characters you will meet in Empyreal all existed in one form or another in our original demo.


Did you decide to make an Action RPG and get a team together, or get a team together and decide to make an Action RPG? Silent Games was an RPG studio from the moment of its conception, and it always will be.


What were the main things you wanted to accomplish when you started on Empyreal? Our goal has always been to make a vast, ambitious, and brilliant RPG with thought-provoking themes and a unique combat system.


How close to the original vision do you think you’ll be at launch? I think it’s better. While there were features that ended up getting cut, we also developed and iterated on new ideas we had along the way that weren’t part of the original concept. I had a general outline of where I wanted to take the


story, but as it took shape and the characters came into their own, I ended up exploring ideas and ideals that I never anticipated. The same is true for the gameplay and RPG


mechanics. I am forever indebted to our gameplay team for entertaining entire reworks of whole systems as new ideas came to the fore. One illustrative example being the Cannon; the whole ammo system – three types of ammo, perfect reloads, Fan the Hammer (a unique move performed after a perfect evasion), ammo level ups – none of that was in the original design!


From your perspective, how do you make a new IP stand out from all of the other ones? Is that even much of a consideration at your studio? As creators, our mission is to make the best game possible. It is up to the players to decide if what we have made is compelling. All I can say is that we made a game that we love, and we made it for them.


Empyreal isn’t a Dark Souls-like, but it feels like it shares a lot of visual language with other Souls-like games, and even has its own asymmetrical multiplayer component. Have you had much luck in convincing people that’s not what you’re going for? I have a deep and enduring respect and admiration for FromSoftware. I have played all their games from Demon’s Souls onwards, and alongside Larian Studios — Divinity 3 when? — I think they are the best in the


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business today. However, I do not think all developers that sought


to emulate their magic did so successfully, and I am quite fatigued with the “souls-like” formula. When From Software iterated on their own ideas, they created games like Bloodborne and Sekiro, which are infinitely superior to any game that tried to simply copy their formula. As such I think there are undoubtedly influences


from FromSoftware in Empyreal, but not in the combat! Games like Dragon’s Dogma and even isometric RPGs like Diablo and Path of Exile have a much greater influence on its combat. In terms of convincing people, I suppose I simply


hope that this will be obvious when players get their hands on the game. Our game is a complex and challenging one. I expect it will be most attractive to experienced players, and they will have no trouble in seeing that the formula seen so consistently in the industry in the last decade or more is not applied here.


The leadership at Silent Games is made up of industry veterans from Ubisoft. What made you decide to go independent in the first place? We learnt a great deal about making games at Ubisoft and were lucky to leave just when the decline was really


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