Sunset Overdrive Was Originally Planned as a More Grounded Game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9FXIloYb8

Insomniac Games’ Sunset Overdrive is a fast-paced, caffeine-enhanced sugar rush that gives you an arsenal of crazy weapons with which to wreak Technicolor havok as you leap and grind your way around its open world.

But it didn’t start out like that. Game Director Drew Murray told IGN that Insomniac that although the game was always supposed to be colorful, they initially set out to make a more true-to-life title and specifically eschewed Ratchet and Clank trademarks like wild weapons and ways of getting around.

“When we first started in pre-production it was way more grounded,” Murray said. “We didn’t have all this crazy traversal, we actually didn’t have crazy weapons.” He added that “basically if we carried on with that it would have become the Insomniac version of DayZ.”

The game evolved through the development process into what it is now as the developers were encouraged to try out their most out-there ideas, even ones that didn’t seem like they would work, Murray said. The agile stage traversal was one of those ideas.

“We had a game jam over a couple days where designers would prototype stuff,” said Murray. “They came back with this godawful looking prototype of…kind of skateboarding? I watched it for the first time in a while a couple weeks ago. I can’t believe that’s what convinced us to do this. It looked terrible, it felt terrible.”

But with polish the clunky prototype transformed the game, so much so that the designers abandoned their intentions to lock some of the movement abilities behind progression trees and let the players have them early.

Sunset Overdrive is an Xbox One exclusive and will be out Oct. 28.