LogInThomas Mahler, the creative mind behind No Rest for the Wicked and the Ori duology, joins us to delve into Wicked's development, the inspirations behind the game, his thoughts on franchises that overstay their welcome, and how to combat online negativity.
After creating a brilliant platformer duology, why did Moon Studios decide to try its hand at something new and begin working on No Rest for the Wicked? Have you at any point in time considered Ori 3?
Thomas: I always saw Ori as our 'Mario,' and I wanted to see what would happen if Moon Studios would then create a 'Zelda.' So I started doing early prototypes in 2015, and we liked what came out of that a lot! It then became very clear that we should probably not just do an action-adventure, but given that ARPGs haven't innovated a ton in the past two decades, we wanted to throw our hat in the ring to see what we can contribute to that genre.
Obviously we have thought about another Ori sequel, I even had some ideas for it already, but we'll have to see!
In general, what's your opinion on game series that outstay their welcome with endless sequels, prequels, spin-offs, etc.
Thomas: Yes, I'm pretty tired of the industry just repeating the same old successes year after year. At Moon, our formula has generally been to look at genres that are underrepresented or show an enormous lack of innovation, and if we feel confident that we could create something better than the top products on the market, we'll engage.
The reason why we made Ori was because even though games like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had been critical darlings in the past, nobody dared to make a AAA Metroidvania for a good decade or so. That whole genre was dead for a long time, with even Konami only allowing Koji Igarashi to keep making his Metroidvanias on handheld platforms, so they were scared to actually invest in it. Meanwhile, they made a bunch of fairly crappy 3D Castlevanias instead. I never understood that and thought that this was just wrong and that there ought to be LOTS of players who would LOVE to play a modern Metroidvania. That's how Ori came to be.
When did the development of No Rest for the Wicked start? How did you come up with the idea for the game, were there any particular games, movies, books, or other sources that influenced your vision?
Thomas: As I said, the very first prototype was made in December of 2015. I had just finished up the design work for the Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition, my girlfriend was on a trip in Argentina, and I had a full month where I could just spend my entire time being creative and working on new projects. So I made a little top-down prototype, and things just grew from there. I was a huge fan of Diablo 2 in the early 2000s, and even back then, I was already looking forward to what kind of ARPGs we'd be playing five, ten years after Diablo 2 had released. But then innovation stagnated, and once Diablo 3 finally released, I felt like it was in many ways even a regression from what Diablo 2 was. They took out a lot of the complexity and systems that made me love Diablo 2 in the first place. And most other companies that created ARPGs just used Diablo as their playbook and basically created 'ripoffs' of that without trying to really advance any singular component dramatically.
Our approach is always a little different: We look at games holistically and try to analyze them deeply, really pluck them apart. Is the combat system really the best it could be? What about the systems? What have other adjacent games done that could work within this genre? What kind of things could we add that would make the player experience even better? So instead of just 'making another version of that successful game', our process usually is a bit more intricate, where we really try to question everything.
After it became clear to us that we could indeed innovate within this genre and compete against even the biggest developers out there, we then chose to create a sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest since Mark Coates at Microsoft convinced me that if we'd do a sequel, we'd have a chance to perfect all the things we couldn't quite do with Ori and the Blind Forest yet due to the limited budget we had. And that gave us a perfect opportunity to work on No Rest for the Wicked as a little side project in the background, really take the time to write a full novel for it, and get clear on the final vision before we'd even start putting the game into production.
Regarding the story, we just wanted to evolve as a studio. For the Ori series, we were inspired by Studio Ghibli and Disney. We used allegory – Ori was all about these fantastical creatures, but the story told within Ori was all about the human experience. We didn't have the budget in Ori and the Blind Forest to introduce a lot of NPCs that the player could interact with, so we tried to expand on that a lot with Ori and the Will of the Wisps. And ultimately, No Rest for the Wicked is supposed to be another evolution of that. This time, the goal was to create an epic fantasy saga, we wanted No Rest for the Wicked to become for games what Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire were for the literary world. And obviously the idea was that this time we'd actually use human characters, with full facial animation and so on, to take things another step forward beyond what we were able to accomplish with the Ori series and draw in more mature audiences as well, those that would never play a game like Ori because it was too cutesy for them. In many ways, I wanted to prove to the world that a good story is a good story, no matter if the characters look cute or not.
Please tell us about the game's world, how did you come up with Wicked's art style? How do you approach the creation of character/creature animations and VFX?
Thomas: All of that is easy if you have an incredibly talented team that consists of some of the best artists and animators in the world. In terms of art, our goal has always been to compete against other studios not through sheer tech prowess, because we knew that'd be a game we'd lose since we'd just never be able to outspend other studios. Traditionally, a lot of game studios have always chased photorealism. The problem is that tech evolves quite quickly, and a game that tries to shine due to fancy new tech might look great today, but will absolutely look quite dated tomorrow, simply because tech is evolving quite fast. But every time I go to a museum and I see paintings by Caravaggio or other famous painters that I adore, I never get that feeling that this stuff just doesn't hold up anymore, even though all these paintings were made hundreds of years ago. So our simple approach is that we want our games to look like paintings come to life. People shouldn't see all the computery stuff, they should feel like playing a living painting.
Tools and software don't really matter. Great art can be made with any tool – it's the artist that makes all the difference in the world.
What can you tell us about Unity's capabilities when it comes to creating soulslikes? Was this particular engine chosen because of your team's experience with it, its rendering tools, or something else entirely?
Thomas: Unity is just a game engine, it has no particular stuff in it that makes it easy or hard to create a Souls-like. You still very much have to craft and code everything by hand. But Unity is very approachable, easy to learn, easy to expand, and that seemed like the perfect fit for a studio like Moon Studios.
Could you tell us about Wicked's gameplay mechanics, what makes the game different from other soulslikes? What weapons do players have at their disposal? What about the planned multiplayer mode, are there any updates you could share on its current stage of development?
Thomas: No Rest for the Wicked is neither a souls-like nor a Diablo-like – it's No Rest for the Wicked. We're really trying to analyze all the ARPGs that have come before us and are just trying to create the next big thing, making something unique.
Regarding weapons, our goal is that players should ultimately be able to fulfill any sort of roleplaying fantasy they might have within No Rest for the Wicked, which is why there's such a huge amount of different weapon archetypes and weapons in Wicked that all play differently.
I can't talk about Multiplayer just yet, but we will have another 'Wicked Inside' Showcase as soon as we're ready to present it all.
Why did you decide to ship the game in Steam Early Access? How do you collect user feedback and determine what should be altered before No Rest for the Wicked 1.0 hits the shelves?
Thomas: Well, every single time when we made an Ori game, in order to release the product and ship, we ultimately had to cut a few really cool ideas that we love just to hit that release date. So we always loved the idea that we could create a game, release it when it's fun already, and then just keep expanding it while listening to what our community has to say. Ultimately, we're perfectionists at Moon, and Early Access opens up the possibility that you could develop a game, have players play it already, and while you're taking in all the data, you could potentially perfect your vision. And that's the goal, that we perfect No Rest for the Wicked so that by the time we release the 1.0 version on all platforms, it ought to be yet another Moon Studios masterpiece simply because we had enough time to really polish absolutely everything.
It's no secret that your Twitter posts and Wicked's Steam reviews harbor a number of individuals who dislike you for reasons not related to the gaming world in any way, so my question is, how do you handle haters? Is there any practical advice you could give for combating negativity online?
Thomas: It's just a sad part of being a public figure. There will always be people who just downright hate you, insult you, and want to see you fail. Every person who has even a slight bit of notoriety has to deal with that nowadays. The best way to deal with that, I found, is to ban and simply ignore them.
Some people just want to see the world burn. We're not interested in that. We will just continue making amazing games, and the idea is that even those people will ultimately want to play our games since we're trying to make exceptional products, and hopefully, they can learn a thing or two from the messages we're trying to put out there. Kill them with kindness!
Is there any news on No Rest for the Wicked 1.0's approximate release date? Do you have a specific launch window in mind? What should fans expect from Moon Studios in the coming weeks and months?
Thomas: What fans should expect is us just vigilantly working away on No Rest for the Wicked. We're gobbling up all the feedback fans are posting online and are steadily making No Rest for the Wicked better and better. Ultimately, we just want to make gamers ridiculously happy and ship games that really made a difference in their lives because we gave them a product that was made for the right reasons, a product that feels special. Something that wasn't just made to make some money, but because some crazy people sat down and crafted something out of love and passion for games.