Sometimes it’s hard to imagine, when a game becomes a series and an admired one at that, that once upon a time there was nothing. There was nothing tangible. All there were, were hopes and ideas, swirling around. And the process of materialising them into something: it’s a fragile thing. There’s no certainty that what will come out the other end will even survive that process. And A Plague Tale: Innocence, it turns out, very nearly didn’t.
For one dread-filled moment near the end of the originally-allotted development time, the Plague Tale project nearly failed. French studio Asobo suffered a sucker-punch of a setback that meant the game, and any aspirations of making story-led games like this in the future, was in serious jeopardy. It’s a moment series director Kevin Choteau understandably doesn’t like to recollect.
“I will speak about something that I don’t like to talk [about] normally…” he tells me.
The game was two years into development and external reviewers had been brought in to review where the game was at – a very normal process. Some people call them mock reviews but there’s nothing fake about the feedback they give. And these reviews did not hold back.