The God Slayer Q&A – ‘From Our Point of View, We’ve Always Been Making Open World RPGs’

Pathea Games, the studio behind the ‘My Time At’ titles, just unveiled their most ambitious game yet, an open world steampunk fantasy action RPG titled The God Slayer. It’s only the latest Chinese developer to go full triple-A action RPG after Game Science (Black Myth: Wukong), Leenzee Games (Wuchang: Fallen Feathers), Ultizero Games (Lost Soul Aside, although that one didn’t turn out so well), and S-GAME for the upcoming Phantom Blade Zero.

You can read an overview of The God Slayer in our dedicated article. Here, we’re publishing an exclusive interview with Pathea’s Business Development Director, Yongjin (Aaron) Deng, who kindly answered our questions immediately after the remote presentation.

The God Slayer is targeting a launch sometime around 2027 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X, though Deng also admitted that the game could land around the debut of the new PlayStation and Xbox consoles. If that happens, the studio aims to be there as well.

What were the challenges you encountered while transitioning from My Time at Portia/Sandrock to The God Slayer?

I think from our point of view, making the My Time games and even the games before My Time, we have always been making open world RPGs. We had a lot of experience while making the My Time series, which were smaller maps of 2×2 kilometers with a small town in the center, but it was still an open world RPG. All the rules, all the difficulties of making an open world RPG were still there. I think our experience making those games really helped us in planning and executing for The God Slayer. Now, this game is
using the Unreal Engine, so we did switch engines, but still, the hardest part of making open world game is the planning, the art pipeline, and stuff like that, and I think making the My Time series really helped us. Still, we have a way bigger team making this game, so we are learning how to do management of a bigger team on the go. But the core developers all came from our past games. The cohesiveness of the team itself is really helping us overcome some of the difficulties.

Why did you go with a set character instead of allowing players to create their own?

I think it’s easier to tell a story when the character is fixed. So, in this sense, we’re focusing more of our
energy on just making everything right, making everything tight. So, this time, we are going with a set character. By focusing on just making this character believable and making the character’s relationships with other characters believable, it will be easier for us to finish and polish this game, you know, in a sense that probably we wouldn’t be able to do if we spread out too many systems for ourselves.

You mentioned that The God Slayer is an action RPG. What are your game’s key RPG elements, as far as you’re concerned?

For us, it’s about getting two things right. One is the character growth. That’s pretty much what an RPG is, right? You have to have character growth, either in the skill sets, leveling up, or in the story, where the character grows. Those two, we’re trying to get right by combining them. What I mean is that the protagonist is going to start out in the story as pretty much a nobody, someone who’s never been
challenged before, and then this event, the God Fall, happens, right? And his family dies in front of him. At this point, as a character, you can go two ways. You can give up, or you can face that challenge and take it on. And so by taking on this challenge, we are setting the character off on a journey, but a lot of the decisions and the emotions have to be felt by the player. It’s not just about, oh, the character is feeling that. It’s about, okay, how do we make sure that there are characters around the player that they actually like and then we go off and kill them, or we go off and I don’t know, like, they face some challenge. At that point, you would want to help that character. As a player, you would think, ‘I want to help that character.’ Or as a player, if the enemy does something really bad and is really evil and we show that, not tell, show, or the player plays through that.

Then they will understand. This is the reason I’m going up against this enemy and want to beat this enemy. The player has to feel that emotion. On top of that, we have the skill sets. As you go through the game, you learn better martial arts skills that can help you use those elements. You can focus on one element at a time, or you can focus on all of them. If you just use your skill points on the water element, then your water becomes more powerful much faster than if you spread the points out to all the elements. We have five elements, right? But the wood element is actually a passive element. That means it’s used for upgrading your HP, your speed, your strength, stuff like that. It’s not an attack element.

There’s only going to be four attack elements because there’s only four face buttons on a controller. So you press the left shoulder button to switch between different elements. We want you to be able to switch elements while you’re fighting. You can upgrade that as you find scrolls or meet a master throughout the game. So you can upgrade your skill set. Those two are the main RPG gameplay elements that we want the players to be able to figure out and engage with.

Some RPGs level up the enemies alongside the player character, while others don’t. Where do you stand with your game on this key design choice?

We’re going to have two different modes for this game. One is the story mode, which is like the casual mode. For the casual mode, we’re going to keep it simple. You can overlevel. The main bottlenecks in The God Slayer are the bosses, right? So, you can overlevel and you beat the bosses more easily. I think that’s fine for story mode. But for the challenge mode, it becomes more like an action game. So, in that mode, we’re probably going to tie the player’s level to the difficulty of the enemies so that everything’s a challenge. But we haven’t completely designed or decided on the challenge mode, although that is what we want to do for the challenge mode. For sure, though, there’s going to be two modes for that.

You mentioned that there would be choices and side content in The God Slayer. Is there a lot of it, and what’s the extent of the consequences?

We’re going to try to go as far as our budget takes us, but I think the point is, design-wise, the main plot is somewhat linear. There’s not going to be multiple endings because, as I said, our budget is only that big. So, we want to finish it and make it good. That’s our priority. But I think for a lot of the side quests, even important side quests, there are going to be multiple ways to do stuff. And they actually do influence our main quest. Like, they can make it easier or harder, depending on whether the character is on your side or not. Let me give you an example. In the story, there’s a point where you want to get into a building and if you’re able to influence whoever’s controlling that building and make them your friend or at least someone who’s friendly to you, then you can ask that person at a certain point to just take his guards away from that building, and then for that night you can just go and there’s no guards. That’s how relations can influence quests.

That’s a very simplistic example. There’s going to be more complicated examples, but they do influence how you play the game and, later on, how you set up missions and stuff like that. They do influence that. This is one of our ways of making sure that the players will want to play the side quests. A lot of players just want to run through the main quest, but playing the side quests will give you different feels and different results regarding the main mission. As for NPCs, there are also quests that you can do for them that increase your relationship points with them.

Is there a romance system in the game?

Well, there are going to be characters in this game story-wise that might be a romance target, but I don’t
think we’re going to allow… Well, I’m not going to say no to that, but at least right now, that’s not a major part of our planning.

You described The God Slayer as a steampunk fantasy game. Will there be any mech or vehicle that players can command at some point?

That’s going to be a no. The reason for that is very simple. It’s because the player’s ability to traverse the world is already very overpowered, because you pretty much get the fire element at the start of the game. With the fire element, as you saw in the gameplay, you can jump anywhere pretty much and go fast anywhere. On top of that, you have fast travel. You can ride the subway, you can take buses, you can do that. So at a certain point, we thought adding vehicles to this game would be pretty much overkill. And because we already want the player to enjoy the current fire-based traversal system and we don’t want to add more to it just to complicate things.

You hinted at some simulation elements. Does that mean the time of day impacts gameplay?

Yes, some of the missions are dependent on the time cycle. Maybe someone gets off work at 7 PM, then you can sleep through it or you can do something else and come back at 7 PM. Not only that, but you actually have two identities. You wear the mask to hide your identity, or else they’re going to find out who you are right away. In the city, you do have an unmasked, well, not occupation, but identity that’s unmasked, like Batman. So when you do missions, you do want to wear your mask.

I’m guessing there will be a skill tree in The God Slayer, correct?

Yep. For upgrading your powers and skills, you get points as you fight the enemies, right? Then you can spread the points to different elements to upgrade the skill tree. But some skills come from finding scrolls in this world or finding a master who can train you for a certain skill set. Some of them are given through the main story, some through side quests, and for others, you just have to explore the world. If the player wants to upgrade all the skills, it’s going to take a long time. But if you just want to focus on one element, it might be faster. But it really depends on what the player wants because we do want it so that the player is able to select what elements they want to use. If you just want to do fire and water mostly, then you can just upgrade those, and it’s fine. You can beat the game. If you only use water, you can still beat the game, but it will be more effective and easier for the player if they utilize all the elements, depending on the different situations. But it’s really up to the player.

Are there going to be companions to help the main character on specific missions?

Yes, you do have companions on some of the missions, and also, you actually join an organization that’s like the Resistance against the Celestials. At first, someone else will give the commands, but eventually the
player will be able to give some commands in the organization for what they want to do next.

What’s the current state of the game?

I think we’re probably in a Pre-Alpha state where we’re filling out everything. We’re adding all the assets,
adding everything to the world, making sure all the mechanics are working completely. Yeah, we’re pretty much at that stage. So, we have a lot of the mechanics done. We have the overworld mechanics mostly done. Now we’re just adding assets to the overworld, and we’re adding all the story segments. So we’re at that stage. I think we will know for sure the exact release date by the end of next year.

So, maybe The God Slayer will be ready by late 2027, just in time for the rumored release window of the next consoles from Sony and Microsoft.

Yeah, we don’t have the dev kits for those yet. But that’s what we heard and I think that’s in our plans, because we want to be on as many platforms as possible..

I must finish with an inquiry on your stance on AI. Are you using it to help make the game?

I think the only AI we use is when we’re iterating. Like, for example, we say okay, we want this character to be a female salesperson, and then we’ll try to use AI to go online to search for different models and stuff like that, and then after that, we just do it ourselves. I think overall, our developers don’t want to use AI too much. First of all, you don’t see a lot of Asian steampunk examples out there, so the examples that AI
gives us are weird if I can put it that way. So, a lot of the stuff we actually have to think about ourselves and start from scratch. Overall, that’s helped us keep the world setting as well as the characters grounded. Um, so I think as far as like for us, I think we’re not using too much AI. It’s at least for now is the correct way to go.

Thank you for your time.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.