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We had a lot of nice things to say about top-down co-op shooter The Ascent back in 2021. Former PC Gamer editor Andy Kelly awarded it an enthusiastic 84% in his review, and called its cyberpunk setting “way cooler than Night City.”
Now Swedish developer Neon Giant is teasing its next game, but it’s not giving away much. It’ll be first-person, and it’s big on “player agency.” A handful of screenshots tease a new world clogged with old-school tech (see the gallery below). The whole mysterious thing is “ludicrously ambitious,” the studio promises.
Following the success of The Ascent, Neon Giant could have “asked for nearly anything” from the investors that came courting, creative director and studio co-founder Arcade Berg told PC Gamer in a call last week, which also included fellow Neon Giant creative director and co-founder Tor Frick.
They could’ve gone on a hiring spree, and that was still the thing to do in 2021, just before the games industry began its wrenching contraction. But Berg and Frick and the other founders had started Neon Giant because they wanted out of the triple-A scene, so despite selling the company to South Korean giant Krafton—the publisher behind PUBG and Inzoi—Neon Giant’s founders have kept it small. The team is “just over 20” people.
Why sell at all? “We didn’t start a studio to run a studio,” Berg told me.
“We started [Neon Giant] because we wanted to make games in a certain way,” the co-founder continued. “That’s the only thing that’s really important to us. So we said, well, you know what? Why not? Why not find someone to work with so we can get the rocket fuel that we feel that we need to be even more ambitious, and also feel that we have some stability, we can have the courage and afford to take risks, creative risks and project risks, because we think that will lead to a frankly cooler product in the end.”
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A condition of the acquisition was that Neon Giant wasn’t going to become a support studio or take assignments. It had to be free to make its own games with its small staff, where everyone contributes to the creative vision. Sounding a little like the Valve employee handbook, which promises a “flat structure” (a subject of some debate), Frick explained the studio’s approach to game development.
“This is a studio for people who want to be very involved in the creative and technical aspects,” he said. “You need to be a problem solver. If we’re going to make a game, you need to get dirty—we don’t really have managers, right? Everyone here, even if they had managers in a previous studio, in triple-A, like, when you’re here, you need to just solve the problems and build the game yourself.”
Over half of Neon Giant’s staff were previously directors at big studios, according to Berg, and both Berg and Frick previously worked on the Wolfenstein series at MachineGames, as well as at People Can Fly during its Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgment days.
I failed to extract any precise details about Neon Giant’s upcoming game from the pair of creative directors, but they did give us a few hints.
The studio is focused on building a believable, “reactive” world that’s more grounded than The Ascent’s cyberpunk metropolis, and “player agency and creativity” are at the center of it. Berg also mentioned that it’s “the kind of game that every developer wants to work on”—sounds to me like we’re in the immersive sim realm.
There’s no word on when we’ll hear more, but I suspect that it won’t be too long before we get another call from Sweden.
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Kurt Indovina
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