The director of Lies of P, Choi Ji-won, tried Elden Ring: Nightreign’s network test and found it “refreshing”, so while Lies of P remains a single-player game he’s open to other ideas in future projects.
Lies of P is firmly inspired by FromSoftware’s Souls games, but as Nightreign shifts into a multiplayer experience, I wanted to ask Choi about developments in the genre when I spoke with him at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).
“I’ve tried [Nightreign] and it was very refreshing and new,” he said. “So that obviously gave me the impression that they’re good developers, they always push their boundaries, their imagination and vision, and it shows. In turn, that for some reason motivated me to deliver the Overture experience as good as it could be.”
Overture is the forthcoming expansion to Lies of P, revealed at Sony’s State of Play last month. While it remains a single-player game, Choi is open to the idea of a multiplayer game in the future.
“Our primary focus from the concept of this game was to deliver a high quality, premium action game that is single-player,” said Choi. “There were a lot of learnings for us [from the base game] and we did our best to reflect those improvements. The expansion is the completion of that.
“In terms of our future endeavours, we are definitely open to any sort of consideration in the future.”
How, then, could the Soulslike genre grow and develop in future? “That’s something we discussed internally quite a bit,” said Choi. “Instead of trying to predict how the Soulslike genre is going to be in the future, what we are focusing on is to really find our own colour and the points of attraction. And by crafting our own game to better meet and satisfy the customers’ demand, we believe that we will build trust and credibility with our fans.
“In the future, instead of pegging us into a certain genre, we want the fans to look at us and actually know what sort of unique components that we deliver that they look forward to. So they see our next work as a sort of projection of our trust and characters that we are building moving forward.”
This differed a little from when I spoke to Choi previously at Gamescom, where he stated the development team “wanted a challenge and to make the best game of that genre” as it competed with FromSoftware.
“I’m a big gamer, I play a lot of different games,” said Choi at GDC. “And from [the release of Lies of P] until now, we’ve seen many wonderful games coming up into the market. That was a fantastic array of experiences I had where I developed further respect for those wonderful games. That became a very important pivotal point for my perspective.
“So instead of that goal [of competing with FromSoftware], it’s actually our goal to develop our own unique experience. Instead of setting a goal to make a better game than some of the games out there, we want to continue making games our fans will continue to love.”
In the announcement of Overture, Choi compared the game to a “director’s cut” of a film. He told me it’s really a “developers’ cut” as it’s a “collaborative process” with the entire team. Moreover, it’s providing a complete experience along with the base game.
“We never really saw the development of Overture as a separate entity,” said Choi. “With the base game and the expansion together, we believe that the whole entire thing delivers the game of Lies of P as how it was supposed to be experienced. We just couldn’t do that earlier on.”
Choi confirmed to me the Overture expansion will be accessible seamlessly from around chapter nine of the base game, so is integrated into the narrative rather than separated. Not only will it elaborate on story hints already present in the game, it will expand on the diversity of weaponry used in combat – the trailer, for instance, features a bow and some nasty looking claws.
Beyond that, Choi was keen to avoid potential spoilers, but noted the expansion has allowed the developers to incorporate story elements they weren’t able to in the base game as they focused on delivering a high quality release.
What, though, about difficulty? FromSoftware typically develops DLC that raises the challenge level of its games – will Lies of P follow suit?
“We wanted to really make the content accessible and enjoyable to the veterans of the game, as well as new users,” said Choi. “So we made a game that satisfies both segments of customers. Our prioritisation is more focused on the overall game experience.”
Lies of P has proven a big success for developer Round8 Studios and publisher Neowiz, selling a million copies less than a month after release and frequently considered one of the best games in the genre not created by FromSoftware.
Though we’re yet to go hands-on, Overture is shaping up to offer a complete Lies of P experience that will surely appease fans of the base game when it’s released later this summer.