Watch On
When Swedish developer Neon Giant got in touch earlier this year to tease its next game, I took the call because of how much we liked its first game, a top-down action RPG whose setting we called “cooler than Night City” in 2021.
I spoke to Neon Giant heads Arcade Berg and Tor Frick again last week, and can add a little more context to the trailer. The gameplay we see in the video reminds me of Bulletstorm—big kicks, exploding heads, lots of shooting—but we also spy some sneaky assassinations, so it isn’t entirely about blowing stuff up. The studio is calling No Law a “first-person open world shooter RPG.”
“You have experience points and skill trees, and you opt into how you want to play the game,” said Berg. “Do you want to be more into lockpicking, or do you want to be a hacker, or do you want to be a specialist with certain types of weapons … We never tell you which route to take, we say that the player can never play the game wrong.”
We’re not quite looking at a Cyberpunk 2077-sized world here: Berg and Frick emphasized the density of the city, called Port Desire, rather than its acreage, and this is a much smaller development team than CD Projekt Red’s (just two dozen people, says Frick).
There will be multiple endings, but don’t expect a novel’s worth of ‘nice guy vs mean guy’ dialogue choices—the directors say they’re more interested in how No Law’s world can respond subtly to player actions.
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“You approach things as you see fit,” said Berg. “You control the pace, you control the method, and then our job as creators is to make sure that the game, the narrative, and the world responds, and keeps an eye on you and listens to you to see what you do. So instead of just putting you in a situation where you get to choose dialogue choice A, and that puts you down this way, or dialogue choice B, we think it’s much cooler if you come back after completing a mission and the mission giver goes like, ‘Yeah, that wasn’t very smooth.’ They’re responding to how you actually played it.”
Although stealth is an option, the directors wouldn’t go so far as to say that a full pacifist playthrough is possible. The trailer makes it pretty clear that this is more of a John Wick situation than a precision peacekeeping operation.
Here’s how the press release describes the reactive world:
“Every decision carries weight. Help a friend in need or silence an enemy permanently; take the tactical route through the shadows or unleash chaos in open combat. Even in a city of no laws, actions still have consequences. Each playthrough reveals new possibilities, allies, and outcomes, making No Law an immersive shooter defined as much by its story and morality as its firepower.”
Neon Giant was recently acquired by South Korean publisher Krafton, which at the moment is embroiled in controversy over the firing of the Subnautica studio heads.
Berg and Frick told me earlier this year that the publisher doesn’t interfere in their creative decisions, and that the sale has allowed them to focus on creative work rather than the logistics of running a business. That hasn’t changed, they say, and although Krafton recently declared itself an “AI-first company,” they tell me that generative AI is not being used in the production of No Law.
“We build the games the way we want to build them,” said Frick. “That’s why we started the studio, and we’re still operating the same way. And that’s also something that we were very pleased about with the reception to The Ascent as well, which was that people could feel the personality of the studio and the individuals in the game … Every artist will make a strong imprint on the world. Every designer, every programmer, will have a very, very big impact on the game.”
I dig it. I don’t think the gravelly trailer narration quite matches Max Payne developer Remedy’s knack for cheesy noir dialogue, but I’m a sucker for anti-heroes with nothing to lose, and I love the sweaty meathead they’ve got delivering the lines. There’s a bit of Marcus Fenix mixed in with that Max Payne attitude: This guy’s not just depressed and angry, he also surely does a ‘neck day’ at the gym.
No release date has been announced, but whenever the time comes, No Law will release on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
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