Milestone berättar om Screamer-kopplingen till King of Fighters

Även om Milestone har erfarenhet av arkadracing tack vare spel som Hot Wheels Unleashed är studion framför allt känd för sina mer realistiska racingspel, inte minst Ride-serien. Just därför sticker animéinspirerade Screamer ut.

Med premiären drygt en månad bort (den 26 mars till PC, Playstation 5 och Xbox Series S/X), fick vi nyligen möjlighet att prata med spelets skapare, Federico Cardini, om projektet och dess oväntade inspirationskälla: den klassiska fightingspelserien King of Fighters. Cardini förklarade:

"Sure well you see first I mentioned the fighting games and they are another big inspiration for this game, especially King of Fighters. Our creative director Michele Caletti is a big King of Fighters fan and from the very beginning he wanted to have this game where characters have their own style and their own kind of motif and they are organised in a team like your King of Fighters teams. So we kind of looked at it for inspiration and did our own take on it."

Han utvecklar resonemanget genom att säga:

"We have these teams of characters with one leader and two members. They drive slightly different cars. The leader cars are more performative and harder to drive while members are more welcoming. Let's say they both have reasons to be played throughout the game and you know in various game modes. Each one of them since they have a very specific motif have a different backstory and a specific design for their cars. So the cars of each team have been designed after the characters and their story has been decided."

Cardini beskriver vidare hur vissa lag bygger direkt på sina bakgrundshistorier och berättar hur detta kommer påverka spelet:

"So we knew for example that we wanted our you could call the main team, the Green Reapers, to have kind of a military background but not really be into racing at all and so they joined the tournament on a quest of vengeance but they don't have cars and therefore their cars have been designed especially to look like they have been assembled from scratch because that's actually what happened. They bought them from a guy, you learn this at the very beginning of the story, and they're not really what you would expect racing cars to be and all teams have kind of their own motif. We have the Japanese Idol group, we have the Megacorp guys, we have the scientists. So it really helps us stand out a lot with the designs of the car. It lets us kind of experiment with what a car can be while still being realistic."

Mer om Screamer väntas inom kort, i och med att lanseringen nu bara ligger drygt fem veckor bort.