A Plague Tale Interview

My interview with Kevin Choteau, the game director of Asobo Studio, The Company behind A Plague Tale Games. during Gamescom 2022:

  1. In the first game we saw how the “Hundred Years’ War” and spreading of the plague shaped the hero journey for Amicia and her little brother…

How would you describe the second game in sense of shifting the location to South France and the challenges of creating a new environment?

The first game was about surviving and fleeing so it took place in the south west of France. It was important for us to show our region and the place we are living. For the second one we chose more colorful place, the southeast of France in the summer is really different, it’s really bright and there is a lot of happiness and enjoy and life there and we are going to smash it and destroy this world. We selected a joyful starting point to destroy it. It was really important to us to choose the right place to have this feature. The Mediterranean is really about life which is a good starting point for us

2. The most common theme of the first game was Amicia’s love and care for her little brother while finding a cure.

How would you describe her changes in personality, and what’s her real challenges in the second game besides her responsibilities for Hugo?

Amicia’s priority is Hugo, I cannot split them. They are always together and she lives for Hugo. She decided to forget about young age for the life of his younger brother. There will be many new things for her for example how she can live with what happened previously and what she is living for. in the second game It is about finding the right balance to show the right path to Hugo and not falling into madness or blood ends.

3. As a French team, Asobo company had some better sense of context about the historical events related to French history in the game.

But how about the challenges? During the development, was there any point that made you research more to achieve the historical accuracy?

Yeah it was odd because we showed many medieval places in the first one and we had to find out new and fresh ideas for exploring in new medieval places. Hopefully we were helped by an historian, she

gave us a lots of ideas and small stories that helped us to build the universe and the story of our character.

4. A Plague Tale Innocence felt like a new game in so many aspects, but the survival horror elements really added something new to the formula.

Would you say A Plague Tale Requiem makes it even scarier and darker than before?

The short answer is yes. Its darker and scarier. It’s funny that because we are balancing it with joy and colorful life that I was speaking about at the beginning. We touch more on the psychological thing than the first one so we got deeper to this scary aspect of the game.

5. How did you manage to skip PS4/Xbox One versions and still keep the Nintendo Switch cloud version? Does it feel less detailed than the other versions, specially while rendering more than 300,000 rats at once?!

The good thing with Nintendo switch cloud is that we have limitless power because it streams from Render Farm. We have as much even more power than mini console so this is why we keep this version. Our goal as developers is to give our game to many people as we can. It was our priority to keep it on Nintendo.