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No More Room in Hell 2
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Survive With Your Friends or Turn Against Them - No More Room in Hell 2 Gamescom Interview
We spoke with Torn Banner Studios' Ken Bourgon about everything to get excited about in No More Room in Hell 2.
Audio transcription
"Hello everyone, I'm Alex here with Gamereactor. I'm here with Ken. We're checking out No More Room in Hell 2.
Ken, how does it feel to be sort of approaching the release of this game that is beloved by so many from such a sort of grassroots background in the gaming industry?
It's exciting, terrifying. There's a level of pressure I think we feel because of the large community that's excited about this game for so long."
"But we're still kind of... At Torrent Banner it's very cool because we've had the possibility to take the original vision that the Lever Games team had for No More Room in Hell 2 and then put the weight and the experience of now a studio with 150 developers working on the game to take that idea, that original idea they had as a passion project and flesh it into like a fully fledged game."
"Something we did with Chivalry as well. So it feels right.
So you guys have brought like a new scale to No More Room in Hell basically.
You can tell from the trailers and you can also tell from the sort of descriptions that we've seen of the gameplay.
There's going to be sort of 8 player co-op that also evolves into permadeath sequences."
"What can you tell me about how the sort of scale has been brought up for No More Room in Hell 2?
Yeah, in kind of every way. It's very cool because once again...
I only want to play No More Room in Hell 1. It was linear maps, linear levels which is very interesting for that.
And then when the team started working on No More Room in Hell 2 they really loved this idea of an open world and giving players the agency to choose the direction they want to go and how they want to face the active apocalypse of No More Room in Hell 2."
"And so as we started to develop the game a few things really came out.
One of them being the stakes that we want players to feel.
It's an active apocalypse. They're going into a zombie infested area.
So how do we create an environment where they have to bring something to the table?
And permadeath and the roguelike mechanics of a game like that just made a ton of sense for us."
"It all kind of clicked with the story, the lore of everything and the game design.
And so yeah, it's permadeath games so you go into these rounds that should last between 25 and 40 minutes.
If you go through it you'll get through and then you come out on the other side with the ability to level up your character.
Make them stronger, badder, faster, better marksmen, better meleeers."
"I believe there's one better at dismembering zombies.
Some really cool different things.
But eventually if your character dies you have to restart at the beginning.
The game design team really wanted to create a system where we normalize death."
"Characters shouldn't grow to max level very often.
And when you pick a new character at the beginning we want it to feel like you're picking a character in a kind of cinematic experience.
So similar to Chivalry, when they made Chivalry they wanted every game to really feel like you're walking into a battle from your favorite movie.
Braveheart, Gladiator, all these things."
"When they started fleshing out No Man's Hall 2, A Torn Banner, they took that idea and they put it into we want every single round of the game to feel like you're going into your favorite 80s, 90s, early 2000s zombie horror flick.
And so when you choose these characters you're kind of choosing a character for a movie and then when you go into the game you have the agency as a player to kind of shape that movie into whatever you want it to be."
"Do you sort of see the player as sort of shaping their own narrative then with their friends or maybe solo?
And sort of as we can see, as I've done myself in No More Room in Hell, you can help your friends, you can also leave them behind and with the player character growing does that sort of incentivize that in a way?
Love this question because it's a true PvE experience as a game."
"It's really important to us that you feel like you're in there with your other teammates and there's no PvP.
There's as little room for you to do anything against your other team as possible.
Now that being said, with permadeath I think the stakes of what you just said are going to be bigger because of course you should always help your teammates but if you're in a character that you've had for five to ten games that character is worth something and maybe you're going to think differently about a room."
"We've had a lot of playtests where you see a situation where one of your teammates gets locked in a room just surrounded by zombies.
You don't have a lot of health. At that point you're going to make a decision.
Some people might be happy, some people might be unhappy.
We call it the game a friend maker and potentially a friend destroyer."
"We're hoping there's not a ton of that but it creates really interesting gameplay.
I've had both experiences in the original. Sometimes more so the destroying.
But yeah, there's also as you say like when you're surrounded in a room with zombies you can get infected as we've seen in the trailer.
Your character can also turn. That was something that we also saw in the original."
"How have you built on that from the original?
So we won't have a classic infection in our early access version of the game.
It's something that of course really excites us.
Just as we push towards early access that won't be a thing."
"If you do die, if you do get killed by a zombie your body will turn.
You'll be out of the match but for anyone who was with you it could add this added stakes that now they're dealing with this other zombie as well.
We have nothing to announce just now about infection as a gameplay mechanic but it is something that I think really excites us."
"When you become infected you are adding one body to the horde.
As we've seen in the trailer you guys have much more zombies.
How do you handle that? How do you handle the amount of zombies?
And can we find roaming packs around the open world?
Yeah, super interesting question and something that we've had to really dig into as a team."
"We're very cognizant of what No Man's Hell 1 was as a slower burn zombie game.
Something that took a lot more methodical strategic gameplay.
And we think we really have this in the game as well.
The idea of our game what really excites us is the pacing."
"And so at the beginning of the game when you find yourself all alone nearly pitch black with a flashlight it's going to feel like a very different game from the very end when you're maybe dealing with these massive hordes of zombies.
So it's been a really interesting thing to play with for our game design team."
"Between the two points we want this game at the very end of it when you're eight people working together to try and turn on the power plant and keep things going and dealing with these hordes it should feel very different from the start.
But we've been very cognizant in creating this to create an experience that the people who play No Man's Hell 1 are going to walk into and be familiar with."
"It's not going to feel like an apples and oranges situation.
And so you talked about a bit of the slower burn at the start.
Is that something we're still going to see?
Is it still going to be more sort of building up your resources at the start?
Or are you going to sort of feel like you can go John Rambo from minute one?
You start out with next to nothing."
"And we really want that.
We want this to feel almost like a horror game experience.
A single player horror game experience at the very beginning.
You should be meeting up with other teammates in the first few minutes."
"But there are worlds where you go the wrong way.
You don't follow a sort of beaten path.
And you're all by yourself.
We don't want that gameplay, at least in the beginning, to feel like you're overpowered."
"You are someone who, to take a step back, the entire world that we're in is one that is an active apocalypse.
And our player acts as a responder.
And so in the first game you find yourself just trying to escape."
"In this game we take a different kind of approach to it.
It's almost an optimistic one where as a player you've decided to make the ultimate sacrifice or ultimate altruistic decision to go back into the map because you are working to turn on this power plant in the middle which is failing and you can see how in an active apocalypse that power plant is probably powering hospitals, schools, all these other things in the larger lore of the story."
"And so you're going into this area and we think it's important that you're not a Navy SEAL.
You're not Rambo.
But instead when you choose your character at the very beginning you're going to see you're Gary the Plumber."
"None of these names are real. I'm making them up in the moment.
So you are someone who, if you've played a few matches and you've survived you've gone in and started the power plant a few times you're all of a sudden going to be a lot more powerful and a lot more capable."
"But at the beginning we want you to feel like you're going to have a hard trudge to the power plant.
And it gets easier and when you meet friends and colleagues it really changes.
So what's the solo experience like then just as a sort of all the way through?
If you never meet anyone?
So the idea behind the game really is that that shouldn't happen."
"I think it can.
I know our game design team recently has actually been working on how to make sure that you do meet up with people.
If you are to play it alone I think the idea is that the game is supposed to be very difficult."
"We want, similar to the first, it wasn't an easy game.
I think a lot of people responded to that, resonated with that.
So the idea behind it and I think this is where it gets really good is that you're really trying to group up as early as possible because your chances of survival are a lot better."
"And when you get to the power plant at the end you're going to want as many people as possible to try and accomplish it.
Are there secondary objectives for people to find in the world as well?
And what can they sort of expect to locate?
Yeah, this is one of the most fun parts of the game and the most varied or interesting or unique parts of it is that all around the map as you make your way towards the power plant you're going to kind of be subtly led towards these iconic horror places."
"So you could think like Gas Station which you saw in the first trailer.
We have our church in the second.
We had in the second trailer, if you spot it, I think this is so cool by the environmental team, there is a storage, old storage unit building that's turned into a hospital."
"So when you watch the trailer again you might be able to spot it.
I think it's the coolest thing when you walk into it because it's just so surreal and so smart.
And all of these places have these puzzle-like objectives to try and turn the power back on in them."
"Rewards to that are first, better weapons, better resources of course as you should get something for doing something.
The second one is that if you find your teammates, or you find yourself alone in the game, all of these places should beacon and light up."
"And so let's say you're in the 5 to 10 to 15 minutes and for whatever reason you haven't found a teammate, you'll all of a sudden see down the way one of these places that is now all of a sudden lit up."
"And the team might not be there anymore, but you all of a sudden have a direction and a marker that's going to lead you towards others.
There was something you touched upon there that I thought was really interesting about your environment team sort of putting in things into the world to kind of tell you a bit more about the lore."
"How have you guys approached sort of the lore and the storytelling through that open world vessel?
I think that's the most fun that our environmental team has had with the creation of this game."
"All of our locations are created by them, and the amount of research they've done and the amount of storytelling that they've placed throughout the map is really, really interesting.
I think we have a really deep and interesting narrative of what No Man's Hell is."
"If you played the first, I think you know of the sleeping sickness that transformed people into just half the population of the world, give or take.
Matt Kazan, I'm sorry if that number is wrong, in about a two year's time just falls asleep."
"And they have a sleeping sickness, they can't wake up.
And one night or one week, they all basically transform into zombies.
And it sounds like it's such a more realistic, I think, approach to what zombies can be."
"I think a lot of zombie stories, when you hear them, you kind of eventually go, they could have probably figured that out.
And so we think we have this really expansive, interesting lore, but as a round-by-round game, it's difficult to tell those stories."
"And so a lot of that work's been done by the environmental team.
All of these POIs, and we have smaller locations as well, littered throughout the map.
They should all help to tell the story of where society finds themselves in this moment, in an apocalypse that started a couple weeks ago."
"In that apocalypse, in that active apocalypse that we see throughout, it seems that there's going to be less emphasis on maybe zombie types and more emphasis on the horde itself, sort of a maybe more realistic approach.
Is that sort of what the team's going for there?
Yeah, a little bit of both."
"I think, similar to the first game, I think what was extremely important to the players of the first was how realistic the zombies felt.
And we've really taken heed on that.
It was very important in this game that it feels like you're, it's a more grounded zombie experience."
"So at the start of the game, we're going to have three different zombie types.
And it's all based off how far into the virus you are.
So if you watch the trailer, a lot of the zombies you'll see look almost human."
"And those are the zombies that are at the very start of the virus.
The ones that look the most humans are runners, and they're the ones who are going to move the fastest.
They're very annoying in the best of ways, exactly what you want."
"And then the larger part of the hordes, you're more classic zombie, very Romero-esque.
And as the zombies progress, you start getting, like we have shriekers in the trailer as well, this absolutely terrifying kind of alarm that scares you for that zombie, then scares you for everything else that's going to come."
"I can't imagine going up against a shrieker solo.
But Ken, I've just got one more question for you.
When can people expect to see No More Room in Hell 2, and what can they see it on?
Yes, so early access Halloween."
"Poignant. I think it makes sense.
And to start Steam Epic PC.
Who knows from there?
Perfect. Ken, thank you so much for your time."
Gamescom
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