Biomutant is a Delightfully Weird Upcoming RPG
Biomutant waited a long time for the release, but in return, it will offer a much bigger and more complex experience. The game will bring a bizarre, twisted blend, successfully mixing many different styles, genres, and influences.
Imagine a cuddly animal straight out of Kung Fu Panda movie, dressed like John Rambo and armed with a big sword carried on the back. Imagine traveling a fabulously colorful world, in which you can see the grim remnants and traces of our modern civilization. Along the way, we encounter some really bizarre creatures that Lewis Carroll would gladly have invented, had he made video games. These strange creatures can be friendly and helpful, but other times, you will have to fight them.
One of the weapons you'll use could be a walking cane welded to huge, armored safe door. The game allows you to use both melee weapons and firearms, and even gives you a backpack with a small propeller that's able to quickly and efficiently lift you off the ground. Then, amusing captions appear on the screen during combos, confirming successful pairing of blows.
As you progress through the main story, it's easy to get carried away and explore the secrets of the Biomutant world..
Almost all characters, including the protagonist, use their own specific language in their conversations, and the game comes with a useful narrator voice, which recounts the odd events, helping the player understand them, and sometimes even has some funny remarks about our performance.
Yes... Biomutant is a bizarre game – but in the most positive sense of the word. This whole game is so intriguing! Regardless of your genre preferences, there's a specific element, a certain, very alluring quality of the upcoming game from Experiment 101.
The uniqueness comes from inspirations from different ethnic cultures. You have Asian influences as well as African ones, even my personal backstory ties in to that, as parts of my family come from north Sweden, where the Sami lived. So we did not stick to one, distinct inspiration, but many.
Stefan Ljungqvist (Art and Creative Director), Experiment 101
RPG (un)like any other
Biomutant is generally a traditional action-RPG set in an open world. There's character creation and development, a complex storyline, secret dungeons, activities, and side characters, dialogues with choices, crafting, combat, bosses and most of all – a lot of freedom in following your own path. The developers even mentioned that during the initial testing of the game, players strayed from the main path so much and for so long that it was decided to slightly modify the narrative to veer towards the main thread more.
Still, freedom and understatement will be important elements of the game. The hosts of the preview emphasized that not everything in Biomutant is clearly defined as good or evil. We'll have to deal with the main antagonist with a not entirely ominous name, Lupa-Lupin – but is he really the bad guy? All the while, we will be accompanied by an aura; a kind of karma that depends on our deeds and statements. This will have some impact on the development of the overall story and availability of certain options when interacting with characters. But whether we're moving toward the light or darkness will never be explicitly admitted.
The story of Biomutant is based on three main threads. The first one concerns the character's background, their past, and their true role in the events unfolding on the screen. The second focuses on about six tribes that we can freely ally with. Then the third one is a symbol of the story's finale, or the so-called Tree of Life. It's the epitome of the entire game world just heading towards collapse. The tree is poisoned by toxic oil, and its roots are consumed by four powerful entities – the "world eaters," or megabosses of sorts. How it all ends is supposed to depend on our choices. So it all seems kind of formulaic, familiar, and in-line with the standards, yet the crazy ideas and a specific mix of different themes really make Biomutant stand out from other post-apo games.
It does look gorgeous.
Our estimation for a “rushed“ run-through of Biomutant is at about 12-15 hours. (...) On the other hand, one of our team-members is just giving Biomutant a go the way he usually plays games. He isn’t done yet and has about 65 hours of playtime. So it really depends on what type of player you are.
Stefan Ljungqvist (Art and Creative Director), Experiment 101
Math-defined action
The presentation mainly focused on explaining the key gameplay mechanics. So we get an RPG heavily based on action, in which, however, statistics still play an important role. At the beginning of the character creation, we choose one of the available races described by six main characteristics (strength, charisma, intellect, luck, etc.), some of which consist of several values, e.g. vitality determines the amount of health and armor.
There's no shortage of mysteires and adventures.
All the races have different resistance to toxicity, radioactivity, bio-hazard, fire or frost. This, in turn, determines the amount of time we can be exposed to these hazardous areas, and determines if (or when) we will be able to access blocked areas to complete new quests and, of course, get better loot.
Finally, there is a class system, but it doesn't work to the same extent as in Diablo. Here, it determines the starting set of equipment and sometimes adds a perk to the character, e.g. commando (a typical warrior) starts with a rifle and deals 10% more damage; the dead eye (sniper) has the ability to instantly reload the weapon; PSI-freak is a typical wizard shooting electric bolts and regenerating kinetic energy faster.
This choice matters mainly at the very beginning, because later on, we will be able to access equipment and perks of other classes. The developers didn't want to introduce any significant constraints, but rather provide players with complete freedom and a sense of control of the character development with choices made throughout the game.
Comic-book fights
As in any RPG, equipment such as weapons and clothing is of great importance. You can either create it in the crafting menu (without any restrictions, such as finding the right workshop) thanks to a few main resources, or just stumble upon it in the game world. Each item is marked with values such as quality and has its own set of stats affecting survivability. Among other things, these can increase the chance of critical blows or extend immunity in hazardous environments.
Static screenshots without a comic book interface don't do justice to the immense pace of battles.
Weapons deal specific types of damage, such as freezing or setting enemies on fire, which does affects the way you fight, but the very appearance of the tools of destruction and the sheer number of available combinations encourages experimentation. The developers boast there are about 200 million options for firearms and ranged weapons in total. Phew. The walking stick/armed safe door spoof I mentioned at the beginning also had barber scissors attached, and rifle butts could be wrapped in patterned wool scarves! The ideas for customization are incredible, and inventive in a thrilling, entertaining way. I have no idea where the creators got these ideas, but I appreciate and admire this kind of creativity!
With such personal and unique equipment, every battle turns out to be not only a challenge, but also a real visual feast; maybe even a personal manifest. With its rather broad third-person perspective and colorful captions popping up every now saying "Whooop" or "Baam!" the game resembles an animated comic strip. Fights are extremely dynamic and even launching the special Max Payne-like slow-motion ability doesn't create any sort of "tactical pauses." It's hard to judge the difficulty and challenge from just watching, but reflexes and skill evaluation seem to be crucial. Some enemies will prove to be too strong, especially at the beginning of the game, but their over-the-top, original look is sure to attract players just for the hell of exploring them and getting killed.
Biomes, dungeons, useful NPCs
Another issue discussed in more detail during the Biomutant preview was the open world. We will get an 8x8 square kilometer area divided into fairly typical types of climate. We'll be able to go literally anywhere after the first 30 minutes, but access to certain locations is supposed to be somewhat limited – either by hazardous areas, or powerful bosses. Some of these obstacles will be possible to bypass, for example by using a huge mech.
Combat is enriched by a huge selection of weapons and equipment, which can be produced in an endless number of combinations.
Several possible ways of travel is, by the way, another important feature of the game. There will be strange mounts, flying machines, mini-gliders, and other contraptions allowing you to travel both vertically and horizontally. In some places, too, there will be huge dungeons stretching below the biomes – not the fantasy-type dungeons, of course, but rather subway tunnels and sewer networks.
A very important role falls on NPCs, the regular folk scattered around the game world; villagers and wanderers. They not only commission traditional side quests, but also – following the example of recent Ubisoft games – offer clues to hidden locations or items. It hence pays off to talk to everyone, properly conducting the conversations, especially since our past actions and aura will matter.
It was unfortunate that we created 16.500 bugs in the first place, but when they were there, we had to fix them! Ok, just kidding – after the initial feedback we got after the announcement, we decided together with THQ Nordic to increase the scope of the game.
Initially, we had for example 80,000 words of text in the game. Now we have about 250,000. And I have to emphasize, we are a small studio of only 20 people. We didn’t want to crunch, too, if we are not working towards a deadline like, for example, a gamescom demo. So, I’d say the biggest challenge was the sheer size and making sure the game releases in a very good condition.
Stefan Ljungqvist (Art and Creative Director), Experiment 101
Travel is facilitated by different kinds of machines.
Unusual, twisted, intriguing...
For a long time, Biomutant was a rather mysterious project. It has been almost four years since the first announcements. The game is being developed by a brand-new studio, built by veterans from Avalanche Games, aka the creators of Mad Max and Just Cause. This is probably the reason why their new work relies so heavily on a post-apocalyptic setting. However, nothing I saw in those games prepared me for the bizarre world of Biomutant.
The mysterious plot and unusual character designs, even the weapons themselves have me intrigued, and I suspect that even if the game includes the infamous Mad Max-like constant junk collecting, I'll still want to venture further into the world of Biomutant. Along with the Russian Atomic Heart, this is probably one of the most original upcoming mainstream games, so it's definitely worth checking it out, even if you're not crazy about RPG.
