Oddworld: Soulstorm, one of this months PlayStation Plus titles, is the newest installment in the over 20-year old series. The game fully reimagines one of the franchise's most beloved entries, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus, in one of the most ambitious games developer Oddworld Inhabitants has ever made.

For the release of one of the most exciting titles in the long-running platformer franchise's history, Game Rant recently caught up with Oddworld series creator Lorne Lanning and executive producer Bennie Terry III to discuss the franchise's unique approach to video game storytelling, how modern technology influences the developer, the future of Oddworld, and more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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GR: How did you decide on remaking Abe's Exoddus? Was it something that felt natural after New n' Tasty or did you feel there was unfinished business there?

Lanning: What happened was, we've been slowly growing our self-published business. It started in 2008 when Steam became viable, and titles from way back when like Abe's Oddysee started selling [there.] We didn't expect that the appetite and love would be there that many years on a title. So that allowed us to start to accumulate some revenue reserves. So we started looking at our library and thinking "What can we do?" And that's the brutal, honest truth of it, "What can we afford to do? Well, what if we did Stranger's Wrath HD and brought it to the PS3?" And those things got to a point where New n' Tasty exceeded our expectations a bit on critical review and on sales, and that allowed us to look at it fresh and go "Are we at that point yet where we want to do more creative endeavors and start looking at doing a new game?" Even if that was inspired by some lore that was set up earlier.

So we asked the audience what we should do next and they responded "Do the same thing to Abe's Exoddus!" And Abe's Exoddus is... I know a lot of people liked it but it got us kind of off track from the Oddworld Quintology story, which is the one we wanted to tell. So we thought, well, they want us to revisit that second part and if we're going to revisit it, shouldn't we tell the real story? The big epic, and get more aligned to [the story of] the pacifist slave who starts at the bottom and has to rise up and eventually lead a revolution to change the world. I feel like titles like Abe's Exoddus and [Munch's Oddyssee] started to take us in a different direction from this epic due to certain circumstances. Because it was supposed to be a lot more intense, with a much greater weight on the shoulders of Abe with his empathetic nature shining through more closely.

GR: One thing that sticks out immediately when starting Soulstorm are its incredible cinematic qualities, which has always been a staple of the Oddworld series. How do you try to flesh out the cinematic approach to storytelling in each entry?

Lanning: We have seen video games as one of the most powerful mediums in history in terms of storytelling. And art throughout history, whether it's poetry, novels, or fiction, it's something that moves people, it warms people, and it makes us think about different things. So when we're making these stories, we try to focus on making a modern myth. In '94 when we started production on [Abe's Oddysee,] we focused on asking "What is that corporate logo? Do you really understand the impact they're having on the planet?" Which I think that great irony is that the 'Happy Folks' logo is really a threat to us all. So in Soulstorm, we're a couple of decades later, so I'd say the mythical aspects relevant to the time is a slightly different message, but it still evolves in a similar fashion of Abe waking up to the world. He thinks he's free, but it's really just the beginning. We also wanted to use the resolution of the game, with the new technology [that's available to us now] to get the world to be bigger around the character, so that it actually felt more vulnerable.

Terry: Technologically we're always advancing, so on a certain level things get harder, but they also get a lot easier. From what we see in the real world, from how light interacts with objects and materials, and what we perceive is real. Achieving that from Oddworld's inception was hard, but now as the technology has evolved we found that a lot of things we were looking at like "Well we want to have high dynamic range here, we want to have translucency, ray-trace this, ray-trace that." Most directors won't care about most of those things because that's just the supporting cast, but to us [we're thinking] how do those elements become greater than the sum of their parts? How do we tell that story visually? We bring the rendering fidelity to the story in a way that feels feature film level. Then we try to take that core and add Oddworld's unique style and lighting model to it, and we bring it back to our universe in a way that uses those tools.

Lanning: For me, storyteller and character [creation] is probably my deepest passion, and games are a way of delivering that. But when we were able to get more subtle with the characters that should achieve different things if it's performed and animated well, and it's that saying less can be a lot more powerful. So we dialed up the expressive capability and it allowed us to write in more subtle, and hopefully more mysterious and threatening way.

Terry: It never gets easier, the bar is always being raised in rendering and graphics to where you can never reach the bar and it's like - now you're feature film. That bar just keeps climbing and climbing. The thing is as the tech evolves is that really early in the industry you had to be really clever to fake a lot of the things that you saw in the real world, that you had to capture in your cinematics. But now you just have to fake less, you just have to put a light, and with physically based rendering that light will go through objects and it will interpret their colors and how thick they are, etc. I remember on one project I was cutting billboards in half and mirroring them so I could achieve the frame-rate with the real-time rendering tech. But where we are now the tools are really incredible and are on par or almost on par with the kind of tools we would use in a film production, from post-processing to editing. So there's a real add to how fast we can iterate and generate those images. The challenge is always the evolution and bar constantly going up.

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GR: How did working on the PlayStation 5 effect the game? Did it influence the design of the game at all or allow you to be more ambitious?

Lanning: Well we're really small. We're smaller than anyone can imagine. We're always running in a startup-like mode, and it's distributed development, which doesn't make things easier. We basically put all our money into the production because we're not a big publisher, so what we rely on is that we have to make games show off hardware. Games that have a beauty to them that stores want to feature and press wants to feature, and that's part of the strategy that's helped Oddworld through its life. So when it comes to PS5 we were thinking that a lot of attention is going to be on PS5, so how do we be part of that attention? As independent developers we have to think about these things, how your game is going to be noticed in this constantly cluttered landscape. Last time we were at E3 I think 600 mobile games were releasing a day across the world, if you can imagine. Gaming is this enormous thing now so it's hard to get visibility so it's more important for little games to do something that's clever to get success, like Fall Guys right?

So basically we're thinking, if we deliver 'New n' Tasty 2.0' as Exoddus we're not going to get featured on the PS5. These are the practical questions we ask along the way and these are the pivots you make along the way, because at the very beginning of the project the PS5 wasn't on the scoreboard yet, so as we make these decisions we're trying to think what's exciting communities? So were thinking how do we do something special that makes marketing departments go "we want to highlight that" at other places?

Terry: When you go down that road at production companies where you're no longer painting by numbers on IPs and now you're thinking what you can execute, you start thinking creatively how you can cut through. I think our shift internally focused on what's that next thing, and while we don't have that next thing let's start positioning ourselves so that when it gets here we're already there. The technical challenges were like, if we can get it to look great on the PS5, then we'll figure out getting it to look good on the PS4. It was like let's see how far we can go on the PS5 so we picked up some PCs that we thought were full spec even though we didn't have the spec and focused on that as a common thread from a rendering and graphics standpoint on the entire game and then to our surprise the PS5 exceeded a lot of those expectations. Then we had the Herculean task of getting that to look good all the way back to the PS4, which was definitely a difficult task but we did it.

Oddworld-Soulstorm-Screenshot-Abe-Interview-Gameplay

GR: How would you compare the development of Soulstorm to your time developing previous entries in the series, especially with the added factor of the Covid-19 pandemic?

Lanning: It's like trying to play football where everyone is on a different country in your team. It's an insane dance that you have to orchestrate with that many people on a creative project, to figure out the creation tools, the gameplay tools, the pipelines, the depositories. All these new discoveries because those tools get better all the time. We always had engine issues, especially on the development of Abe's Oddysee, which bled into the development of Abe's Exoddus because we weren't supposed to use that same tool again. On Munch's Oddysee we had a lot of challenges with the engines and middleware we used on that project. There were some source code things that haunted us for a long time, so when we did those [HD] conversions there were a lot of bugs that got in the way and we tried to fix them but we couldn't because the publisher went out of business and we didn't have the source code.

So those things are challenging with an engine even when you're in the same room. I wish we could say we didn't have those challenges in Unity's engine but we had a lot of them because we were trying to push it in a territory that we thought it could go but learned all of the "gotchas" along the way. But what made it even more compounding was that we weren't in the same room. The thing about New n' Tasty is that it had a template that we were spicing up. We knew we were going to go "Ok, there's these things we were changing up about the game but we're still sticking to the same basic narrative and design, we're just bringing it to modern standards and improving the game." And I think we did, but it was a very mapped-out target. It still meant I had to spend around six months in the UK to bring the game home to develop it with a team in the UK.

That was our plan on this round as well, we were planning to spend the last year of development here in the [San Francisco] Bay area. Our plan was to bring it all together in the last 18 months, but what happened was COVID. It happened to us all, I don’t think our story is that unique, nobody was expecting lockdown.

Terry: It’s painful. To build an Oddworld game you need to be hands-on and really feel it. I remember when we were in the studio we could go “That’s a little too fast,” or “How Abe attracts to a platform is too strong, let’s dial it back to .2.” We could get through 20 of those iterations in a session to get it right and think [it] feels good. But because everyone’s spread out, because those resources weren’t even in the same time-zone, we’d have to send the message saying “We need you to bring it back by 10%,” then we’d get a build 10 hours later that’s like “Ok, 10% was too much,” and we’d have to wait another 12 hours for another build. It’s hard when you have a game that’s so creative and has so many touch-points for people to tune and the iteration is just so slow. We had many ways around that and we tried them all, but having fast turnaround with high-input feel, we had to turn it around and focus on what we could control without that team sitting beside us, side-by-side as we could collaborate.

Lanning: I’d say it was the most challenging adventure in our [lives.] Had you known you’d never be in the same room finishing the game, what you had for the next 18 months, just forget about it. If that were the case you’d just say “We’re not going to do the production.” That said, despite all that, I’m surprised how well it turned out. If you don’t have that passion and people who are determined to deliver something they’re proud of, the circumstances would probably fall apart along the way.

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Q: Now that you’ve done two titles that return to the original 2D style of the series, are there any plans to return to the 3D perspective of Munch’s Oddysee and Stranger’s Wrath?

Lanning: What was always important to us - and I think this is the first time we fully got that right, was having a fully choreographed camera system that choreographed to the story. With Munch you’re always over-the-shoulder, with Stranger you’re 50% with melee or 50% in POV mode, but they’re really predetermined cameras. So you have a consistency in how the game looks at all times. What we wanted is for the game to look more like [a] movie. We wanted it where that scale relationship is always changing so we can make them feel small when we want them to see the world but you’re still in control, and everything that you do in gameplay holds up even when you’re close or if you’re far. But it gives us narrative control over the narrative-game experience.

We built a camera system for this one called “Oddcine,” which was connected to a thing called “Oddwalk.” What we were analyzing were things like “Why were our audience still trying to get [back] to the side-scrolling games?” It wasn’t making sense to us. We were analyzing it and what we found was sort of… a predictable playing field where your character knows what is in front and behind him, you have a better place of where your character was in a stage. It also went to the power of the spectator. Sometimes you’re the spectator of your own game in this format and even if they don’t know, they start getting it and they start following it like a story. I think that’s part of the reason why Abe’s Oddysee was a connection and why our games have this connection between the generation we were delivering to in the ‘90s, and their generation of kids that are playing it today. Part of that reason was that we always cared and paid attention to the spectator’s view as well so that if more people were in the room as well, they’d get involved.

GR: Are there any plans for Soulstorm to come to other platforms in the future?

Terry: All I can say is there are definitely plans for other platforms.

GR: Any last things you’d like to add?

Lanning: The last thing I’d like to say is, a lot of people have asked “Why do you think the IP continues to resonate over time, and why do you think it has that lasting appeal over people?” And I think part of that is… our stories clearly aren’t approved by a marketing department. If they were I’d say “Here’s this guy, he works at a meat factory and he’s a slave, he’s going to bust out because they’re slaughtering animals” and they’d say “Can’t he be at a clothing factory or something?” That’s not where we’re coming from. We’re not trying to design stories that are popular more than we’re trying to design stories that are relevant. Relevant to where we are as people and civilization. And that’s part of my passion as a storyteller. If we can tell stories and we’re enabled to do so, then we have the ability to tell modern myths. I think that the journey that Abe’s going through is kind of a journey for us all in a way, and I think the questions he’s asking himself are ones that we all maybe don’t even realize we should be asking ourselves right now. That’s what really drives our stories in a lot of ways.

Terry: I love talking about what the team has done, there’s always the challenges of the day, but being able to just communicate what we did, how we did it, and just the narrative that Oddworld tells. It’s just truly nourishing to my soul and heart so, I hope to always be doing Oddworld games because this is the kind of stuff that I love.

[End.]

Oddworld: Soulstorm is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. The game is planned for release on other platforms.

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