"All the puzzles that incorporate it, and all the more advanced moves that you can do by chaining them and jumping them, it really was all based on that idea of, let's make it so that you can move fast through this space in an interesting way, moment to moment." There's plenty to find just off the critical path. "A lot of the design of the game fell out from that," Nava says. The timing mechanics, Nava says, were invented to keep that sense of fluid motion. Throughout the course of the game you can acquire more uses of its "flap," to thrust yourself higher into the air while gliding. Even your eagle companion assists, as it allows you to grab its talons to hang-glide. Slow the world to a crawl, as you carefully draw your reticle over your target and release.īut what if your goal is to keep moving? The Pathless is about motion. Many, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, put you into a slo-mo effect, to give you time to line up a shot. The concept started, as Nava tells it, as a way to get around how most games handle moving and aiming. It also just feels good, and over time, a cadence starts to solidify: zipping along the plains, carefully timing shots out to keep your boost from running out, feels good. Shooting the floating crystals around the island is key to keeping your boost meter filled, which is crucial for staying one step ahead of the cursed beast's storm and on the trail of more gems. Yes, there are deer, and yes, they can be your friends. You can also risk an early shot at the halfway mark, something Nava refers to as a "skill shot," but if you don't time it right you'll still miss. Pulling down on the trigger puts an indicator over your target let go before it fills up, and you'll miss. Trees and other objects can still get in the way, and there's also a timing component, the most critical part of The Pathless' rhythmic movement. You auto-lock onto targets, but that doesn't mean you'll automatically make every shot. "That was something that we really loved and we wanted to carry over, and we realized was kind of a defining feature of what makes a Giant Squid game one of ours." "In Abzu, you would swim and you could flip and do all these kinds of motions," Nava says. Director Matt Nava says it's about continuing what it started with Abzu's similarly fluid movement. It might seem like a boiled-down way to approach archery, but the goal seems to be emphasizing the speed and skill of the archer in question. Shooting an arrow in The Pathless is as simple as depressing and releasing a trigger. By collecting special gems and bringing them to landmarks, you can eventually blast them with light and, subsequently, arrows, to bring them back. The local spiritual animal beings, essentially gods of nature that could have stepped right out of Princess Mononoke, have been taken by a dark force. Your wandering archer seeks to cleanse the corruption of an island with the help of a mysterious otherworldly voice and your friendly eagle companion. The Pathless is an upcoming game from Giant Squid, the studio behind the underwater exploration game Abzu. Find a rhythm, and let the arrow do the rest. When you're sprinting across the grasslands of the cursed island, breaking the floating crystals that infuse you with more boost, you never once "take aim" in a traditional sense. But the focus isn't necessarily on the finessing of crosshairs, but on the fluid motion of the archer. I recently had the chance to demo The Pathless, an upcoming PS5 launch game that also stars an archer: a nameless Hunter with an eagle companion. The stars of big games like Tomb Raider, Horizon Zero Dawn, and The Last of Us have all carried a bow and quiver as part of their arsenal, as developers have found a fascination with the tried-and-true tool. There have been a lot of games about archers in this generation. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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