Avalanche Studios’ Mad Max doesn’t have to take cues from the likes of Fallout or Borderlands, says senior producer Emil Krafting. Mad Max’s dusty, post-apocalyptic wasteland has been a well-trodden one, with plenty of big- and small-screen imitators since, but these games owe Mad Max a debt rather than the other way around.
“We are not copying anyone; we are working with the original wasteland franchise,” says Krafting.
That said, Krafting is aware a younger audience may not necessarily be aware of Mad Max’s role in shaping the dominant style of post-apocalyptic dystopias: barren, desolate places ruled by people in outrageous vehicles and even more outrageous costumes.
“It is a franchise with a long heritage,” says Krafting. “I mean, I grew up with it, but most of the audience today didn’t.”
“But that doesn’t detract from the fact that this is pretty much what started it all, and we wouldn’t have had games like Fallout, or Rage, or Borderlands if we didn’t have Mad Max.”
Rumors of a Mad Max game out of Avalanche had been running rife since 2010 all the way up to the game’s official announcement at this year’s E3. Krafting concedes trying to keep the game under wraps for so long was tough.
“Certainly from the inside it was difficult,” he says. “It’s a franchise that most people in the studio just love it, grew up with it, and being able to work on it – to create our type of game – and not being able to talk about it for so long, even when the rumours started trickling out…”
“I think it’s sort of a double-edged sword because while, yes, development is affected by having to do trade shows and interviews and demos, it’s also such a vitalisation in development; you get that boost of people seeing and looking at what you’re doing, and you being able to talk about it.”
“It’s like you turn a switch once you go public and that just energises the entire team.”
Krafting believes Avalanche’s experience with the Just Cause series means very good things for Mad Max.
“The thing about the Just Cause games… is that emergent nature,” he says. “We are providing the player with a world and a set amount of tools to utilise in that world at their own will.”
“How they combine those and what they do with them and how they experiment with the tools that we provide to create these crazy events, that is something that really taps into what is unique about games for me. To have that freedom as a player, that autonomy.”
“That feeds really well into the wasteland setting of Mad Max and I feel like that’s really where we’re going to stand out comparably to previous wasteland games that people have seen.”
The challenges of working on a game across two generations adds complexity but getting the balance right is something the team is acutely aware of.
“The 360 version of Just Cause came out after the original, so that was a very good exercise for us,” says Krafting. “In this case we’re releasing simultaneously on all platforms.”
“It is a challenge, but I think the biggest challenge is to make sure that the current gen version is the same next gen experience in terms of gameplay; there won’t be any gameplay differences between the current and the next gen versions. Gameplay is what comes first for us.”
“But when you get all that memory and all that power to work with you just want to go all-in on it, so it’s a challenge to find that balance in-between.”
(Source: ign.com)
