Art & Evolution of Zeno Clash

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The Zenozoik Era
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Zenomorph: The Art And Evolution Of Zeno Clash

By Duncan Harris on September 9th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.
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This is the first in a weekly series of features about the art and art technology of PC games, in association with
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website Dead End Thrills. More from Zeno Clash II can be found here. Click the images below for biggies.
Punch me in my Salvador Dali and tell me I’m not dreaming. Did just fifteen people really make Zeno Clash II? Of
course they did, it’s by ACE Team, the Chilean house of brothers Andrés, Carlos and Edmundo Bordeu. Making a
game that actually seemed possible would be too easy for those guys, and maybe even lose the underdog cachet
that makes their first-person brawlers so disarming.
Zeno Clash – or, as I like to call it, Hieronymus BOSH! – was conceived in 2002 as a prototype first-person
adventure called Zenozoik: Shattered Land. It was, Carlos almost proudly declares, “really bad. It was a mix of
several ideas that were too ambitious for a small studio at the time. Even saying we were a studio would be a
stretch, we were just a bunch of dudes.”
Amusingly, one of these ideas was pacifism. NPCs would respond in kind to how you played, making it possible to
just charm your way to the end. Again, “it worked awfully. Getting NPCs to interact with you, and understand
whether you’re being aggressive towards them, that’s really hard. And it’s even harder if you’re in this punk fantasy
world where everything looks menacing.” Non-violent quest options made the game exponentially more fragile, and
testers used to Counter-Strike were just shooting the place up anyway.
So, in the production version of Zeno Clash released in 2009, NPCs understand more quickly whether you’re being
aggressive to them. It’s the mandatory punch in the face that does it, then the highly recommended soccer kick to
the face, and then the in-for-a-penny stamping on the face. They tend to get the message after you’ve done that a
couple of times.
The switch to Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em brawler earned the game cult status, but not for the reasons you might think.
Bringing to mind The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, this kind of screen-consuming melee
system can make stars of a game’s characters, lending unusually high resources to their texturing, animation and
expressions. Inspired by the likes of Bosch, British fantasy illustrator John Blanche, and Python legend Terry
Gilliam, Zeno Clash was quite shamelessly now an ‘art game’. With fighting.
ACE Team had clearly learned from its mistakes, even if the next one always seems to be just around the corner. “If
you want to do a game, you do what your engine does best,” says Carlos. “We don’t! ‘What does this engine not do?
Let’s do it!’ That doesn’t make a lot of sense but it was at least the case for Zeno Clash.”
It was also the case for pretty much everything else the studio had done. You know how in Doom you can’t have
one floor above another? “We sort of did that in Batman Doom [a mod that pretty much explains itself] by doing
some really creative sort of hacks. It was an illusion, almost cheating,” he recalls.
Zeno Clash was in fact supposed to be a Doom 3 engine game before the team, recognising its problems with
exteriors, chose Source instead. Much has been written about how it then proceeded to totally eschew Source’s
brush-based geometry and bake all its lighting into static meshes in 3D Studio Max, all for the sake of a more
organic-looking game world. Which worked, of course, in the end, but not as a foundation for this year’s Zeno Clash
II.
Switching to Unreal Engine 3 for a bigger, more open sequel, ACE Team played it unsafe yet again by designing
over 100 unique characters, more than trebling the size of the game world, creating one of the first and only
simulated day/night cycles in Unreal, and telling a bigger story complete with voiceovers and cutscenes. This time
the fight was with workflow rather than technology. As Carlos puts it, “Now we were hacking ourselves.”
Though one of the most bewitching UE3 implementations ever, full of chemistry and colour, Zeno Clash II isn’t
perfect. Mistakes were made which, all things considered, seem almost ordinary.
“It was quite a successful project and a very worthwhile sequel,” believes Carlos. “We did a lot of stuff to really
address what people were asking us to do. On the other side, I do feel that the game is maybe more for hardcore
Zeno Clash fans, and I don’t know what I could have done to not be in that situation. The first game ended with a
cliffhanger, in the middle of something you really needed to follow up. A lot of people who went into Zeno Clash II
didn’t really get it. I was disappointed that many people talked about the story being just this weird thing without
any purpose, whereas it was thought out really well. It’s our fault.
“A concrete example is that we left the tutorial and prologue out of the main campaign so, if people were in the
middle of the campaign and forgot how to do a combo, they could go back and re-practice. The problem is that if
you go and see people doing their first impressions on YouTube, they skip the tutorial and everything, and it’s a
disaster. I want to pull my hair off, kill myself. So yeah, maybe that wasn’t the best idea in the world.”
There’s little question that Zeno Clash II is overambitious, “just ACE Team trying to do something you’re not
supposed to do,” says Carlos. “It’s not the engine this time around but you’re not supposed to make something
that’s a big adventure with multiplayer, with co-op, for PC and console.”
Its art, however, though an acquired taste, is a feast. From the convincing mix of baked ambient occlusion and
dynamic lighting, to the ridiculously broad palette of moods and ideas, the game over-delivers by even the triple-A
standards the team cautiously plays down. Time to get on the tour bus, friends, with art director Edmundo Bordeu.
Bosch Spice
Yup, that title did just happen. The influence of Dutch surrealist Hieronymus Bosch on Zenozoik is not just some
early aspiration seized upon by ACE Team’s marketing. (Does it have marketing?) Nor is it always so explicit as the
turning of the ‘Tree Man’ from Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights into a roving ‘cavity on legs’ that poops out
bombs, has glass bubbles for kneecaps, and serves as a half-time boss battle.
Layered parallel planes littered with unique props and characters form many, if not most, of Zenozoik’s landscapes
– and this is a very realtime phenomenon. But for all the time and resources games spend trying to plug those
gaps, achieving a kind of spatial ‘realism’, ACE Team spends just as much going the other way.
Edmundo: “The Bosch reference is very difficult to achieve because each square inch of a Bosch painting is
unique. Every single creature is different, every single prop. So, making Zeno Clash II bigger than Zeno Clash 1, one
of our main worries was how we were going to fill this huge space with different things. You can’t make every
single square inch unique, so you draw people’s attention to the things that are unique.
From a designer point of view, we decided that if there was something really interesting in the background, like say
this gigantic egg sculpture or the tower, you had to be able to reach it. So we couldn’t put something in the distance
that was cool-looking but oh, you couldn’t go there. That’s why you have these kind of ‘set-pieces’ that are very
evident in the background.
Proportion is certainly easier in a fantasy game. You can say that something’s important and make it twice as big,
whereas in a realistic game, if a phone is important then you can’t make the phone twice as big – that’d be
ridiculous. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the landmarks [in Zeno Clash II] were reduced or enlarged to four
times their original planned size. So yes, you want the gameplay to be readable, and again you want to draw
attention to things that are special in these huge spaces.”
Father-Mother Of Invention
Edmundo’s approach to designing characters is, unsurprisingly, the opposite of what you’d expect. Others might
want to know every detail of a character’s attitude and history before calculating their appearance, but the
characters here come out backwards.
Edmundo: “Not all the designs come from the same person [on the team] or the same few sources of inspiration.
Once we have a lot of designs out there, then we decide where they fit in the world and the story. If we have
someone with a classical-inspired design, for example, we say he fits more in the Golems’ world. Even the
backstory of a character doesn’t exist until we can see him on paper.
Father-Mother wasn’t even a secondary character at first, he was a prop. He was sitting in a bar and I thought, ‘Oh,
this character looks a bit boring,’ so I made it that he was a father who’d brought his baby to the bar because he
had nowhere else to leave it. The baby was just laying there on the table. All the playtesters who came along and
played that level said, ‘Ooh, that creepy witch character’s going to eat that baby.’ I thought that was very unfair, and
that reaction to Father-Mother influenced a lot of the conflict in the first game.”
The Uncanny Country
In a rare case of ACE Team making life easy for itself, its more batshit characters (read: most of them) bring none
of the usual anxieties over realism and the uncanny valley.
Edmundo: “You don’t have very particular expectations of how a bird man looks when he frowns. So yes, you can
get away with doing things that don’t need to match a specific mental model. Still, we had so many more
characters in Zeno Clash II than in Zeno Clash that the art team was under huge pressure to release enough. I think
our team, for the size it is, to release that game on consoles and PC, did a tremendous amount of work.
In Zeno Clash 1 it was one of our objectives that every person should have a face and a name so that you weren’t
punching a generic army of clones. Obviously the story requires that sometimes, like with the Desert People or the
Shadows, but elsewhere it’s always different characters.
Another thing we wanted to do from the beginning: in firstperson shooters you usually shoot characters when
they’re far away and it doesn’t matter how detailed and awesome their face looks; but in Zeno Clash the character
is normally using half your screen, so they have to be detailed, they have to have expressions. It’s not a tech feature
but an essential part of it. Is the guy angry? Cocky? We have a whole emotion layer in there where if the guy’s angry
he’ll attack more and defend less, stuff like that.”
Divine Comedy
Terry Gilliam once described his work, so similar to this game’s as it can be, as the result of ‘conversations’ he’d
had with other people’s art. Sometimes he showed respect, sometimes he took the piss, and somewhere out of that
came everything from Brazil to Conrad Pooh’s Dancing Teeth. Zeno Clash walks a similar tightrope and, for all its
perils and grotesques, never plunges completely into nightmare.
Edmundo: “I read an art analysis about Bosch’s paintings. Some people think it is very moralistic and supposed to
scare people; of course, art was educational, etc. But other art historians think these scenes weren’t supposed to be
scary and were playful. Even on Bosch people can’t agree if it’s serious or just imaginative and funny. In Zeno
Clash there’s definitely seriousness: the main characters, usually their motivations, aren’t comedic in any way.
When I have a very strange or ugly or unusual character, I don’t necessarily treat him like he’s stupid or laughable.
Even if the design is ridiculous, I try and treat the character with respect. With the Golems we were a bit more strict:
this is what they were trying to communicate, this whole thing of authority. How they present themselves has to
correlate better with their ideas because that’s their thing, they try to build the world in their image. But people in the
city of Halstedom and the wider Zenozoik have absolutely no prejudice about how strange things are.”
The Changing Of The Guardian
Try to contain your surprise, but something strange happens between Zeno Clash and Zeno Clash II: your
companion and platonic love interest in the first one, Deadra, is swapped in the sequel for Rimat, an antagonist. Of
course, no one is entirely evil in this universe, especially when it’s family, but it’s still akin to Half-Life 3 swapping
Alyx for Dr Breen. “Sorry, Gordon, for being such an idiot back there.”
Edmundo: “We had a ton of different designs for Ghat originally; seeing the design that stood out meant we could
then define what he was like. Ghat’s almost nihilistic in the first game, but in the second one he kind of has his own
goals. I read just today, in our forums, he was described as an ‘anarchist libertarian’. It’s a weird thing to call
someone who’s never read a book, but that’s how he feels he needs to act.
We wanted him asymmetrical from the start. He has these armour pieces that are personal, but not put together
carefully. In the second game he’s a little less thin because– This is my view on things, but thin characters I usually
relate more to frailty or something missing psychologically.
Rimat was one of my favourite characters in the first one, but the story didn’t have much focus on her. Even if it’s
not in the first game, I always felt that Rimat did know that Father-Mother wasn’t her Father-Mother, and that’s
actually what made her so angry with Ghat: she could keep the secret and swallow the pain just to keep things well
in the family, but Ghat was selfish and created this whole conflict. Coincidentally, my sister and other people who
played the first one said, ‘Oh, I’d like to be Rimat,’ more often than Deadra.
We gave Deadra more of her own decisions to make and her own character arc in the second game, whereas in the
first one she’s asking a lot of questions to Ghat just so he’s not monologuing the whole time. In reality, though,
almost her only function in the first one is being empathic and the grounding force for Ghat.”
Lights and Magic
The more apocalyptic the game, the more likely it is that the antagonists will have all the light bulbs. This is
beautifully upheld by Zeno Clash II, where the ancient Golems literally electrify a world of mottle and daub,
wrapping its stone in holograms and wires. Trespassing onto their island, Ghat and Rimat are quickly surrounded
by marble ramparts and enchanted jewels, not to mention tall obsidian watchmen, the Shadows, whose
movements seem based on gaming’s creepiest glitches.
Edmundo: “The second game definitely has more focus on the Golems because in this one we’re explaining more
what they are, and a lot of the conflict is between the Golems themselves. Electricity, and these cyan, green and
blue lights, are what we decided would differentiate their advanced technology from the primitive Zenozoik. In the
case of the End World [a later level] we really wanted it to not actually be the end of the world, but to let the player
see that there’s a whole other civilised world beyond it. We knew it was a bit risky to show this cool modern city to
people and then tell them no, they cannot go there. But that really makes people hate the Golem, even if the Golem
in general are not bad people.
In both games we decided that Golem architecture would be of materials that basically last forever: marble, gold,
and these things that, no matter how expensive they are, form kind of monumental, impossible buildings. Gold
really doesn’t mean much to people in Zenozoik because there’s no currency, so in a way they’re obsolete symbols
for Zenos. And the Shadows, they were supposed to be almost like modern art in a way, because the Golems can
decide what shapes they want their minions and even themselves to adopt. They decided their upgrades, they use
their own reasons and desires to say, ‘Okay, I want to have these symbols of authority, this Greek look,” or some
other symbol like a crown.
Sunstroke
There’s a piece by John Blanche, usefully ‘Untitled’, that seems awfully close to Zeno Clash II’s loading screen.
Even more usefully, I can’t find it to show you. It’s a fairly straightforward image of a sun setting through the layers
of smog and grit that choke even Blanche’s most idyllic scenes, a web of thin black branches in the foreground.
That’s basically the loading screen, too, the trick being that its bottom ‘layer’ rotates with the game’s day/night
cycle. For the game to be perhaps the only Unreal Engine game to simulate a full shadow-casting sun and moon –
I’m really struggling to think of another – is one thing. But what’s magical is the art of it, how it mixes with layers of
atmospheric detail to create roiling, multi-coloured skies.
Edmundo: “It took a lot of iterations. The main difference between trying to do a simulation cycle and what we did
is mostly choice of colours – like, say, the sky light can be pink and the backlight can be green, and the fog can be
something that doesn’t clash with those. Second is the skybox itself, the image. Those two things find the right
balance between how real it needs to look. Because if it’s completely abstract, that will clash with the rendered
scene with its shadows and aspects that are real in a way. Surrealism is not necessarily a Picasso painting where
nothing has to make any sense. It has a dreamy quality to what it is rather than how it’s drawn.
One trick we have is that when the sun is very close to the horizon, when the shadows would be most bothersome,
the intensity of the shadows fades and it turns almost 100 per cent into ambient light, which is not directional. And
then during the night the moon illuminates things. My favourite time is right before this horizon time, when the
shadows are very horizontal, where the sun is intensely red and you have these long shadows. That’s my favourite
time in real life too.”
Texture Clash
Trust Zeno Clash to not conform to any one current model of 3D texturing and colour-grading. It doesn’t use the
compression-friendly painterly style of Dishonored or Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons – at least not always. It doesn’t
always try to hide the photographic origins of, say, its rock textures, or use a sepia wash to achieve a unified look
or conform to expectation.
Edmundo: “I don’t think it’s usually difficulty in making things look real that makes people lower the saturation and
things like that, but a conscious decision. Saving Private Ryan, for example: after that movie, so many war games
used it. It’s how people expect these games to look, like how a sci-fi game should have these blue hues… When we
said we didn’t want to do this in Zeno Clash, it wasn’t because we wanted ours to look better, but because we were
bored of these styles. We want to make something look different, even if we cannot achieve the most beautiful look
and it looks ugly.
We do use photographic reference but we always process it in Photoshop, trying to keep a consistency between the
things that are pure fantasy and photographic, finding an area in between. We did do some attempts at using post-
processing to kind of have these styles you could get away with, but we found out that usually people prefer to
look at it without the post processing on. Now I have learned more about post processing and so we might use that
for the new project. But Zeno Clash has a very thin layer.”
Region Coded
As good as games now are at using skyboxes to communicate distance and place – a Citadel here, a Shard there;
a Founders Tower or abandoned radio mast – few attempt more than the hub-and-spoke tactic of having one key
landmark that reminds you that you’re ‘there’. Zeno Clash II prefers a kind of camera obscura approach that maps
most of Zenozoik onto the skydome, the obvious risk being that the whole place feels like a theme park.
Edmundo: “Before creating the levels I first created a world map where every region would go. I even created it in
3D, and for a very long time in the project each level was placed in its exact location on the planet; one level would
be 1,000 miles north, etc. We even had technical difficulties because in the engine you’re not supposed to do things
so far away from the origin of the level. But it helped us keep places where they actually had to be in relation to
each other.
For the final game we realised that the distances I’d picked were way too realistic, and so great that you couldn’t
see the landmarks far away. So, though I was afraid that making things bigger and closer to each other would
make the world of Zenozoik look too small, it was better for the final game.
We had this thing where my map actually represented part of Chile. In the first game, just without thinking it, we put
mountains on one side, sea on the other and a desert to the north. And I realised that of course we did that, that’s
how the world is in Chile. So we worked that in, made it explicit if you search the lore in the second game. Of
course, the distances you travel in the game are ridiculously short, but when did they ever have to be realistic?”
You can follow ACE Team and Dead End Thrills on Twitter. There was a better prize for getting to the end, but I ate
it.
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53 Comments
53 Comments
Ross Angus says: 09/09/2013 at 21:39
Well, I don’t know who this Duncan fellow is, but it turns out that the price of my loyalty is two Hieronymus
Bosch puns.
pupsikaso says: 09/09/2013 at 21:41
More columns like this, please.
Jim Rossignol says: 09/09/2013 at 21:56
We’re aiming for this to be a new regular feature.
SominiTheCommenter says: 09/09/2013 at 23:20
Yet another virtual thumbs up to this article. More of this sort of thing!
rockman29 says: 10/09/2013 at 02:18
Yes! Fewer articles, more content!
Be the Wirecutter of the gaming world :):):)
Mctittles says: 10/09/2013 at 08:19
Great idea!
Dances to Podcasts says: 11/09/2013 at 03:19
Another vote for Yes, please. Things like The Flare Path, Live Free Play Hard (and
Kickstarter Katchup, dammit!) are the best parts of this site.
DrScuttles says: 09/09/2013 at 21:45
Zeno Clash is a thing of beauty, wonder and ultra violence. For all the fictional worlds created for videogames
there are so few that I’d actually care to visit, but Zenozoik has to be at the top of that meagre list. Stimulates
the same gland that those old Roger Dean Psygnosis covers did when I were a lad.
And poor Oxameter. Though at least he had purpose.
Faldrath says: 09/09/2013 at 21:52
You mean “Hipgnosis”, but nice Freudian slip there :)
I really wish I wasn’t completely rubbish at Zeno Clash so I could actually explore the world.
tikey says: 09/09/2013 at 22:01
I think he actually mean Psygnosis

link to en.wikipedia.org
Nope, he mentioned Roger Dean, who is also a famous album cover designer (he
did all of the most famous Yes covers).
tikey says: 09/09/2013 at 22:06
The same Roger Dean who made covers for Psygnosis?

Like this one for example: link to en.wikipedia.org
Aha. Touché!
LTK says: 09/09/2013 at 22:22
‘Ultraviolence’ implies a sort of sadism to it, which is not the case at all in Zeno Clash. Violence in
this game is almost always pragmatic and goal-oriented. It’s why nobody ever dies as a result of
fighting in Zenozoik.
Very true. I just like to invoke the voice of Malcolm McDowell.
Manburger says: 09/09/2013 at 21:55
Yeah, this is a great feature! I enjoyed both Zeno Clash games a bunch, even though I can see how the
roughness of the edges (so to speak) displeased some folks (i.e grumps).
Man, Zeno Clash II was a trip! And not in the typical way games are trippy, (arcadey, lsd-audiovisual-overload)
but in a full on batshit insane shroom/peyote/salvia-laced feverdream sort of way. It’s never “haha randommm”,
there is internal consistency, a sense to the nonsense. It’s breathtaking at times.
There’s more character in a single screen than most games have over their entire runtime.
Gosh, what a beaut!
And also the face-punching is delicious, obv.
Laketown says: 10/09/2013 at 00:02
I so totally agree. It’s in my top 3 so far after Europa Universalis 4 (because I’m going to spend 100
hours in that game after it’s over) and maybe Tomb Raider I can’t decide.
Beyond Endworld alone was better than some games. That revelation was SO GOOD, it actually made
me say ‘oh fuck’ out loud to no one.
Mollusc Infestation says: 09/09/2013 at 22:11
Zeno Clash feels like a fantasy written in a world without Tolkien. I find that incredibly refreshing.
Paul says: 09/09/2013 at 22:11
Fantastic feature. It saddens me greatly that Zeno 2 did not get the reception it deserves. Such a great
imaginative game.
LTK says: 09/09/2013 at 22:24
I love everything about this article.
By the way, did you know about Zeno Clash 2’s playable Framerate Challenge?
Viroso says: 09/09/2013 at 22:29
Great thing RPS is doing here.
This game is a feat, and it deserves more attention. RPS’ Zeno Clash 2 review was really disappointing, unfair
even. ACE Team is just one of the more original developers out there right now. Zeno Clas 1 and 2 + Rock of
Ages, you don’t find many developers creating unique titles like this, and more importantly, making their crazy
ideas work.
Urthman says: 09/09/2013 at 22:52
Dead End Thrills is a wonderful celebration of the beauty of PC gaming. I think it’s a fantastic site for RPS to
team up with.
Brugt says: 09/09/2013 at 22:54
Excellent read! Thank you, Mr Harris.
Never played any of the two games, now reconsidering just to tourist around in a Bosch world.
pertusaria says: 09/09/2013 at 23:19
Logged in to say this, pretty much. Great read, loved the “visual art of the game” mixed in with “this is
how they achieved it”.
m0gpt says: 10/09/2013 at 01:46
REGISTERED to say this. Great article, please more of this kind of thing.
Arglebargle says: 09/09/2013 at 23:06
I buy their games on the strength of their art and vision. The genre is not my favorite, and I’m not even
particularly good at playing them, but these folks deserve our support.
Dances to Podcasts says: 11/09/2013 at 03:25
Same here. I’m still working my way through the first game, but it’s still installed and I will finish it one
day!
Carlos Bordeu says: 09/09/2013 at 23:40
Hi guys, I’m Carlos Bordeu – one of the developers interviewed in this article (great work Duncan!). We have a
pretty good reputation for being really accessible and open to discuss stuff in our own forums and over at
Steam, so I figured out there’s no reason not to do it here.
If anyone has a specific question, or just wants to comment on something you liked / disliked about ZC1 or
ZC2, I’d be more than glad to answer here. Just fire away!
inertia says: 10/09/2013 at 01:12
Is more Zeno Clash coming?
Another Zeno Clash isn’t our next project. We have a completely new game deep in
development and some other stuff on a queue that might or might not happen.
Whether or not we make a new Zeno Clash game is still up in the air. It isn’t something
we’re ready to commit to this early after finishing the sequel.
inertia says: 10/09/2013 at 02:47
Fair enough. Hoping to hear about the new project soon!
cpt_freakout says: 10/09/2013 at 07:55
First of all, I love your games! They’re really great looking as well as great playing. Anyway, my
question parts from the bit where Eduardo says “punk fantasy world”: what are the influences for the
themes and the philosophies behind why each side (Zenozoik and the ‘civilized’ world) fights? I think I
could write a whole essay of speculation, but since you’re here, I’d rather hear it from the source! :)
Hi cpt_freakout. I think in this case the best course of action is to redirect you to this
thread of our forum which has a major discussion about the themes, motivations and
inspirations behind the game (I’m pretty sure this was discussed in here with several
answers by me and Edmundo).
It is really complete and will have way more info than what I can cook up in a brief answer
here. If you’re not satisfied with the answers just post a follow up in the same thread and
I’ll gladly continue the discussion.
link to forums.aceteam.cl
YogSo says: 10/09/2013 at 15:33
“A concrete example is that we left the tutorial and prologue out of the main campaign so, if
people were in the middle of the campaign and forgot how to do a combo, they could go back
and re-practice. The problem is that if you go and see people doing their first impressions on
YouTube, they skip the tutorial and everything, and it’s a disaster. I want to pull my hair off, kill
myself. So yeah, maybe that wasn’t the best idea in the world.”
Carlos, I have to vehemently disagree with you here. If people act stupidly it’s not the developer’s
fault. You can shove all the manuals, tutorials and pop-ups into people’s throats and many will still
refuse to read/comprehend them and will get lost within seconds of starting a game and complain
and start a fuse and then get sidetracked because “look, a fly” and where were them?
I haven’t played ZC2 yet (I did play and complete ZC not so long ago, though), but I think having the
tutorial accessible apart from the main game is a very good feature (I’m also thinking of other little
known games that also have this option, maybe you’ve heard of them too? Do Half-Life or Deus Ex
ring any bells? ;-) ). If anything, maybe a consideration for the future is to lock the New Game button
until the Tutorial has been run (and completed?) at least once. People will still complain, but hey, as I
say, “stupid people gonna be stupid”. So don’t worry about them.
Our first course of action when we started spotting people skip the tutorial was to patch
the game and make the button flash in the main menu until it was clicked (sort of a way of
reinforcing people to start there). An additional problem of the whole separate tutorial
thing that wasn’t discussed here is that the tutorial also contains the prologue and if you
go into the game and don’t remember the events of ZC1 (or didn’t play it), it makes the
game’s story much more harder to comprehend. This also prompted us to patch the game
again with a brief text intro separate from the tutorial to at least guarantee people would
read the relevant aspects of the story of ZC1.
I pretty much agree with you and it is all more frustrating to see this happen when the
button is named ‘Prologue/Tutorial’ …I would never think people would skip the starting
tutorial if it had the prologue in it… but it sadly happens a lot. Since a lot of people
see/judge games based on quick first impressions on Youtube, it is so disheartening to
see someone show it so atrociously and know people might walk away from trying it out
based on such an unfair glimpse of what the game has to offer.
midhras says: 09/09/2013 at 23:50
My knee-jerk reflex is to applaud anything that is not only in-depth but numbers a fair few paragraphs while at it.
The quality of writing displayed as well as the focus on game design challenges makes my knee-jerkery look
fancier than it ought to be.
More of this!
Mctittles says: 10/09/2013 at 08:22
Small world; I recognize your name/avatar from flicker screenshots.
Oh and also linked from my brother who may or may not be steam friends with you (he has like 100
million while I think I have less than 10)
PopeRatzo says: 10/09/2013 at 00:08
Look at the Wot I Think’s for the last few months and try to convince me computer gaming is not in a serious
slump.
Now do the same search for the same period a year ago. Two years ago.
Where are all the games?
Barnaby says: 10/09/2013 at 00:14
I imagine the 360 and PS4 being at the end of their life cycle at least have SOME effect on the number
of games being released on PC. Nowadays it seems like LOTS of games are making their way from
console to PC, so the slowing down of releases on consoles would most likely affect the PC market
as well. Might not be the only cause but I imagine it is a factor.
Rich says: 10/09/2013 at 07:02
Somebody says something like this every year. That said, this is the year for hearing about the
ongoing development of big kickstarter projects (mostly in space) that probably won’t be ready until
2014.
dagudman says: 10/09/2013 at 00:15
I bet you wrote half-life 3 just to please the interwebz.
obd2works says: 10/09/2013 at 02:11
My knee-jerk reflex is to applaud anything that is not only in-depth but numbers a fair few paragraphs while at it.
The quality of writing displayed as well as the focus on game design challenges makes my knee-jerkery look
fancier than it ought to be.
AUGOCOM H8
GernauMorat says: 10/09/2013 at 16:38
Spambot alert
The_Great_Skratsby says: 10/09/2013 at 07:08
Good grief, Tim Stone then Robert Yang now Duncan Harris.
Absolutely rad and great read too, have a huge amount of affection for Zeno Clash and it’s world though I still
have to try the second. Interested in seeing how apparent the engine difference is.
Zanchito says: 10/09/2013 at 08:13
This was a great article, ACE creates wonderful, wonderful games (Zenos, Rock of Ages). Rough around the
edges, yes, imperfect as they might be, they are truly unique.
I’d love if there’s a similar article interviewing Ice Pick Lodge. Man do they create unique games too! People
bash them for being obscure and difficult, but I find them perfectly balanced for their intentions (which are not
necessarily you beating the game, but figuring it out, both mechanics-wise and story-wise). I’m going to go and
recommend a let’s play of The Void which is as dreamy as the game itself: link to youtube.com
Though I’ve only played Pathologic, I’d like to gaze upon the insides of Ice Pick Lodge’s brains. While
not a game I’d readily go back to (one day though; I’m curious about the Devotress’ story), they
certainly have a unique vision that I can’t help but applaud.
Viroso says: 10/09/2013 at 13:19
The Void is one of those games I have nothing to compare to and will always have a hard time
explaining what it is about.
fish99 says: 10/09/2013 at 12:42
I loved the ZC setting, characters and the bit of the story I saw, but I found the combat a chore. It wasn’t badly
implemented or anything, but I just found that brawling in first person isn’t that fun. And so after one 90 minute
session I never came back to the game, which is a shame because I wanted to see more of the world and story,
but the actual gameplay was a barrier to me seeing that. Maybe if the game has been free roaming rather than a
series of arena fights it would have kept me playing.
Dayofthedan says: 10/09/2013 at 14:08
I was thinking this as well. I was looking online if maybe I could cheat to make my character
extremely powerful so I can at least just kill everything with one punch. I couldn’t find anything except
for a shady trainer that I don’t trust downloading.
tomeoftom says: 10/09/2013 at 16:21
Fantastic article. Zeno Clash is best.
merc-ai says: 10/09/2013 at 19:58
An excellent piece, please write more of this (but maybe a bit shorter or split in 2 articles?).
Zeno Clash / Zeno Clash 2 are two of my favorite indie games in terms of style (visual, audio and story). It’s
really nice to learn more on decisions that were made and challenges that were solved.
One minor nitpick: a day-night cycle simulation in UE3/UDK isn’t /that/ hard. Borderlands 2 did it to an extent,
probably some other games as well. I’d guess the reason most UE3 games stay away from full day-night cycle
simulation is it’s usually not worth the effort.
(1) It rarely adds anything to gameplay (and can be annoying sometimes when it does impact gameplay, same
as weather simulation). I’m not sure if day/night has any gameplay impact in ZC2, aside from the sun-powered
gun?
(2) It requires additional time/effort to make sure environment art, level lights etc play nicely with it at all times
(something might look good at day/night, but look horrible at dusk or certain sun angle).
(3) It requires sacrificing some other cool and useful features, like baking emissive lights into lightmass.
I can totally see why ACE wanted a full day/night simulation for Zeno Clash 2, though – it made the game more
immersive and believable. It added to that feeling of a living world, not just collection of levels with corridors
between them.
And the resulting game is pretty much a playable piece of art.
Thanks again for the awesome article, looking forward to more!
pilouuuu says: 10/09/2013 at 21:19
Great article!
I have to say that I feel really glad that a team from my country is creating games. And I feel that a lot of
inspiration comes from living in this small piece of land at the end of the world. Here in Chile we like to believe
we’re somewhat like british people, drinking copious amounts of tea, but at the same time we copy everything
from the USA. Although there are still creative people who can come up with crazy stuff like Zeno Clash or
anything that Jodorosky comes up with, including comics. Have you ever thought about working with him?
Well, I want to say that if there’s one place that such a crazy creation could come from is from Chile and that
makes me happy. Please, don’t ever start doing gritty brown generic shooters.
Oh, and some of the screenshots looks like Shadow of the Beast, which is awesome!
thealgor says: 11/09/2013 at 02:55
I just registered to say great article! I loved the first Zeno Clash and mean to check out the sequel when I get the
chance. This may have bumped it up the list!
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Ross Angus says: 09/09/2013 at 21:39

pupsikaso says: 09/09/2013 at 21:41

More columns like this, please.

Jim Rossignol says: 09/09/2013 at 21:56

We’re aiming for this to be a new regular feature.

SominiTheCommenter says: 09/09/2013 at 23:20

rockman29 says: 10/09/2013 at 02:18

Yes! Fewer articles, more content!

Be the Wirecutter of the gaming world :):):)

Mctittles says: 10/09/2013 at 08:19

Dances to Podcasts says: 11/09/2013 at 03:19

DrScuttles says: 09/09/2013 at 21:45

Faldrath says: 09/09/2013 at 21:52

You mean “Hipgnosis”, but nice Freudian slip there :)

tikey says: 09/09/2013 at 22:01

I think he actually mean Psygnosis

tikey says: 09/09/2013 at 22:06

The same Roger Dean who made covers for Psygnosis?

Faldrath says: 09/09/2013 at 22:26

LTK says: 09/09/2013 at 22:22

DrScuttles says: 09/09/2013 at 22:47

Very true. I just like to invoke the voice of Malcolm McDowell.

And also the face-punching is delicious, obv.

Laketown says: 10/09/2013 at 00:02

Mollusc Infestation says: 09/09/2013 at 22:11

Paul says: 09/09/2013 at 22:11

LTK says: 09/09/2013 at 22:24

I love everything about this article.

Viroso says: 09/09/2013 at 22:29

Great thing RPS is doing here.

Urthman says: 09/09/2013 at 22:52

Brugt says: 09/09/2013 at 22:54

Excellent read! Thank you, Mr Harris.

m0gpt says: 10/09/2013 at 01:46

Arglebargle says: 09/09/2013 at 23:06

Dances to Podcasts says: 11/09/2013 at 03:25

Carlos Bordeu says: 09/09/2013 at 23:40

inertia says: 10/09/2013 at 01:12

Is more Zeno Clash coming?

Carlos Bordeu says: 10/09/2013 at 02:00

inertia says: 10/09/2013 at 02:47

Fair enough. Hoping to hear about the new project soon!

cpt_freakout says: 10/09/2013 at 07:55

YogSo says: 10/09/2013 at 15:33

Carlos Bordeu says: 10/09/2013 at 16:34

Mctittles says: 10/09/2013 at 08:22

Small world; I recognize your name/avatar from flicker screenshots.

PopeRatzo says: 10/09/2013 at 00:08

Where are all the games?

Barnaby says: 10/09/2013 at 00:14

Rich says: 10/09/2013 at 07:02

dagudman says: 10/09/2013 at 00:15

I bet you wrote half-life 3 just to please the interwebz.

obd2works says: 10/09/2013 at 02:11

GernauMorat says: 10/09/2013 at 16:38

Zanchito says: 10/09/2013 at 08:13

DrScuttles says: 10/09/2013 at 09:58

Viroso says: 10/09/2013 at 13:19

Art & Evolution of Zeno Clash

Art & Evolution of Zeno Clash