Gungrave G.O.R.E. Director Describes Inspirations & Challenges Of The Game’s Development

Gungrave G.O.R.E. has been out a couple of weeks now, but aside from the game’s middling reception, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the game. Now, post-launch, the game’s Director, Kay Kim has shared some insight into the inspirations behind the game, and the challenges that the team faced in working on the game.

Speaking about the inspirations that underpinned the development of Gungrave G.O.R.E., Kim stated,

From the game, the previous Gungrave franchise was the most inspiring source, and from movies, the film Equilibrium was the most inspiring. The Gunkata action by Christian Bale is still amazing to watch.

Kim also reflected on the changes in design that that comes as a part of the game’s prolonged development, which dates back to 2017,

At first, the game was designed to be half open world and it was terrible. It was strange for Grave to search and have conversations. We were benchmarking the trending games at the time, and it became this freak of a game. So we have set the game to go beyond the original Gungrave design, and now it looks like what we are seeing today. We have refined the character since to make them look better.

Of course, challenges stem from lengthy development, just as can be the case for game’s of more standard development timelines. When discussing the challenges of developing Gungrave G.O.R.E., Kim stated,

I think that there is nothing easy about developing a game. Everything is difficult. Especially at the time when mobile games were the main platforms in Korea, console game developers like us had hard time finding investment. At the time, there were only six people left in the team making the game. We didn’t give up on achieving the dream, and because of that endurance, we ended up meeting great partners, reinforcing the team, and coming this far.

Finally, Kim also touched on the changes to the game’s lead character, Grave, and how it presented challenges throughout development. Such things can be challenging hurdles to overcome when working on established franchises with large legacies. When addressing this, Kim said

It wasn’t as difficult as one would think. We have worked with [original Gungrave Character Designer Yasuhiro Nightow] deeply in many ways, so we could develop the character design quite easily.

Gungrave G.O.R.E. from Embracer Group’s Prime Matter arm, and Iggymob is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.