MercurySteam has been slowly revealing more and more details about its upcoming action RPG Blades of Fire. In a recent interview with Gamereactor, studio co-founder and game director Enric Alvarez revealed that it will have an emphasis on narrative, while still giving players the agency to decide how much they want to be involved in its story.
He spoke about needing good characters to tell a good story and that Blades of Fire will be “strongly narrative-driven.” Despite making use of cutscenes, Blades of Fire will also offer players “a kind of organic narrative.”
“It might not look like it because of the freedom the game gives you, but it’s a strongly narrative-driven game, and characters are the most important thing,” said Alvarez. “Because you don’t have a good story without good characters. So, when writing the story, we wanted to have a certain exposed narrative through cutscenes, other characters, etc., but we also wanted to have a kind of organic narrative, depending on how proactive you are.”
The player’s curiosity will be key in figuring out the story in Blades of Fire, according to Alvarez. An example he gives revolves around Adso, who can be spoken to whenever and will cryptically update players about their quest.
“The curiosity will drive you through important bits of the story,” explained Alvarez. “For example, there are two mechanics that you can talk to Adso anytime. One mechanic is, okay, tell me what you know about the mission you’re accomplishing. And they will tell you vague stuff because they don’t know everything about that. So, you, as a player, will know what they know.”
“And there’s a second layer, which is, I want to talk about specific topics to Adso. You can stop at any time and say, hey, Adso, tell me about the forgers. Tell me about the hammers. Tell me about the master forgers, or this castle, or about this new character we just found. All this requires your curiosity and active participation. There’s a lot of narrative delivered in this way. I think between both, we have something quite cohesive and interesting.”
Capping things off, Alvarez spoke about how, while there is a story to drive things forward, the player will still have to go out to find it. On the way, you’ll run into various colorful characters.
“In Blades of Fire, most of the story doesn’t come for you. You have to go for it,” he said. “You have to actively pursue wanting to know more. You’ll find quite crazy characters in this game that will give you a different perspective on what’s going on in the game and many surprises.”
Blades of Fire was unveiled back in February and is developed by the team behind Metroid Dread. It will be coming to PC (via Epic Games Store), PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on May 22. For more details about the PC release, here are the recommended hardware specs.
