The team would have to get clever if it was going to make that experience satisfying at scale. The right way to do accessibility was actually making a lot of accessibility … Reducing the punishment for going off-beat would help take down those barriers, though the goal was still ultimately to make a combat system that encouraged players to stay on beat. Rather, the team wanted to keep that idea at the center of its core design process. The word accessible comes up frequently during our discussion, though not in the context of optional settings tucked away in menus. So we were looking at a way to incorporate music that was accessible, yet a positive game loop that made you feel the rock star fantasy.” Accessible design Some people love that game, and I thought it was great too, but I didn’t want to isolate people who didn’t have that ability. We saw some people just couldn’t play that game if they didn’t have the ability to do that. “If you’re not playing to the beat, you’ll stop or you can’t attack. “We looked at Crypt of the Necrodancer, which is an awesome game, but it does punish you,” he says. Johanas specifically cites Crypt of the Necrodancer as a game that guided the project, though he notes that even its simple beat-matching setup felt a little too restrictive for the broader audience he hoped to reach. The team would extend that thinking to every aspect of the game, pushing back against rules established in other popular rhythm-action hybrids. We were looking at a way to incorporate music that was accessible, yet a positive game loop that made you feel the rock star fantasy.Ĭreating an easy-to-grasp attack system was only one piece of the puzzle, though. Even the Y attack, which has a beat in the middle, was tricky for some people to handle.” So we say, what is the thing that anyone can do? It’s probably just pressing a button to the beat. “What if it was triplets and you do these quarter note combos? I almost had to pull back because I’m more familiar with music, so you feel like you want to make it more complicated, but that accessibility was always the main thing we had to remind ourselves of. “When we started, the natural tendency is to go for super high-level rhythm aspects,” Johanas says. To solve that, Johanas would have to take a step back from his musician mindset and think about what an average, less musically-inclined player might be capable of: clapping along to the music. The more complicated the rhythmic patterns, the more Tango would risk alienating players. And we never really found that in a game.”Īs the project became a reality, the team would start to realize the challenges of making an action game that encourages players to battle in time with music. We need you to feel like the music is part of the game and it’s almost lifting you up and making you feel better. We didn’t like the idea of you being very constricted by the music. “I know that there’s lots of games where you’re tied to a track, like the music is the main point. “I was particularly focused on the 3D action brawler feel,” Johanas tells Digital Trends. That was due to a music-first approach that could sometimes come at the expense of gameplay. Though there has been no shortage of rhythm-action games with similar ambitions, Johanas found that nothing out at the time quite matched his vision. Johanas would pitch the project to Bethesda after Tango Gameworks wrapped production on The Evil Within 2 and spend a year hammering out the basics with a single programmer before expanding the team to around 20 members. He compares the game to a good 10- to 12-track album where every song is high-quality and nothing drags down the run time (“all killer, no filler” as he describes it). A musician himself, Johanas wanted to capture the highs and lows of that experience and place them into a succinct experience that wouldn’t overstay its welcome. When Johanas originally dreamed up the basic premise of Hi-Fi Rush, his goal was to bring the “kinetic energy of live performance” to a Dreamcast-style action game. That makes for a more user-friendly rhythm game that makes sure even its least musical players can still keep up with the beat. While many of its tricks are immediately visible to players when they fire it up, others function like a background instrument that you might not be able to pick out on a casual listen but would notice if it was removed from the mix. In an interview with Digital Trends, Johanas explained the ins and outs of Hi-Fi Rush’s musical gameplay.
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