Bastion Previews and Interview

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on July 14th, 2011

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Bastion's upgrade system is mostly governed from the hub location of the Bastion itself, a floating island that grows and changes throughout the game in response to your explorations beyond its borders. After most levels, players are able to upgrade some aspect of the Bastion, initially by adding new buildings. Each building has its own role, and you can choose which ones you build first.

One of the most important of these structures is the Distillery. Here, you'll build up a collection of tonics and drinks that are continually active on your character. However, you can only have a number of these potions active at one time equal to your experience level. Like most role-playing games, experience is primarily acquired through the killing of monsters out in the field. As each level passes, you'll have more slots to fill, and you'll get the expected bonus in maximum health. The drinks themselves vary widely in their application. Some offer additional maximum health, others reduce damage from falling, and others still might increase your critical strike chance.

Of course you can't make a game just using clever narration. Bastion is an isometric action-adventure game with hand-drawn graphics that create unique locations with vivid colours and charming animation. It can be off-putting at times having the ground appear as you walk around and it was a little difficult to understand which way to go at times. Despite these flaws the actual gameplay remained a pleasure. At any one time the kid can carry a melee and ranged weapon in addition to his shield. The player can also utilise a roll move to manoeuvre around enemies that occupy the land, although one has to be careful not to roll of the edge of the map lest the narrator will note (and then our hero fell to his death.) though once restarted he simply comments (Just kidding.)

We also found the combat to be very involving. There is a decent sized armory of differing weapons with each having its own strengths and weaknesses, so weapons do require a level of thought to be properly employed in action. Enemies vary from big brutes with clubs to a swarm of floating glowing parasites, so the shield was actually useful for doing some deflecting and blocking work, although we still prefer using the evasive rolling technique. But let's not forget the RPG elements to the game, which should make putting the controller down even more difficult. Experience points are earned through progression and can be spent on unlocking potions, weapons and upgrades. Because of the gameplay and combat set-up the player should be able to choose options to compliment their own playing style without having to worry about being penalised for making the wrong choices later on.

In Bastion, you play as an anime-style hero simply referred to as 'the kid', who starts our demo waking up to find his world has collapsed around him in the wake of an event called the Calamity. From the moment you begin, the narration kicks in and keeps the pace of the game rolling along at a fair lick. An isometric scrolling brawler at heart, Bastion's first weapon is a chunky Cael Hammer and we immediately set to work smashing up anything and everything in sight. (The kid rages for a while) the narration chimes in as we go on a rampage before deciding to get a move on. As you run through a stage in Bastion, the ground forms beneath your feet creating bridges and platforms as you go.

Soon, we find ourselves in the first open area, where we're attacked by pickaxe-wielding green 'gas fellows' and little black oily 'squirts'. (The kid takes out one squirt, then another...) that fantastic narration manages to keep up with everything that's going on, giving Bastion a magical, interactive storybook feel that we can't say we've really experienced before in this kind of game. It's easy to pick up and play too, with B swinging the hammer and X shooting projectiles like arrows from your Breaker's Bow or fireballs from your Flame Repeater. There'll be a total of ten upgradable weapons in the game, including a War Machete that can be thrown at enemies. All weapons can be upgraded in the Forge, which is one of three buildings you can visit or add to the bastion hub that you're striving to restore to its former glory, before the Calamity struck.

AusGamers: What was the key decision behind the contextual narrative, because that's obviously one of the key features that stands out. Despite that, the game is fantastic. It's got this great level of energy and challenge that comes out at you really quickly which is awesome. But that's a pretty unique feature.

Greg: Yeah, the narration wasn't there from the very beginning. It happened during the course of prototyping the game. What we knew from the beginning was that we wanted a game that had some emotional weight to it. We didn't want to make a game that was just purely... we wanted to make it more than just fun to play.

The fun of the moment-to-moment experience was essential to us, but we wanted something more than that. At the same time, we wanted to make an action RPG and have a story to it but we didn't want a game where the storytelling was very indulgent. You know, where you start playing the game and you're running into cut-scenes or (here's a wall of text with the back-story that you have to know).

We miss the days when games had an immediacy to them. In the mid-90s, the golden-era of the Super Nintendo and what-not, you hit start and you just start playing. We didn't know how to reconcile that for a while and the narration was just something that we tried at a certain point because we knew this great actor who's an old friend of one of the co-founders. He recorded a few lines and we're like (hey, that's pretty cool). Then we realised that we wanted it everywhere because wherever we didn't have it in the game, we missed it. And we started crafting it around the level design. Personally, there's some games I play where's there's some really cool moments where the game feeds back on something I did, but usually it's only one or two moments like that in the entire game. So what if we just had that all throughout the game? It's like (we could do it). So we just started going from there and never looked back.

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