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Steel Hunters
A World of Mech Combat - Steel Hunters Interview with Wargaming
We spoke with creative director Sergey Titarenko and narrative designer Ed Gentry to learn more about this upcoming multiplayer action title from the same developer who brought the World of series to its fans.
Audio transcription
"Hello everyone, and welcome back to Gamereactor. Today, as you might be able to infer from the lovely t-shirt that you're wearing here right now, I'm at the Wargaming headquarters in the UK, because I'm here to see a little bit of Steel Hunters, which is a game that you guys really recently announced to the public, but it's very soon that it's going to be made available to everyone through an early access program.
So, the first question I really want to throw at both of you guys is, obviously Wargaming is known for the World of series, World of Tanks, World of Warships, and obviously there's some similarities with Steel Hunters, with the free-to-play model and all that, but really it's a very different game. So what made you want to go down this different route of, you know, mechs over more historically accurate sort of warfare and vehicles?
Alright, I can take this one. So, Steel Hunters. It is a slight step aside from the World of series, obviously, but definitely there's tons of connections and tons of legacy rooted in those titles."
"For example, yeah, both of World of Tanks and Ships are games with high accessibility. It's easy to start to play, hard to master, but there's depth making players replay the game hundreds, if not thousands of battles.
Likewise with us, we try to make a game that is very accessible to casual players, but it has depth for the engaged audience.
Second is, of course, community engagement. We like to make a game that will be well-received by the community and audience."
"And from day one, we were already starting to test the concept of the game with our potential audience, and via different tests, user research, we try to understand what resonates better in our audience and what is the best product for them.
So, not only we are guided by our own reasons and design logic, but we also try to listen and probe the community to resonate to their ideas and adjust and course correct what we are making.
Third piece is probably, of course, well, the approach to monetization and approach also on frequent releases and cadence of updates."
"Yeah, this is very important for a live product to keep life going and release new stuff, new maps, there'll be new hunters, new skins, whatever is there for us in the future, including the new modes, of course, there'll be more stuff on the way.
So, yeah, these are elements that we share a lot and we are rooted in our bigger brothers of the World of products, but at the same time, we are stepping aside a bit in one aspect, one important aspect.
We didn't want to make a vehicular shooter, we wanted to make a game that is more built around player character."
"And originally, we were building something World of with a pilot, with a pilot inside the mech, right?
After some experimentation, after looking at this, we felt it's not exactly what we wanted to build, what we wanted to make is what I see in screen is what I play and what I care about.
And there we changed the creative direction and we started making a game about the toys that we see on the screen."
"Large toys for boys, yeah, very powerful mechanical creatures and we try to inhale more life, more animation and more emotion in what we were building.
Ed, anything you could add?
Yeah, I would just say that what interested me the most was the idea of, you know, you take, people are obviously going to compare us to Transformers and things like this, but you take the idea of a machine with a personality, right?
So, yes, that sounds like Transformers, but then you factor in the idea that these people were human once, they have that human experience, so what does it mean to transition into this machine?
And that's how we really get that emotional connection with the player is, it's not just that you're a pilot in a machine, you are the machine, this person had their own life, they had their own experiences, their wants and desires and fears and all these things and those are still present."
"That must give you a lot of freedom as well, you know, going from the World of series where it's all historical and it's all based on these existing models to go and be able to just freely create whatever you want.
What's that like from a narrative standpoint? What sort of limits do you have to stick to to make it all feel, I don't know, believable in a way?
Yeah, it's interesting. I spend a lot of time researching actually, so I like to delve into physics and science and that kind of, that sort of thing and yes, we push those bounds a lot, we push past those bounds, but they're there."
"We recognize them, we keep them in mind, we don't want to just absolutely break believability completely, so when you're in a big machine, you want to feel like you're in a big machine, so we stomp and we wreck and we smash and we have big guns and they feel big.
And so you'll see characters sort of develop to where they start to realize, hey, I'm this big powerful thing, maybe I should change the way I interact with the world.
And Sergei, you know, obviously it still has that sort of World of feel to it in that you don't get into Steel Hunters and think, oh my god, I need to be prepared for what I'm about to experience."
"It's quite slow and strategic almost and you sort of have to, you want to approach the battle with a bit more sort of intelligence towards it.
Why did you go down that route? What sort of demographic are you aiming for with this game?
Well, the demographic is very much the same, but the interests are different.
These are the guys who care more about sci-fi, about hero shooters."
"They're still very drawn into interacting with a team, playing together.
It's another important aspect that unites us with those games.
Yes. Sorry, I wanted to say something else, but I forgot.
It's absolutely fine. So obviously you guys are going to be dropping into Early Access with seven Hunters to begin with."
"There's going to be another one coming in the first season, which is in May, I believe, so quite soon.
What sort of cadence are you looking for when you come in with these updates and you're adding new things to the game?
Yeah, there will be a cadence every 12 weeks. There will be something.
This game will be driven by Battle Pass releases and good value proposition in each Battle Pass, so a combination of characters, skins, additional content, sometimes maybe new modes."
"We will be looking into that and updating the players.
And you have quite a short Early Access window as well, right?
You want to obviously get it into the hands of fans in April, but I believe there was talk about maybe getting to the 1.0 by the end of this year or something like that. Is that right?
Yeah, well, to be refined on the dates and the format."
"But yes, we want to have periodic updates and frequent releases.
Each season contains two Battle Passes and continue moving on and forward.
There's a real focus, I would say, on player feedback.
So if the players think it's ready, you know, then that's going to be motivation, I think."
"And as you can say about the story arc in each season.
Yeah, so we're going to have definitive story arcs in each season.
Yeah, so we're going to have definitive story arcs in each season as well.
So we hope to sort of time the big release with something sort of more explosive at that point."
"A little time to build up and then really go.
Does that put a lot of pressure on you then as a member of the narrative team?
Well, so I have a co-writer. Shout out to Monoghost in Prague.
No, it makes us get creative is what it does."
"It really, when people put boundaries on us, it's good.
People think creative boundaries are bad. They're not.
It just helps you focus and helps you really get there.
OK, and obviously at the moment you're going to be debuting with one game mode, but you did mention there's going to be several more."
"So what can we expect from the future of Steel Hunters?
Well, we will experiment with the formula.
Of course, what we are releasing as a core mode is something that we will not stop upon.
We have a few more things we are testing and researching."
"It's too soon to reveal this, but expect maybe an increase in number of players in the squad or maybe even playing side versus side.
We are hearing a lot of these feedback from our players and we're trying to conceive something that will be of interest to them."
"The one thing I've noticed as well when checking out the game is that you obviously, it's based on planet Earth, post-apocalyptic future, and you have all these defined characters that all sort of fit into different geographical places.
Have you explored going down that route more significantly, like having characters and maybe mechs that are more suited to a geographical region?
That's an interesting idea, yeah."
"We definitely play with national identity and geographical identity a lot because these are people who, some of them lived on Earth and then transitioned into living in space or underground after the disaster.
So I think we think a lot about sort of maybe the terrain they would have grown up in or be familiar with, yeah, for sure."
"Yes, and some of the hunters have a connection to some of the maps.
For example, Henrietta, which is a character behind the genesis of Ursus, she belongs to the quarry map.
And you mentioned there, obviously, it's not just Earth."
"The lore takes it into space.
Is that something you're going to explore down the line maybe?
Maybe take it away from planet Earth?
So the trick is we want players to have recognizable things that they interact with, right?
So if we just made it all sci-fi, you wouldn't know if that space station is this big or miles big."
"We want referential items, right?
So we want you to be able to smash things that you recognize.
When you come up to a two-story house and it's up to your chest, that feels good, that feels powerful."
"And so we're mostly going to stick in the Earth thing, I think.
Yeah, one of the problems when we are playing in a very abstracted or unknown environment is the scale of player character.
We want to ensure we feel that power and always there are objects of scale, helping the player understand how large am I in relation to this world."
"How powerful am I?
And also other things like destructibility, vegetation, infrastructure, roads, vehicles.
All of these elements are really helping to build the right feel of the player character in this world.
Now we've seen a fair few different hero shooters."
"It's become quite a popular sort of genre of video games as of late.
How are you positioning Steel Hunters so that it stands out and makes people want to check it out?
A lot of them make sense.
We're playing, we love a lot of hero shooters and other mech games."
"But we're trying to make it very different and we have our own treatment.
So grounded in the world of Sirius, we go after a very plausible, more realistic and serious tone of voice.
And we think it makes sense.
We are testing these things with the players and we hear a lot of the feedback saying, yeah, this is something I was missing in the market from our players."
"So we are capitalizing on this and we are building a different experience both for the core gameplays, game mode and visual treatment and narrative treatment of our elements to build something different, to build something that part of the audience may like more.
Now I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, because obviously the second that this becomes public people are going to be very excited about it."
"The monetization, tell me about why you're launching with no monetization whatsoever.
Well, we are launching with a monetization that is very close to the other World of Wargaming products.
It's going to be light, it's driven by season passes, it's driven by cosmetics.
We may course correct in the future, but this is something we want to start in the beginning of our life operations."
"And the other thing that's obviously, it's coming to an early access begin with in PC and then you're going to be expanding in the future down to consoles.
No timeline on that, I don't believe.
The World of games, they have separate console and PC games."
"Is Steel Hunters going to follow that route or is it going to be a one package game that everyone hops on?
Yeah, not quite a question for me as a creator, but yes, I know our plans are more to be in line and have one product that could be playable on PC, on consoles.
Whether it will be a spinoff, I don't think it's that likely that we'll have a separate SKU for consoles."
"Our desire is with time, when we have the right moment to build a game for consoles and have the joint audience internationally playing one game.
Now obviously it's a very different game to what we sort of know Wargaming as.
So, as a final question for the pair of you, what's one thing that when you were making Steel Hunters you were really excited about, something that you really took pride in when you were creating this game?
Well, I think we are very proud of our characters and the treatment."
"They are really introducing something very new to the genre.
You don't see a lot of this at all and there's a lot of repetition on some of the visual themes and tropes.
We are trying to make it different, we are trying to expand on this nation.
For example, there's an introduction of animalistic in our roster of the hunters."
"And this is what we like and what we see players are really liking about having Fenris, Weaver, Ursus and other quadruped characters.
Yeah, so in addition to the characters, which of course I'm really excited about, I would say I really like exploring darker tones and sort of competitions and that sort of thing in the world.
So, when you take this idea of, hey, this is really about a resource war over this really powerful thing, that gets my juices going, right?
It's what are the greedy going to do, how are the not greedy and the hurt going to respond to that?
That's really the tension I like playing with."
"Well, there you have it. Steel Hunters is coming very, very soon.
By the time you see this interview anyway, it'll be probably a week until you can jump into the game.
So, stay tuned for that.
Otherwise, early access period can be taken through the year, plenty of new content and leading up to an eventual 1.0, which we'll hear an official announcement about that, no doubt in the near future."
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