Weird West

In my Prey: Mooncrash post I speculated there was more than family reasons behind Arkane Studios' founder and president Raphaël Colantonio quitting in 2017. Since then, in an interview, he has added that there had been "creative anxiety" involved with delivering big titles, having to make products rather than focusing on other things. Neither did he seem too happy about the Prey name that had been bestowed upon his last project.

Colantonio resurfaced to the general gaming audience in November 2019, announcing he had founded WolfEye Studios with another former Arkane person, producer Julien Roby. Next month, at The Game Awards, WolfEye revealed their upcoming debut game, Weird West, which was to be published by Devolver Digital (whose portfolio doesn't often align with my choice of games).

Attempt at an isometric immersive sim

Colantonio talked about how he was continuing with the immersive sim design philosophy from Arkane -- which is great. However, Weird West was to have a topdown camera perspective. While immersive sim elements don't necessarily require first person (I suppose) and isometric games can be immersive, I grew quite doubtful: it's just not the same. I feel smaller budget and team size were the reason for the isometric view: the game wouldn't need quite as effort-intensive assets and other features.

I also found it amusing how Colantonio said how it had always been difficult to exactly convey what a first person immersive sim title is -- on a glance Prey looks just a first person shooter -- and that an isometric game would be easier to showcase to people because they would be more open to novel ideas. But I don't think Weird West ended up any simpler in the end. It too is a nebulous, between-genres title: definitely not your usual isometric action roleplaying game.

Stealing your datas

Weird West released at the end of this year's March. I had a Game Pass subscription ready to go (as the game was a day one title) but it took me quite a while to get on the right mindset to actually beat it. Weird West was already on its third update when I finally got to the credits. What initially put me off was how launching the game threw a flaunting data collection announcement at your face and no way to opt out -- which was clearly against EU's General Data Protection Regulation. I'm not even sure if all the data they claimed to be gathering really was available to them. And if you're gonna do shady stuff like that, try to be at least little inconspicuous about it to not make me feel demoralized.

I alt-f4'd out and decided to wait for an update that was no doubt coming: Surely the developers wouldn't risk actually getting fined for going against the GDPR. (Some small game studio getting fined seems unlikely when there are bigger fish though.) It took a week after which the game got an option to opt out completely or its online activity to be limited to community events only. WolfEye also announced that 400k players had played Weird West during that first week -- a nice lump of big data to sell out in secret. I doubt that there's many, if any, people in that 400k who actually sent a request to delete whatever data had been collected of them after they had been forced to opt in. Data which then may or may not get actually removed -- who's gonna go to Texas to check? I wonder if it was WolfEye or Devolver whose idea the whole thing was: certainly a dumb and unnecessary way to sour things.

Uncommon but reused narrative

As per the genre of fiction Weird West borrowed its name from, the game's setting is western mixed with scifi, fantasy, and horror elements. (The weird west genre is funnily enough getting pretty congested this year in gaming with this game, Hard West 2, and Evil West.) Weird West's narrative setup is very reminiscent, or even rehashed, of Prey and its Mooncrash DLC. Over the game you possess five different characters in turn. For what purpose gets slowly revealed along the way -- mostly at the end, I'd say.

I've seen few times a comment here and there saying that everything in Weird West is good except for the core gameplay. I'd say there are other issues though and one is the narrative structure. Mooncrash's character switching works because it has an actual framework story, you have a purpose and a background. In Weird West the whole thing is a mystery and I was frankly disappointed how unoriginal the revelation at the end was too. The game is almost like five different, barely related stories -- which are fine on their own though.

The narrative problem bleeds into gameplay because all the gear and stuff you gathered will be on the previous character after a switch happens and you have to go find them. I mean, you don't have to but it sure would be more annoying to start from nothing five times. Alternatively you can store beforehand your stuff in bank and/or horse inventory which are in a rather non-immersive way shared by your characters.

Cursed design

There's also how you have to leave behind the characters whose abilities you had taken effort to upgrade. (Although you can recruit up to two of them into your posse.) The third post release update actually made weapon abilities (which are identical for everyone) to carry over like passive perks already did: only character specific active abilities need to be individually upgraded for characters now. That resulted in the already plentiful nimp relics to be in excessive supply -- I think the upcoming fourth update is going to address that and add something to spend those points in. But this kind of rework suggests to me that the game had cursed design -- i.e. conflicting mechanics -- that hadn't been worked out before its release.

I reckon that leaning into the RPG genre more would have made Weird West a better game: work the story to have just one main character and expand the ability system so that you could have a personalized build.

Having voice acting would have helped a lot with immersion too, even if it was just few lines per character. The game's budget must have been pretty tight because there wouldn't have been that much dialogue to voice. Instead of speech there's this weird mumbling sound and that I've never liked in games. I'd rather be without it; it's so weird. I can't outright remember if I've ever even personally played a game that extensively does this outside the Star Wars games and their repeating alien speech nonsense. Otherwise sound design and music are on point though: Weird West's audio creates an immersive atmosphere.

The core gameplay problems stem largely from the camera. It rotates horizontally and can be zoomed in and out, however it being locked to an angle makes things feel awkward. Such a camera felt limiting back in Dungeon Siege already but it didn't matter for gameplay because it isn't pure action game like Weird West. Dungeon Siege also has a cursor unlike this one which has to cater to controller. Thus trying to pick up things and maybe to try some immersive sim messing around isn't as easy as it would be in first person because you have to awkwardly angle your character to face the desired object.

In combat, Weird West is basically a twin-stick shooter with the difference that you have to worry about ammunition count and the whole rotating camera thing. The camera rotation actually locks in place when holding aim key (RMB) to use your equipped weapon. There are melee weapons too but melee is so awkward that you're better off sticking to guns even with characters that seem like they'd be meant for close quarters combat.

Fights can be pretty chaotic but on Normal difficulty at least they're never too hard: just keep on backpedaling and diving while shooting. The game has a toggleable slow mode too (no hotkey bound by default) that to me says WolfEye wasn't comfortable with how the combat turned out. There are many this kind of little conflicts in the game that make it a mix of different mechanics just thrown together.

While aiming, your four character specific ability hotkeys get replaced by the current weapon's four abilities adding another layer of hassle. The abilities rarely seemed to make a big difference on killing speed though. The Sentry Silencer rifle ability I found useful to take out one baddie before starting a fight. I suppose it and other abilities would see more use if you didn't have to chug a potion to restore your action points after 1 to 3 ability uses. I wonder if it would have been better to have the action points regenerate like void power in Dishonored: Death of the Outsider.

Immersive sim design shows in various ways: there are interacting mechanics, you can choose how to accomplish a goal, and the world and its people appear to have lives. However, it all seems fake, procedurally generated. In the best immersive sims about everything is handcrafted; you don't have randomly generated fetch and kill quests. Weird West has many locations but they don't feel unique due to the reuse of assets. All the towns, ruins, etc. feel repetitive cheap content. This just further strengthens my opinion that immersive sims are made with money. The game was okayish entertainment in the end but as an immersive sim I'd say it's a failed experiment.