Developer MachineGames has confirmed that its action adventure title Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was always envisioned as a first-person game. According to GamesRadar, design director Jens Andersson spoke about the decision to make the game first-person at a talk at Develop:Brighton. It “was a given for us,” said Andersson, who continued, “there was no choice for us, we love that perspective. It’s a great way of telling stories.”
“If you’re going to be Indiana Jones, you need to look through his eyes, you need to feel like him,” he said.
Andersson went on to explain how the studio could tap into making players feel like Indiana Jones further in the talk. He also described it as a difficult challenge when the studio was making Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. However, he also clarified that it wasn’t the hardest part.
“How would we make you as a first-person player feel like Indiana Jones? We knew that would be really hard, but actually it was one of the things that we felt we hit,” he said. “It took years, of course, but it wasn’t the hardest part making this game. It was a lot of the other things that I would highlight as ‘we didn’t get this right until at the very end.'”
Going by Andersson’s words, it might just come down to the fact that MachineGames has traditionally preferred telling stories through a first-person perspective. We also saw the studio explore this similarly in its take on the Wolfenstein franchise, all the way from Wolfenstein: The New Order back in 2014, to 2017’s Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. We even saw this in Wolfenstein spin-offs like Youngblood and the VR-only Cyberpilot, both of which were developed by MachineGames alongside Arkane Lyon.
In an interview leading up to the PS5 release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer had also spoken about MachineGames’ decision to make the title a first-person game. He noted that there was some pushback on the studio to make it third-person. However, ultimately, he praised the studio for sticking to its guns, and noted that Microsoft wants to continue giving studios the means to tell their own stories through their own games.
“I was really inspired by MachineGames taking someone else’s IP and doing something so unique, and I’m inspired about what that team can do next,” he said. “Certain people were kind of pushing them on the first person versus third person. And I think once you play it, you realize you are Indy. But going forward, I also want to give the teams the ability to do our own games and our own franchises. We have a lot of room to tell new stories, as well. And I want to make sure that’s an option for us.”
MachineGames is currently working on a post-launch expansion for the title, dubbed The Order of Giants. The expansion is slated for release in September, and will be available at the same time across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. As part of the expansion, players will once more step into the shoes of Indiana Jones as they head to Rome and explore its underground catacombs.
In the meantime, check out our review of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
