Developer of cyberpunk shooter The Ascent teases 'the kind of game that every developer wants to work on'

Thick Thighs Save Lives

NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
Article:
Swedish developer Neon Giant is teasing its next game, but it's not giving away much. It'll be first-person, and it's big on "player agency." A handful of screenshots tease a new world clogged with old-school tech (see the gallery below). The whole mysterious thing is "ludicrously ambitious," the studio promises.

Following the success of The Ascent, Neon Giant could have "asked for nearly anything" from the investors that came courting, creative director and studio co-founder Arcade Berg told PC Gamer in a call last week, which also included fellow Neon Giant creative director and co-founder Tor Frick.

They could've gone on a hiring spree, and that was still the thing to do in 2021, just before the games industry began its wrenching contraction. But Berg and Frick and the other founders had started Neon Giant because they wanted out of the triple-A scene, so despite selling the company to South Korean giant Krafton—the publisher behind PUBG and Inzoi—Neon Giant's founders have kept it small. The team is "just over 20" people.

Why sell at all? "We didn't start a studio to run a studio," Berg told me.

"We started [Neon Giant] because we wanted to make games in a certain way," the co-founder continued. "That's the only thing that's really important to us. So we said, well, you know what? Why not? Why not find someone to work with so we can get the rocket fuel that we feel that we need to be even more ambitious, and also feel that we have some stability, we can have the courage and afford to take risks, creative risks and project risks, because we think that will lead to a frankly cooler product in the end."

A condition of the acquisition was that Neon Giant wasn't going to become a support studio or take assignments. It had to be free to make its own games with its small staff, where everyone contributes to the creative vision. Sounding a little like the Valve employee handbook, which promises a "flat structure" (a subject of some debate), Frick explained the studio's approach to game development.

"This is a studio for people who want to be very involved in the creative and technical aspects," he said. "You need to be a problem solver. If we're going to make a game, you need to get dirty—we don't really have managers, right? Everyone here, even if they had managers in a previous studio, in triple-A, like, when you're here, you need to just solve the problems and build the game yourself."

Over half of Neon Giant's staff were previously directors at big studios, according to Berg, and both Berg and Frick previously worked on the Wolfenstein series at MachineGames, as well as at People Can Fly during its Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgment days.

I failed to extract any precise details about Neon Giant's upcoming game from the pair of creative directors, but they did give us a few hints.

The studio is focused on building a believable, "reactive" world that's more grounded than The Ascent's cyberpunk metropolis, and "player agency and creativity" are at the center of it. Berg also mentioned that it's "the kind of game that every developer wants to work on"—sounds to me like we're in the immersive sim realm. There's no word on when we'll hear more, but I suspect that it won't be too long before we get another call from Sweden.


Media

uPtYKY6.png

DQvY68p.png

MANKcYD.png
 
Never managed to make the gameplay click for me but art and story wise the ascent was really super cool.
Waiting to see what it's all about too !
 
Good for them staying small.
Could have been another casualty if they had large overhead.
 
Probably will be an immediate day 1 for me. The Ascent is one of my favorite games from this whole generation. I would have preferred not first person, but I'm still on board.
 
Good reminder that I need to play Ascent. I keep forgetting but it looks up my alley.

First person...I'd rather not in games that aren't straight FPS.
 
Oh shit, theyre cooking up Fortnite 2.

Joking aside, hope its a more action focused immersive sim, theres not enough of those.
 
I really enjoyed The Ascent. That game was absolutely gorgeous to look at, had great atmosphere, and was a lot of fun.

The one thing I didn't like was that the text was absolutely teeny tiny in places. Often couldn't read a thing while sitting on my couch. Had to get up and walk closer to the TV to see what it said!
 
I remember a mod that turned The Ascent into a 1st person. It was surprisingly good. The game is already packed with good looking assets.
 
The Ass Scent was decent enough until I got brickwalled by an annoying boss. Put it down and never went back to it.
 
Top Bottom