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We caught up with Thunderful's Petter Magnusson to talk about the upcoming turn-based strategy sequel and how it is improving on its well-received and acclaimed original.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to Gamereactor. I'm here right now with Petter in front of the SteamWorld Heist II booth.
It's actually one of my last appointments so this is quite a special one for me because after this I'm leaving.
But no, Petter, I've just had a chance to play the game, love it, really fun."
"Tell me a little bit about SteamWorld Heist II and where this story's taken us.
Yeah, so this time around we have met our crew on this large oceanic shard, one of the pieces of the earth that got exploded. Spoilers in Dig 2, hopefully you've seen that by now.
And yeah, so we follow this ragtag crew of steambots out on the big ocean here."
"Yeah, so that's kind of where we start out, in this huge submarine that they get back from the confiscation from the Royal Navy.
And there's a few different things that you've taken from the first one, you've sort of built upon.
And one of them is obviously you mentioned the ragtag crew, now you can sort of play with them a little bit more.
Make them your own in a way, tell me about that."
"Yeah, so one thing that we felt from the first game was that we wanted more of the customization or more strategic depth in the choices that you make in the game.
And the way we did that is that we added what we call this job system, where the weapons that you equip on your characters give them a certain job."
"And that job, once they level or gain experience in that job, gives you abilities.
But, not over that, but once you've done that you can also switch jobs to another one and you can keep some of the abilities from the first one.
Not all of them though, so you have to make some choices there."
"But as the game goes along you kind of get a larger and larger tool kit to choose from for each mission.
And that's going to be necessary for the kind of tough missions that you encounter later on.
And tell me a little bit about the world map as well, it's another key sort of feature that you've introduced here.
You can sort of take your submarine out there and actually fight on the open waves on your way to the next mission."
"Tell me about that.
Yeah, so this is actually a feature we wanted to do for Heist 1.
I think we even started doing it, but I managed to get there in time.
So it's got a bit of a simpler system."
"So that's one of the big motivators for doing this game at all, getting back to this world.
We had this thing we wanted to do so badly.
So the big thing about it is it gives more life to the world, lets you explore, find things, secrets.
And as we said, it gives you something to do in between the missions."
"Like our naval combat, for example, it's a bit more relaxed and laid back.
But the challenge increases there as well.
So it's this kind of automatic combat.
The ship shoots by itself, you just have to aim."
"But you also need to kind of dodge the missiles and the torpedoes of the enemy ships.
And it looks absolutely beautiful as well.
And you mentioned to me a moment ago that this is, you know, it's not a small game that we have here.
You've got a lot in store for us, a lot of different levels for players to go and explore."
"Yeah, this game clocks into almost 30 hours.
And, yeah, it's still like a main story campaign.
There's probably even more than that if you want to do everything.
But there are choices along the way in terms of which missions you want to complete."
"You don't have to do all of them.
But it is a pretty involved story that starts out with this crew, as I mentioned.
And, yeah, well, they're trying to find out what happened to this ocean here.
And tell me about why we've returned to the build, sorry, not the build, to the heist series here."
"Because SteamWorld, there's a lot of different SteamWorld games out there.
But why are we doing a heist sequel now?
So I think the main driving force between the different games that we do in the SteamWorld universe is just the kinds of things that we like and we want to do."
"So, for example, when we do a new genre, it's just we have a crew of people at the studio that really loves this thing and want to show that to the world.
And the times we go back to a game, it's just based on us wanting to do more there, having more things that we want to show."
"And as I mentioned, some of the driving factors in this game is just stuff we wanted to do even in the first game.
But that's like nine years ago, and we still want to do it.
And we've been working on this game for, I think the first two things we did was over four years ago.
So at this point, yeah, it's definitely something we wanted to do for a long time."
"And the game's coming up really soon.
You mentioned to me a moment ago that you're sort of in the polishing phase now.
You're almost ready to go.
When SteamWorld Heist 2 does make its debut, what's something you're really excited for players to experience for themselves?
Just seeing what they can do with all the options."
"This is just a big pile of toys for people to enjoy and see what they can do about it.
I think that's probably the biggest thing.
And yeah, we've had a lot of good reactions for both the style of the world, the lovely art style always, the great soundtrack from Steam Powered Giraffe, for example."
"And yeah, it's going to be awesome to see what people do with it.
And as a final thing then, when's it coming out and what platforms?
It's coming out August 8th.
And it's going to come out on pretty much all major current and last-gen platforms."
"So PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Switch and PC.
Well, there you have it. SteamWorld Heist 2.
Stay tuned for it because obviously we're going to be seeing a lot more of it with it coming up very soon.
And yeah, this has been another Game Reactor interview and we'll see you all on the next one."
