Games Industry has an interview with Robert Bowling about his new open world survival game Human Element.
Quote:
Q: So, you've been uncharacteristically quiet since leaving Infinity Ward, culminating in the Game Informer reveal of your new game, The Human Element. Details have been fairly scarce - can you tell us anything new?
Robert Bowling: We've been talking a lot about how the character creation stuff is set up - in Human Element what's most exciting is that we're going cross platform and cross genre in this universe. The situations that you'll face when you're in this open-world survival scenario are determined by your identity. That's determined by a number of things: your gender; your company - are you an adult alone, which is inherently easier because you just worry about yourself; an adult with another adult, which has advantages but means you have to share supplies, or an adult with a young child - that translates to the hardest difficulty and adds a whole other layer to that survival mechanic.
Lastly, it's your class - whether you're intelligence, action or stealth. When I think about the apocalypse, zombie or whatever, my plan changes drastically with my age. When I was young it was very action oriented. I was fighting zombies, I was fighting other survivors - that's what I was worried about. Then when I got older and had a kid - I have a daughter that turned three last week - you think about survival very differently. You want to rebuild some resembelance of society. You want to avoid confrontation, build fortifications. That mentality lead to these design decsions.
The interesting thing is, that, since it's an open world and the situations you come across are very dynamic, based on your identity and where you are in the world - we're not telling a linear A-B kind of story - how you engage in the universe changes drasticallly depending on the device you're using. That's what I'm most excited about here, is that cross-genre, cross-platform experience.
