For outsiders, by outsiders: Project Wight

Earlier this year we sat down with The Outsiders CEO and co-founder Ben Cousins, a veteran game developer who has plied his trade at a selection of studios ranging from Lionhead to EA DICE, and later EA Easy Studios and more recently in the mobile space with Scattered Entertainment and DeNA. He founded The Outsiders with fellow DICE veteran David Goldfarb, whose career has seen him work as a writer and creative on highly successful games such as Killzone 2, Battlefield 3, and Payday 2 to name a few.

"We had been friends for about ten years before starting the company," says Cousins as we sit down for a chat in The Outsiders offices in central Stockholm. "We were both working at DICE and I actually brought Dave over to Sweden to work at DICE when I was working there. And we just got to that point where we were, luckily, both trying to find something to do. Both had left our previous jobs and were consulting and we just sat down and had some drinks together one evening. And David has had this unbroken chain of really successful first-person games if we go back in time - Payday 2, Battlefield 3, Bad Company 2, Bad Company 1, Mirror's Edge, Killzone 2.

"So a lot of people wanted to talk to him about the potential of starting a company and then helping him from a financial backing side. But he's not a business man, he recognises that he's a product guy, he's a game designer, not a business man, so we decided to start to work together and David had the idea for Project Wight at that time. But we kind of started the company cause we wanted to work together as friends and create a work environment which was fun and had the culture that we wanted. As much as it was about building that particular product, particular game."

Given the interest and both their backgrounds, Project Wight was perhaps not the path of least resistance, and it's certainly not a game that is reminiscent of the shooters Goldfarb has worked on.

"It would have been super easy for us right to say we're going to make the next killer mobile FPS or free-to-play FPS with my background in mobile and free-to-play and Dave's shooter background," says Cousins. "I think you're right in that there's no shooting, well, no there's no real shooting in the game, but a lot of the things you learn building first-person games we have. All of the locomotion the player uses, we're very focused on these creatures walking on all fours and having a feel of that they're in contact with the ground and touching the ground. That's something that we will have seen in Mirror's Edge. The way AI works in a first-person game is probably different from a third-person game. The way you build environments is kind of similar. And the way you work with first-person animation."

"We have two animators on the team, both of whom are DICE veterans, one of whom was the animation director on Mirror's Edge 2 and one of whom has worked on a lot of those really popular reload first-person animations in the Battlefield series, because we're making this creature and we're selling the idea that you're controlling a creature rather than a human, all of those things that you would learn building high-quality first-person animations for a shooter can also be applied in sort of selling that you're a non-human, that you're a monster, that you walk on all fours."

"There's not so much absolute direct experience that we can bring over, but we're certainly in the same ballpark. We're not making an isometric turn-based strategy game."

And don't expect a project like that from The Outsiders in the future either.

"Thinking of the company as well as me as CEO, one of the things we focus on and the companies I admire: the companies that stick to the same path. I think about Blizzard to a certain extent, maybe Overwatch is a change, Bioware, Naughty Dog, these companies know what their genre is and they try to excel at that genre rather than making a million things at once and that's something that we will try and do as we continue."

Project Wight lets us experience an alternate history take on the Viking era where humans are in competition with another intelligent species and the twist is that it's these creatures you'll play as. In a way, it reverses the situation you'd find in most action-RPGs. Crawling on all fours makes for a different camera perspective, closer to the ground, which also makes the game different.

Project Wight was first shown in November last year at Unite, Unity's developer conference. Clearly, it was chosen by Unity to showcase what the engine is capable of. What we got to see was a few minutes of prototype gameplay, showcasing a very young creature focused on stealth gameplay, as well as an older, adolescent creature capable of massive leaps and devastating attacks on its human enemies.

"What you saw from our sneak peek video which we released in November was basically an art-treated version of our prototype. So we spent a year working on our prototype. Working as fast as possible, checking out and examining and researching the areas of the game we felt was the most risky. And we just made those in really ugly visuals basically for a whole year and then we spent a couple of months just making it look nice."

"Following that we actually threw out everything, pretty much. We're in pre-production now. So basically, taking the learnings from that prototype and building it into a chunk of the game, not the whole game, a slice of the game. A slice of the things you can do as a creature, a slice of the enemies you'll meet, a slice of the environments you'll come into. So we would call that pre-production even though we're actually building assets for the final game. And then towards the end of the year, we'll start our final stretch into production. But we're still a ways out. It's not going to come out this year, you know. We're a pretty long way out and we decided when we started the company and when we signed our deal that we wanted to have a small team for a longer amount of time, in terms of the way that we spent our budget, rather than having a big team for a short amount of time. It's nice to be able to have the luxury of spending multiple years on your first game."

In fact, it is such early days that the investor/backer/publisher that is funding development is still kept a secret. Having said that, the game has been in development for coming up to two years now.

"We started out with six people and we tried to keep the team small for as long as possible. We spent a year with only seven people on the team and towards the end of last summer we grew to, I think, 12 people and we're at 13 or 14 now and at the end of this year we'll hit our maximum size of 22-23 people depending on QA, extra management and things like that. So that's where we are. We've still got a chunk of people to hire.

"We sit very much in between that indie versus triple-A. I mean we're not a team of 5 people, but we're not a team of a hundred people. We're never going to be bigger than 25 people. So when you're 25 you can take some chances, you can do something original and Project Wight is a pretty original product, but at the same time we can't be as experimental and produce 6 games a year like a mobile team would or one of King's team would. So we kind of sit in between that a little bit and we're forced to specialise, because I think even in the indie space or the mid-priced space the expectations of quality and production values are really high now compared to how they were ten years ago."

Cousins and Goldfarb have been living in Sweden for over a decade each, a Brit and an American, so we had to ask if this had something to do with the name of the studio. If they still felt like outsiders?

"I think it's probably a little bit of that," says Cousins. "That comes into it. But it's also the feeling that wherever we are, even when we're back home, both me and David feel like outsiders and that's something that we encourage with the team here. I think a lot of the things that we look at when we're hiring people is maybe excepting the unique people that might not fit into a big corporate team, that might not fit into the box they're asked to get put into at a big company. Allowing people to be themselves. If they're very extrovert, allowing them to be very extrovert. If they're very introvert, letting them be very introverted. These are all things that we kind of focused on a bit, but also it's about the game that we're building and the game that we're building is about that feeling of being an outsider and not being in the mainstream. And probably making products that appeal to the kind of people that don't feel like they're in the mainstream and that they fit with a particular taste in games or a particular place in society. So, we're outsiders, we hire outsiders, we make games about an outsider for people who feel like outsiders."

It's still early days for Project Wight then, and it will still be some time before we get to see something beyond the prototype shown at Unite in November of last year.

"I think it'll probably be next year. I think next year we'll be in a place where we have enough to show, rather than showing you a sneak peek of the game we can really show you in-depth what the game is about. I think the modern industry is about doing a big reveal closer to the launch date, if we look at Watch Dogs 2 I think is a really good example of that, hours of content relatively close to launch rather than drip feeding, and we actually never had a plan to show the game in November at Unity, it just gave us this really great opportunity to reveal the game on stage and be kind of the focus for them, so that was why we did it. We're going to hold back a bit, do the odd little thing that we're doing right now, but we won't be showing real details of the game until next year, probably."