2019-05-01+Official+PlayStation+Magazine+-+UK+Edition

073

THE SINKING CITY

WITNESS

INTERROGATION

We press Frogwares CEO Wael Amr

for hard-hitting information on how

to go about making a Lovecraftian

detective game as ambitious as

The Sinking City

“WE MADE MAPS OF

OAKMONT DEVELOPING

THROUGH TIME.”

F

rogwares has an impressive

track record, but what the

studio is doing in The Sinking

City is more ambitious than

anything it’s done to date.

We sit down with CEO Wael

Amr to discuss what it took to create

Frogwares’ first open world adventure,

and how Lovecraft’s mythos differs

from the world of Sherlock Holmes.

OPM: In Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s

Daughter you experimented with more

open areas, but making a full city

is something else. How did you

accomplish that?

Wael Amr: The first thing that we

had to do was to completely reformat

the way that the team was working,

change the full organisation of the team,

change the experiences, and the way

we were working without growing the

team actually. And that was a base to

be able to create an open city game.

I think in Devil’s Daughter we had

around 800 metres of streets altogether.

In The Sinking City, in Oakmont, we

have something like 27 kilometres.

So, in order to do 800 meters versus

27,000 without growing the number of

resources we had to change everything,

and that was a necessary step in order to

bring investigations to the open city.

OPM: Can you tell us about the city

building tool you used to make Oakmont?

WA: We created a city editor, which

was rather prominent because we used

it, for example, to create Istanbul in

eight hours [at a tech showcase in late

2018] – we use it to create very fast,

large environments, and we had a lot of

requests from architecture

companies and other

studios to have a look at

the tool. But we also

made a character editor,

we also made a narration

editor to help us very

quickly prototype and create

new cases.

OPM: Oakmont feels like a city with real

history. How did you get that level of

subtlety architecturally?

WA: City creation, the lore, the world

building is what gives you this part.

In parallel with studying architecture

and urbanism we created some

worldbuilding. We made the story of

Oakmont starting from a million years

ago, up to today [the 1920s]. And then

we invented the history of Oakmont

and men starting, you know, 2,000 years

ago – starting in the 18th century with

the settlers arriving. In development we

even made maps of Oakmont developing

through time in order to understand

how the city would have grown from the

settlers or even from a Viking

settlement, admitting that the Vikings

arrived in the US before Christopher

Columbus – up to today 1920s,

railroads, organised urban planning.

OPM: Considering Lovecraft has some

sketchy views regarding race relations,

it’s nice to see some of the “monstrous”

elements in his works humanised a little.

Is this something you did consciously?

WA: I’m sure you know Ukraine [where

Frogwares is based] has been having a

war for five years. We’ve a lot of IDP

• internally displaced people, over a
  million people. So it’s something that we
  see very closely, and of course there is
  the Syrian migrants and Mediterranean
  migrants situation, and what is the
  reaction of people that are in power
  and in control in different countries.
  And yes, we believe that it actually
  makes sense that even when the planet
  is threatened [laughs] people still
  waste their time on trifles like “are we
  belonging?” or “should we be together?”

OPM: Why did you decide to work on a

Lovecraft game after doing so many

based on Sherlock Holmes? What can

you do in this new fictional world that

you couldn’t before?

WA: There’s a major difference between

both universes. Sherlock Holmes, he’s

after the truth, and the reality of the

truth. In Lovecraft there is probably

no “truth”, there is only “significance”,

and that makes the detective work at

the same time necessary and on the

other side maybe useless,

because the ending doesn’t

really depend on you.

So you could say it’s an

evolutionary path, but an

evolution regarding the free

investigation, the concept

of having no markers, no

task – that is an evolution. Our previous

games were location-based, linear and

location-based. Here we are letting

the player find his way inside the city,

look at the addresses, go to the streets,

find the addresses.

You could have a Lovecraftian tale without tentacles and cultists – but, frankly, we all look forward to fighting slimy things and religious oddballs.

WAEL AMR

CEO, FROGWARES