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Fretless
Live to Shred - Fretless Interview
We caught up with Ritual Studios to learn more about their musical adventure-RPG.
Audio transcription
"Hello everyone and welcome back to Gamereactor.
We're still here at Gamescom, this is day 3.
I'm kicking things off with an interview with the incredible team who have been developing Fretless."
"This is a couple of the crew behind the game from Ritual Studios.
I'm here with Connor and Max.
I've just been able to try the game for myself, play around with it for a little while and I'm quite surprised by it. It's quite an interesting and unique premise."
"So where did the inspiration for Fretless come from?
I think we're all musicians ourselves and we wanted a game that embodied the music that we all love to play.
Absolutely, and as RPG fans we wanted to find a way to fuse those two in a new and refreshing way.
Tell me a little bit about the way that you've incorporated music into this game."
"The combat is really unique.
It's not a typical turn-based action game because there's a little bit of deck building in there as well.
Tell me a little bit about how that works.
The deck building mechanic is because there's definitely a plethora of abilities for your single character that we'd like players to have access to and feel like they're in control of customizing their build in such a way."
"In terms of combat, as a music game we definitely knew we wanted to incorporate the expected, such as a rhythmic event, but we didn't want to go into a full rhythm game.
So we mixed in the deck building and the turn-based combat for the strategic element with the rhythm component to exercise your skill, something players would expect in a music game."
"As the artist, I'm trying to infuse all these moments of cool combat with little bells you can hit that make noises.
You can pet the dog.
All these other aspects that we love from other video games, but having musical themes throughout everything.
So all the enemies are musically based."
"Instead of swords and shields, you have guitars and you're playing with riffs and stuff like that.
You have guitar picks as the currency.
Every aspect of the game, I feel like, is musically inspired.
And you said that you're musicians yourselves, right?
So how have you gone about actually incorporating music into this game?
Have you recorded your own soundtracks and all that good stuff?
I wish we did, but we have an amazing person."
"We have two people not here, and they're part of our team.
It's Jeff Linville and Dave Anderson.
Dave Anderson's an engineer in production, and then Jeff Linville is our audio.
So he is the main source of all our music and stuff like that, as well as the main character, Rob."
"And tell me, you know, you're the artist yourself.
Tell me a little bit about going in this pixel direction and what that allows you to do with Fretless.
Five years ago, I did not know how to do pixel art.
So it's a huge journey."
"There's a lot of things you learn along the way, but by doing it, you learn to develop your own style and you're able to kind of be able to channel things that make you like other games in your own game and give you that little moment of like, oh, that was cool, and things that you made.
So through pixel art, I feel like it's a struggle at first, but once you know what you want to achieve with it, it becomes easier."
"And talking about the game itself as well, there's obviously a main sort of narrative that you follow, a main sort of quest line, but what else can you do off the beaten path?
Off the beaten path, you know, there's side puzzles, optional bosses, there's a little bit of exploration, and of course, you know, the customizing the character and equipping different gear pieces called mods to your instruments to further customize your character."
"So, you know, fans of music, those familiar with guitars will probably get a big kick out of, you know, seeing particular pieces of music equipment that they're familiar with that they can use to better their characters.
And talking about the game itself, what sort of like timeline are you looking at for launch and what platforms will Fretless be coming to?
So Fretless is set for PC on Steam in 2024."
"That's all we can give you.
And there's a final question then.
It's coming next year, when people ultimately do get their hands on Fretless, what's something that you're both really excited for them to see for themselves?
I mean, you can pet my dog, that's one."
"But the majority of it is like having everything come together and if you don't know how to play music, you'll be able to shred with music here.
But if you're a musician, every little nook and cranny here is filled with love and care about things that musicians love too."
"Like instead of leveling up with a talent tree, you have a pedal board.
I just intrinsically love every aspect of this game because it's all so musically based.
Yeah, I think I'm on the same page with Connor.
I'm very excited to share the sort of world that we've kind of cultivated."
"I think we've kind of fostered a really unique identity for everything, including the characters, environment, the theme of music is really strong throughout in a very fantastical sort of way.
And very much so allowing people that maybe are not musicians to sort of just feel very musical for the whole adventure."
"Well, there you have it. Fretless will be coming out on PC next year.
For more information about the game, you know where to find it all, on your local Game Networks region."
Gamescom
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