

Elsewhere in the interview, Choteau also shared how the team came up with the idea of rats as a way to depict plague and what other ideas they had instead as well as spoke about the studio's approach to creating the sequel. You can learn more about this by reading the full interview here.

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