Sunset Overdrive creative director Marcus Smith recently spoke to GameSpot at EB Expo 2014 and talked about how the game seeks to be completely opposite from a game steeped in reality like, say, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us.
“I love The Last of Us, it’s a great game. There are games that have tried to eliminate the HUD – but a HUD is how you know a lot of information, so by removing it there’s that ambiguity. For us, we embrace that there’s a HUD and we call it out a lot of times and the player character will remind the player occasionally about things that are very gamey.
“It’s an open world game and we have fast travel. The player [character] will remind you every once in a while – ‘That’s really far. Good thing there’s fast travel!’ If Joel broke character to remind the player to pick up health or something like that, it would be a terrible experience. But in our game, everything is on the table.”
Sunset Overdrive releases on October 28th in North America and October 31st in Europe for the Xbox One.