Sea of Stars Combat System Reinventing 90s RPGs It's like you're more actually there if that makes sense. In this way, everything feels kind of connected. Then, by physical contact, you trigger combat, which also happens in the same areas where you navigate. It's not random encounters, they just appear in the world, so all the levels are designed to kind of be able to contain that in a way that feels organic. That was definitely a big one for us, that seamlessness.Īnother big one was everything with the enemy systems and how enemies appear. But otherwise, we wanted to do what we call 'unshackling the traversal.' So the fact that you can hoist up, jump up from anything, exit in and out of the water with no clear transition between entry points and exit points– everything is organic, making it more of a world that you can touch. That's how you control your character on the world map. You know how with old RPGs, you are always bound to the tile set– bound to the grid then you move one step at a time, which we did for the world map as a call back to those games and those kinds of control. It was around this whole idea of ‘what can we look out for to make this a worthwhile pursuit creatively?'Ī big one that was just everything around the traversal. However, if we made games that were exactly like those games, then well, you don't miss the stiff controls, you don't miss the unfair difficulty spikes, you don't miss lengthy bits that just add playtime but don't really meaningfully impact your experience. What we're shooting for is a game that is as good as your memory of those games. But we can make you feel like that, if the game feels the way you felt while you played these classics that you kept close to your heart, which is usually who gathers around our games. I mean, we can't make you be 10 years old when you play our game, that's the one thing we can't do. In the case of Sea of Stars, when it comes to the narrative, the gameplay, and everything, even though the retro roots are very real, we still wanted to kind of do the next iteration, because that’s what we're shooting for.
So before we work on any game at Sabotage, there's this idea of ‘okay, here's the genre that we're looking at, that we're going to be working on’ – our previous game was an action platformer, and it always comes from a list of the known irritants or things that we feel we could improve upon enough to kind of give us enough of an excuse to be like, 'hey, here's a modernized take.' Part of this is, of course, playing on some of the tropes or some of the things that you would expect from a certain game, and then some of it is ‘how do we reinvent some of the things that didn't age well’, you know? It could be 'oh, the lives and continues system', how do we rethink that for modern players?
Q: Were there any main gameplay features or aspects of the JRPG genre that you wanted to make sure that you kept in Sea of Stars, and were there any that you knew that you wanted to expand on or innovate on?Ī: Oh, for sure. RELATED: Sea of Stars Arrives in Summer 2023 The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. Game Rant recently spoke with Sabotage Studio CEO and Creative Director Thierry Boulanger about the development process, inspirations for the game, reactions to the Sea of Stars demo, and more. The game takes a modern approach to the classic RPG systems of the '90s, and the game promises to be a breath of fresh air for fans of the genre. Sea of Stars, the second major title for indie game studio Sabotage Studio, released its first official demo on February 8, 2023.
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