The martial-arts player-versus-player from SloClap just hit the shelves a week ago. Although the game was met with mixed feedback, Absolver is one enjoyable fighting game.
We get to see veteran developers who left triple-A production teams to form their own studios for one big reason: freedom.
SloClap took the time to share some things about its creative process. For those who don’t know, SloClap was established by former Ubisoft Paris employees who apparently worked on Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. Pierre Tarno, the creative director of Absolver, shared that they get to define what they think is unique without anyone to point-this-and-that; and that their work gives more meaning to them than before, he told Play UK (Issue 285) in an interview.
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“[Working in an independent studio], we get to define the vision that’s dear to us, that we think is original enough and beautiful enough to be presented to players… that gives meaning to our effort. So that’s wonderful.“[/alert]
Pierre also added that working with a big studio also affects their progress as they have to go to meeting time after time. However, with a small studio, after he left Ubisoft, the advancement of developing a game is much faster. Furthermore, he still iterated that making games is still difficult.
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“When I left Ubisoft, I was working on Ghost Recon: Wildlands. It wasn’t even the final push on production, and I was working in a team with 250 people. Here, at the final apex of production, there are 25 of us. Working with a smaller team like this gives us much greater velocity – when we were really motoring with production, it gave us this breakneck speed, this ability to not look back, iterating and making the game as good as it could be without having to have meeting after meeting and wrestling with this huge codebase at every turn. But making games is still fucking hard.“[/alert]
As we’re still in the progress of writing our review for Absolver, it’s sitting with a score of 76 on OpenCritic.
Are you having fun with Absolver? Tell us your experience with the game!
