“Microsoft had some messaging problems,” Peklar told us. “People expected multi-million AAA production games to show off next-gen visuals and, most importantly, gameplay showcases.”
“[Recreating that style] is something I figured would be one of the biggest challenges from the start, but I couldn’t comprehend how much,” Peklar said. “It really requires a tremendous amount of polishing and attention to detail to look good.”
“When I started discovering art Giger was a big inspiration. His paintings were very close to my own sensibility and ideas,” Peklar gushes. Alien is the reason why most people think Giger’s work is only about, well, aliens, or something alien to us, but this is a very superficial way of looking at it. It’s not about something alien, it’s much more about alienation. It’s a reflection on never ending fusion and devouring of sentient biological entities by technological machinery.
It’s about the processes in our mind that move and frighten us as biological creatures, like our sexual drive or the drive for self-destruction. It’s about the truth of our existence, not some other form’s existence. That’s what people are subconsciously reacting to, not the alien-ness.”
“We learned every lesson two times over. It almost feels unreal with how much confidence and how much ignorance we went into all of this. If at the beginning someone could project to your mind how much you don’t know, and would need to learn, you would probably just be too paralysed to start at all. Basically 80% of that part of the game you saw has changed, let alone the rest of the game.”
“If we fail at immersing the players Scorn will simply fall flat. We have various tools at our disposal to immerse the player, from sights to sounds, but we have to make sure we use them properly to elevate and prioritise the psychological component. Next- gen hardware makes it easier because you don’t have to do so much leg work and you can just concentrate on art.”
“We didn’t [want to bring Scorn to current-gen consoles] because we want our game to be played at 60FPS. That would be close to impossible without big sacrifices. Next-gen is about responsiveness, smoothness and a lot less time wasting. The problem with these features is that they are not easy to sell in videos or screenshots.”
“Everyone is touting the SSD as the next big thing, and yes SSDs will help a lot with loading and moving assets, but the biggest culprit that is creating problems in the current generation is the CPU,” Peklar explained to us. “That’s where the biggest difference compared to current generation will come from.”
