Immortals Fenyx Rising is desperately fighting for attention in a packed holiday season of new games and next-generation consoles.
Nine.com.au caught up with the game’s narrative director Jeffrey Yohalem, whose team has been busy animating the game from home.
Jeffrey, thank you so much for your time. First of all, how are you doing on the other side of the world?
I think we’re hanging in there. LA (Los Angeles) is getting a little bit dicey with the skyrocketing cases but I’m safe here at home.
Working from home when you’ve got a AAA title coming out in just a couple of days is crazy but you’ve managed to do it. For people that may not be familiar with Immortals Fenyx Rising, can you give us a quick run through?
Immortals Fenyx Rising tells a story in ancient Greek mythology.
There’s this terrible titan named Typhon who breaks free of his chains in the underworld and rises up to try to take back the throne of Olympus from the gods.
Meanwhile, there’s this mortal — who’s never seen battle — shipwrecks on the mysterious island and discovers a prophecy talking about how you know there will be a mortal that rises up to save the gods.
It’s unclear whether this mortal, Fenyx is that special mortal but she’s gonna try as hard as possible to do it.
I’ve played the first couple of hours of the game which is narrated in an hilarious back-and-forth between Zeus and his cousin Prometheus. Clearly it’s not taking itself too seriously?
No, and in fact, the Greek myths themselves have a huge comedic element that’s often swept under the rug in terms of doing something that’s more serious.
The Greeks believed in balance: that we are dark and light; we are comedy and drama.
For them, the gods were their reality TV. They were flawed individuals that make as many mistakes as they make, you know, heroic gestures. I really wanted to play into that.
Where we are in the world right now, there’s a huge dark cloud over the entire world even before COVID, but COVID has made it so much worse.
We really wanted to give players something that would make them laugh, that was light-hearted.
You’ve worked on some games like Assassin’s Creed 2 where you had to go so far into the history of Italy in that Renaissance period. How far have you pushed it with the Greek mythology?
It is very, very accurate.
Basically, there’s this long-lost poem which tells the story of the battle between the Titans and the gods. No one knows what was in that poem, because it’s been lost.
The idea is that the story of Fenyx, this mortal, is contained within that.
All of the gods’ relationships to each other, even the backstory of the island itself, all come from mythology.
So if you’re a huge mythology nerd, there’s so many jokes and references to like and enjoy in this game — and if you’re new to mythology, it welcomes you in and starts to serve as kind of as a jumping-off point where you can go and do a lot of that research yourself.
Tell me a bit about the game’s main character. You referred to her as a ‘she’ but the character creation is really robust. I think my hero is a female with blue skin, pink hair and a beard! How does she fit into this story?
Well, again, you know, the character Fenyx is a vector for the player to explore this world.
I loved these stories growing up like The Wizard of Oz with Dorothy, and Lucy and Narnia — where it’s a normal person that comes into an extreme situation and has to adapt to that setting; who discovers that there’s this magic that the world is bigger than they ever thought.
In this case, Fenyx comes from our world in the sense that she’s ancient Greek, she has not seen anything mystical, yet she believes in the gods and is a passionate storyteller.
In the back of her mind, it’s like, ‘Is this real?’ Just the way we question our own beliefs when we haven’t seen anything.
Once she shipwrecks on this island, she discovers that these stories are all true. That realisation changes everything and is a great way to get the player into that world and discover everything at the same time.
The weapons, everything down to the combat in this game is driven in some way, shape or form by that storytelling. In the first hour, I’m finally finding weapon after weapon after weapon that are all in some way, shape or form connected to the gods. How much time did you spend researching?
I studied mythology when I was in high school and college and I jumped right in with all of the research on this.
We had a historian who was very versed in the different texts and interpretations — you know, there are different versions of different stories.
A huge amount of research went into it. And actually a fellow Australian, Amie Kaufman helped me edit. She wrote all of these incredible New York Times teen bestsellers, and so she is also very versed in mythology to lean on.
I remember when the game was revealed, not as Immortals Fenyx Rising but as Gods and Monsters. Was there a gameplay shift there or was it just a title change?
It really was a reimagining of where the game was going.
The mythological setting was in place but it was early on in development. We saw this potential to really make something that stood out and the name change is symbolic of that shift.
This is a story that not only tackles Greek mythology, but also mortality and what it means to be a god, what it means to be human. So we definitely changed things.
Fenyx, initially her motivation is the fact that her brother, this fantastic soldier, has been turned to stone. I’m interested to see how that develops as the story progresses but clearly, the mythology doesn’t just serve as the basis of a “world” but character development as well?
For me as a writer, the focus of a story that’s going to be epic is always around character but there’s this comedic side to things.
I was thinking about stories like The Princess Bride or Robin Hood, Men in Tights, or Naked Gun, where this kind of humour pervades the whole world. At the same time, there’s very high stakes, like Guardians of the Galaxy.
Zeus and Prometheus are totally interactive as narrators in the sense that whatever you are doing as a player they are commenting on. So you’re taking these kind of hilarious, Odd Couple narrators that used to be friends before Prometheus stole fire to help humanity and Zeus chained into a mountain for all eternity and had his liver pecked out by an eagle.
That relationship is very much soured, but Zeus needs Prometheus’ help to try to defeat Typhon. So it’s this, you know, “frenemy” (friend-enemy) situation.
You’re the narrative director of the game, but I wanted to ask you about how that also weaves into the art style of it. If you have this lighter, more bubbly interpretation of Greek mythology, it allows you to lean into that more cel-shaded, cartoon-like look that’s not as photorealistic as something like Assassin’s Creed.
That art direction came pretty quick and it was always Gods and Monsters.
I’ve always treated the narrative as supporting the game.
Performers have a type and you play to that performer’s strengths. You don’t try to put the performer in a situation where they look awkward. So, as you’re pointing out so aptly, the art style was bright and colourful and the animation already had some slapstick to it. Pushing it into the comedy realm felt natural for that type of art direction.
How heavily are you involved with the animators in that process, given that you’re writing the story and setting the tone?
Oh, very heavily and because of COVID, we couldn’t do motion capture!
Everything is hand animated which is incredibly beautiful. They did a great job.
Because of that, we recorded the game completely twice. I was working with the actors, through (Microsoft) Teams. We did a whole rehearsal of the game where the whole thing was recorded.
The animators animated to that, while we were doing the final version with professional mics.
In my first couple of hours with the game, and I mean this purely as a compliment, it reminds me very much of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Nintendo Switch — which is my favourite game of all time.
There are a lot of inspirations that made up this game and games we have loved that contributed, you know, to this final original work that we’ve created.
There are some assumptions that players make when they come in based on seeing something and that’s great, because the same thing happens in a genre.
When you enter into a horror film, you have some assumptions about what’s going to happen and so we play with those assumptions. You think you know how the structure of this game is going to go or you think you can expect something that seems similar to something else, and playing with that is what makes narrative fun.
There’s already a plan for what comes next. The second expansion is actually going to take us into a completely different area, which is Asia. Can you tell me a bit about that?
It’s a DLC (downloadable content) so it’s a taste of world, but yeah we go very deep in there.
A Chinese team developed that game and so it’s really cool DLC.
I don’t want to give away too much.
Immortals Fenyx Rising is launching on every console under the sun, plus Google Stadia and PC. In such a busy year, what would you say to people trying to decide what to play this Christmas?
We really wanted to bring joy and delight and give you something that feels like Christmas with your family in case you’re not with your family this year.
Because this is a comedy, it felt like an opportunity to explore some of the pressure that goes in our modern life.
There’s this pressure with social media where you want to have the perfect life, the perfect food, the perfect relationship on display, but all of that is so intensely curated.
At the same time, when you try to be perfect, everything is on video so there are all these moments where you fall short.
So there’s the impossibility of being perfect and the pressure to be perfect.
The Greeks were all about balance. They were about seeing that heroism comes from jealousy, laziness sometimes — comes from all of our shortcomings if you can harness them for good.
It felt like the perfect way to talk about that pressure in our modern world and hopefully release some of that in the story.
Immortals Fenyx Rising releases on December 3 for Xbox Series, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia and PC.
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