Immortals Fenyx Rising Director Says Some Influence Came From Early 2000s Action-Adventure Games

The game once known as Gods and Monsters got its grand reintroduction yesterday as Immortals Fenyx Rising. The game is an open world adventure game with a stylized look all about Greek mythology. The game looks quite interesting, but one thing that many felt they noticed was how similar many things looked to Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The art style especially jumped out at people. But the game’s Director actually speaks of other, older influences that went into the game.

In an interview with VGC, Julien Galloudec was asked about the influence from Breath of the Wild and while he said it was flattering to be compared to such a legendary game, he actually said the influences run deeper. He said that he wanted the game to full more like the platformer adventure games from the early 2000s, specifically mentioning Banjo-Kazooie and the first Jak and Daxter. Specifically, he wanted to take their open world like formula that was densely packed with various challenges and modernize the design.

“It’s always great to be compared to great games, but I’ve actually been influenced by a lot of different experiences, and one of the very important influences for us was the action-adventure games from the early 2000s.

So games like Jak and Daxter or Banjo-Kazooie, that were action-adventure games within a small open-world, very dense in challenges that could be combat, that could be platforming and that could be puzzles. We wanted to kind of revisit that formula and bring it to the next level with the tech knowledge and the things that we can do at Ubisoft Québec.

So that was part of our intention, to explore that aspect in terms of game experience, while using the Greek mythology as a setting for the game. We wanted to have that mix of combat, travel, exploration and puzzle all mixed together in a flow that that kind of makes sense and that you can have an agenda within.

So you can choose how many puzzles, how much platforming, which exploration and how much combat you want to do, but have a unifying experience within those three pillars. That was really the focus in terms of game experience, to try to have the best balance within that mix of intensity, with combat, exploration and traversal.”

Immortals Fenyx Rising will release on December 3rd for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Switch, PC and Stadia. You can check out a walkthrough of the gameplay through here.