Video Games
Bloober Team Aims to Evolve With ‘Silent Hill 2’ Remake
With the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober Team is looking to compete with the industry heavyweights when it comes to horror and horror-adjacent games. Speaking recently with IGN at DICE Summit 2023, Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno says that the developer wants to move beyond “walking simulator” games to titles with larger scopes and more complex and involved gameplay mechanics.
“We still would like to make meaningful games, we still would like to keep our DNA to tell [stories] about things which are important to us,” says Babieno. “However, not by environmental storytelling, but by full action, to have much more mass appeal. And I think that this is the reason why we have chosen Silent Hill.”
Babieno says Bloober Team is effectively shifting the way it looks at horror with Silent Hill 2. Referring to this evolution as “Bloober 3.0,” Babieno is taking a quiet approach to the developer’s move as a way to show fans how the company will approach horror. Babieno explained that Bloober team first transitioned from “1.0” to “2.0” after 2014. Back when the company first started in 2008, it made “all possible mistakes.”
“I micromanaged at the beginning, I made a lot of mistakes by choice in projects,” he says. “And at the beginning we thought about our shareholders, and we tried to make them happy because they were investors in our company. We followed their needs.”
That all changed in with 2014’s Basement Crawl, which Babieno says was “the worst game on PlayStation for that time.” From there, the team decided, that they needed to refocus on what gamers wanted, and less on the shareholders’ desires.
As for the future, Babieno aims to make Bloober Team’s focus on making psychological horror games conceived and crafted internally that get people’s attention, while also making games that leave a mark on players long after they’ve completed them.
��Our idea is to make games which will make an impact on you, that you understand more not so much about our characters, not necessarily about the universe which we are creating, but about yourself. Because those choices which we are offering in the game will allow you to understand better, ‘Am I [a certain kind of] person? Why did I make this choice and not the other? Is there something wrong with me?’ Those moral conflicts, which are in the best games, are not made by people more than once, maybe twice [in their real lives]. Usually never. But because we have the opportunity to check ourselves by playing games, we are able to understand ourselves and others better.”
As for what comes after Silent Hill 2, Babieno isn’t ruling out Bloober Team carrying the franchise forward with more titles in the future. While Bloober is focused for now on Silent Hill 2 and its secret project with Private Division, Konami has shown interest through their conversations with the developer. “I’m not going to say never,” says Babieno.
Silent Hill 2 is currently in development for PC via Steam and the PlayStation 5, with the Xbox Series coming at a later date.
Director Andrew Saullo has just dropped the second Resident Evil cast reunion. And this time, Charlie Kraslavsky, Greg Smith and Eric Pirius (who played Chris Redfield, Barry Burton and Albert Wesker, respectively) are joined by the surprise addition of Rebecca Chambers’ actress, known as Linda! The quartet were joined by Saullo, as well as Residence of Evil founder JJ Trulock to discuss (what else?) their experience with Resident Evil, as well as some behind-the-scenes info on the shoot for the cutscenes.
Regarding the shoot for the cutscenes, Linda said that the experience “left a really big impact” on her at the time. “It was a big day. It was a wild shoot and it was very different than anything else that I had been doing in Japan at the time when I was modelling.” Still, Linda did remember her fellow actors, though she admitted that they all “looked a little bit different” at the time, including herself. “I remember for the shoot, I actually had blonde hair, and they spray painted my hair that morning so I would look more like Rebecca.”
As for her knowledge of Resident Evil, Linda admitted that she’s still learning about the series and her character. “I didn’t know a lot about the job, or that anyone was looking for [me] up until probably about four years ago, where someone reached out to me and they found me. But even then, I didn’t understand the magnitude of the entire situation. Only now I’m realizing like wow, there’s maybe someone out there that you know it’s like ‘Wow, that’s Rebecca Chambers!’. So it’s new to me, and I’m kind of just going with it.”
The interview (which you can check out below) also includes a special announcement of a four-part fan-made web series, which will be directed by Andrew Saullo (who also directed the fan-made short The Keeper’s Diary, in case you missed it). All four of the actors will be reprising their roles in the web series. It will not be an official Resident Evil series (for copyright reasons). Crowdfunding for the project will be launched “soon”.
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