Fumito Ueda is Rethinking The Companion Relationship That Defined His Career

Each of these games had a sort of fantasy theme to them, as barren as the narratives may be, so the shift to science fiction and big robots (and their detached heads) raises questions about that companion relationship central to his games. “The robot head is going to have different roles and functions,” Ueda says. “I can say that it could be at times a vehicle for your transportation. At times it will be your navigator. At times it can be a tool as just a functionality.”

If that sounds somewhat familiar to the basic companion structure of his previous games, Ueda clarified that the “kind of relationship that the main character is going to establish and build throughout the game [is not] necessarily the same kind of ‘you need to protect your companion or you are being protected.’ It’s a little different from what you’ve seen in my past games.”

Ueda says that his previous games omitted direct communication between the player character and the companion because that was the reality of the game’s fiction (ie: horses can’t talk). But also having direct communication “kind of ends that conversation maybe by a line or by the next command or if the character says, ‘Oh, go to the north and to the woods and you can find this,’” Ueda explains. In keeping with that sense of “what is real in this setting, in this world, and the relationship that I am continuing to grow” with a companion, Ueda says that Gen Atlas’s player character and robot head companion will have some communication, in part owing to its sci-fi setting. “It’s not going to be a situation where you can’t have communication,” he says. “You will. It’s not going to be maybe as blatantly direct, but you will actually be able to have some level of communication.”

“There are some very fundamental setting differences such as going into the sci-fi world that has allowed me to make some different decisions and adjustments between how your character and companion used to communicate in my past games versus this one,” Ueda says. “So you’ll probably be able to notice those differences and why they’re happening and it’s probably thanks to the setting that it’s in sci-fi.”

The switch to sci-fi is perhaps not even the biggest change for Ueda in Gen Atlas; it’s also his first time developing a game for a multiplatform release, and inside of an off-the-shelf game engine (in this case, publisher Epic Games’ ubiquitous Unreal Engine). When asked if the access to a more powerful game engine and a multiplatform target has changed how he approaches development, Ueda was ambivalent. “Maybe there are challenges that […] haven’t crept up yet for me because it hasn’t been such a huge challenge. The one biggest difference for me though, is that all my previous games we had our own engine that we worked off of and Gen Atlas is built on Unreal. And so perhaps if I look at just the large subject of reporting on different consoles, yes, there are things that are different. But in a sense it hasn’t really greatly […] changed anything that I’ve had to do.”

Game development as furoshiki

When asked if the technological constraints of his previous games contributed to his creative process at all–Shadow of the Colossus famously pushed the PlayStation 2 hardware to its limits–and whether the freedom to not worry about those constraints in the same way would impact his design, he was more contemplative.

“When we talk about technology and limitations, we are making video games at the end of the day. So we’re talking about platforms that have existed from 30 years ago to today and it does seem like it is limitless, but I think there’s still some limitation,” he says. “In Japan, there’s a culture of furoshiki. It’s the wrapper. It’s literally like a piece of cloth that you open up and then you close. But when you close it, it needs to be wrapped very nicely and essentially [it has a] souvenir, it’s gifting, right? And so there is the expression in business and any sort of structure in Japan that you open up the furoshiki to put in any idea you want, but at the end of the day, at the end of the entire process, you have to wrap the furoshiki. But how you wrap it, what’s inside, how it’s balanced, is it cohesive? Is it lined up? Are all the pieces lined up perfectly? That’s what matters.”

“So in that sense, I think that there are still some limitations when it comes to perfecting that skill, perfecting it and wrapping it in a nicely neatly bowtied package by the time you deliver it to the world, that’s where it matters.”

Interestingly, for a now-independent game developer shipping a major title with new partners, Ueda’s concept of furoshiki didn’t stop with design, but extended to the managerial requirements of running a large game studio working on a AAA game. “When you think about what’s inside, it’s do you have the right human resources?” Ueda says. “Do you have not just the right human resources, but the right human resources with the right skill that can make that perfect piece of puzzle and do you have the right financial backing for it? Do you have the right support for it? So if you take all that into consideration, I do think that there’s still some limitations. […] Yes, the hardware technology has advanced to a point where we think it’s so superior and limitless, but I think what matters is how you approach the process of making it within the limitations that still currently exist.”

Gen Atlas will be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PCs (where it will be exclusive to the Epic Games Store). It does not yet have a release date.