The power of fiction to serve the gameplay
As the development team itself has pointed out, fiction has always been the first place in Dontnod gaming games. With Vampyr , however, there was a need to combine to this natural inclination a sufficiently complex gameplay structure to be able to implemen
t the two fundamental dynamics of the game: the first to regulate the different act of the player based on the ability of yield to their vampire instincts or less, and the second to make the narrative contour coherent once they have gone one way or another. Freedom and narrative consistency, then, are two desirable and difficult elements to reconcile appropriately.
Freedom, first of all, we can note from a structural point of view, the kind of membership of the game is in fact the Action-RPG and everything takes place in an open-world game world. Going where you want to personalize your character according to your nee
ds, decide whether to opt for high levels of experience in exchange for the blood of the innocent or save them while remaining weak, are among the various activities that already in turn give a strong identity to the game. All this is just a small part of what can be done in Vampyr. The city is a button entity, divided into districts and populated by 60 characters, each with its own artificial intelligence.
Do not be fooled by the number, because the fate of each of these characters is able to completely change the face of the district of belonging. Satisfaction with your Vampire instincts by killing a barman could take the room to your wife or bring it to the brink of depression and ruin the business. It goes without saying that the possibilities for a pyramid network formed by sixty elements are virtually endless.
Each action then goes slowly, leading us to one of the 4 finals of the game, one of which is less tragic than the others, but it is possible only if we do not kill any civilians throughout the game.
A taste of the combat system
All this interest in the narrative and the intricate development of Vampyr’s characters did not forget the Dontnod boys how interesting it could be to develop a deep combat system and to keep pace with the times. During the study tour, we saw developers working at some stages of the clashes, of which we could have a little taste.
The impression went beyond all the more rosy expectation. It seemed to have to do with a system that hybridized the combat of souls, while remaining in human form, the fluidity of the freeflow system, passing from one foe to another during that vampire rebellion.
Meanwhile, the filling and emptying of the blood bar have set a pace between the need to suck the blood of our victims and to exploit the vampire’s ability to escape from the most difficult situations.
Technically, there is little to say, if it does not show a general improvement of screen-to-screen performance compared to the previous E3 build, cleaner and more coveted, but we only have a very short video clip that we will not enter into further considerations.
