A Plague Tale: Innocence had many problems at the beginning of development: “The game was a real disaster”

In a retrospective published on Eurogamer.net,  Kevin Choteau of Asobo studio, the director of the A Plague Tale franchise, revealed that A Plague Tale: Innocence had several problems early in development, so much so that it risked even being cancelled.

The game had been in the works for two years when the team decided to submit it to videogame critics to collect feedback and understand what could be improved. Obviously, we are not talking about the final reviews of the critics, mind you, but about work-in-progress reviews that are useful for developers to understand where to intervene. However, the director recounts that the response was far from positive:

The game was a disaster – says Kevin Choteau – It was horrible in terms of gameplay, story, whatever. There was nothing binding, nothing was in its place. It was like getting punched in the face.

Based on the comments received, Asobo calculated that he would have an average grade between 55 and 60 in the final press reviews. An undoubtedly not very encouraging result for the team who felt they had jumped too quickly into a genre in which they had no familiarity. Thus it was that Asobo decided to take a step back : after making changes to gameplay, narration and so on, he chose to change his approach. Over a third of each chapter, says the director, was redone from scratch.

A Plague Tale: Innocence changed its face and so did the judgments on the product which in the end, at the launch of the title, proved to be in fact far superior to the team’s expectations. The success of Innocence then prompted the team to work on the sequel, which was received extremely positively by critics and audiences.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

• How A Plague Tale came back from the brink ( eurogamer.net)