Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto’s upcoming Disintegration is looking like a unique and interesting blend of shooting and strategy, and in recent days and weeks, Lehto has spoken a great deal about the game. Recently, he talked about the game’s tone, and how it was inspired by the TV show Firefly, and now, in new interview with DualShockers, he’s gone into detail about the central narrative premise of the game’s story campaign.
Lehto describes the campaign as “a really big part” of Disintegration, before going on to describe central plotpoints of humanity being on the verge of extinction, us choosing to merge with robotics to avoid that, and how that eventually leads to conflict based on ideologies on how to proceed forward.
“The story campaign, it actually started that way and it was a really big part of our game,” said Lehto. “In our campaign, we play a character named Romer who is one of these… all of our characters are human by nature. Due to some pretty bad odds that humanity is up against in the future, there is a pandemic that’s spreading across the planet and really decimating humanity to the point where we’re actually concerned about a potential extinction event so we’ve taken drastic measures. We’ve taken the human brain, encased it into an armored case and integrated that into a robotic armature. Those are our base characters throughout the game.”
“All of them are human, all of them are just normal people like you and me so they all have these personalities and are interesting and unique,” he continued. “But then a whole faction of them broke away, they have this desire to never become human again. They like who they are now as these robotic forms and they started to continue to evolve that and leave humanity behind. We don’t agree with what was going on there and we broke away. The enemy is called the Rayonne which means light. The Rayonne is after us, they’re hunting us, we’ve been outlawed and now we are fighting with this small group of people like us around the fringes of a much larger global conflict.”
Lehto also explained that the game is going to focus strictly on Earth and keep things local, so to speak, rather than delving into whether humanity managed to reach out into space and settle on other planets as well- that’s something they’re saving for sequels. Meanwhile, players will also run into characters that are regular humans.
“We are not delving deep into how humanity has continued to expand,” he said. “What we are showing is that on Earth, and we are keeping it very terrestrial on purpose because we want to hone in on that this is the birthplace of humanity and this where it could end as well if we don’t take care out. We do have natural humans in the game as well that are some of our story characters, our allies, but we don’t talk much about whether or not we ventured off into the stars, that’s for sequels.”
Disintegration is due out some time in 2020 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC.