The senior narrative designer at Housemarque mentioned in an interview recently that their next mysterious IP will incorporate some Returnal ideas. Before you start thinking “they can’t be copying, can they?”, these ideas will be ones that were unused in their previous game.
We don’t know much about this next IP from Housemarque other than them confirming that it is in development and that they will be collaborating with PlayStation for it.
Eevi Korhonen is the senior narrative designer in question, and in the interview, she discussed the future of the studio, what the best things about working at the Finnish-based developer are, and what is in store for them next.
Korhonen said:
“Returnal was so ambitious, we dreamt super big, but we still had to leave so much on the cutting room floor. All of these ideas and narrative systems. I’m super excited to pick up those pieces and see how those fit our new IP story.
“We didn’t quite have the handle on how big [Returnal] was going to be, building for a new platform on a new engine with a new team, all of those things require some learning. Now we have that team that has gone through the fire and learned how to build a game like Returnal. So now we get to start off stronger.”
Korhonen wasn’t finished there though because she went on to talk about the lessons she and the rest of the team had learned while developing Returnal – Housemarque’s principal large narrative-based game.
“I think we’ve learned the importance of pacing and how difficult that is in a rogue-like game,” Korhonen said. “It’s very hard to control and say ‘okay, now we hit them with this perfect story beat’, that’s kind of the beauty of linear games, you get to control that absolutely perfectly.
“Letting go of that and somehow building the sandbox or the playground for players in a way that means certain story blocks become available is challenging.”
If you have played Returnal you’ll know all about what it has to offer. The story unravels with clips that start to play out when the primary player dies and returns to their trusty ship. As well as these shorter clips, there are some longer segments that take place in the first area. Here’s the thing though, players can completely avoid this area because there are larger parts of the Returnal story that can be easily missed, purposefully or accidentally.
The hopes for this mysterious new IP from Housemarque are quite high, and the fact they will be using unused Returnal ideas does offer some promising results. Saying that though, we wonder what Returnal would have been like if they used these unknown ideas, they could have made the game even better.
