With the year drawing to a close, now is the time for studios to look back on the year gone by and look ahead to the future. New studio Deviation Games, who have partnered with Sony to develop their first title, is no different as they’ve revealed their 2022 plans. The “groundbreaking AAA new IP” will begin production next year after several months in the pre-production stage.
Deviation’s CCO Jason Blundell explained what the studio was up to in a message to the community video. Throughout the last 12-18 months, the studio’s new title has been in pre-production and they’ve been doing a “lot of foundational work”. According to Blundell, when “making a game of this kind of ambition” and scope, this involves:
Thinking about your platform. Thinking about your key hooks of your game. Building your narrative. Building your tech innovations, right. What are you doing to set the industry on fire? What are you doing to get people excited? What are you doing differently?
Specific details on the game are still to be revealed. We have no idea of its genre or anything like that. However, the team has been thinking about the game’s visual style. They don’t want it to follow any of the current visual trends and it should have “an ownable visual style” and “ownable characters”. They want their game to be instantly recognisable as soon as someone sees a screenshot of it. They’ve also been thinking about the story and gameplay:
How are you telling a story differently? How are you making core gameplay that engages a community in a new way? […] When we set Deviation up, it was a very specific goal to deviate away from the humdrum, the normal, from the boring, from the things we’ve seen a thousand times. […] What can Deviation do that can lay forward a new road, a new place to go that engages a community? It’s easy for people to pick up that want a very simple story and then have the depth, the replayability, a place for fans, a place for people to kinda fall in love with our world, fall in love with our characters, bring entertainment that you’ll remember for years and years after, once you’ve finished playing the game.
No story, no matter how good it is, matters if the gameplay is not fun. If we do not have core mechanics then why are you gonna want to listen to a story? […] The holy grail that we are looking for is the marriage between game design and storytelling.
While 2021 was about building the company up from 10-15 employees to its current total of 100-110 people, 2022 is when the game will begin to take shape. Their new title will enter its first real year of production. Hopefully this will mean we’ll hear more about the game at some point next year.