Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is inching nearer to its December 9 release and Microsoft is releasing a deep dive trailer about the gameplay.
I had a chance to preview the Indiana Jones game recently in San Francisco (my preview is here) and while there I interviewed game designer Jens Andersson of Machine Games, which made the game for Microsoft’s Bethesda division.
The deep dive trailer shows off the gameplay — where you use stealth or action, the whip or the pistol — to make your way through a grand action adventure that could be one of the the biggest mass appeal games this holiday season. It debuts on Windows and the Xbox Series X/S, and it will be on the PlayStation 5 in the spring of 2025.
The Machine Games crew wanted to make a true Indy adventure, a game that is rich with detail, full of intriguing environments and hidden secrets, exotic places, good puzzles to solve and gameplay that will bring the resourcefulness out of every player. It combines stealth, action, story and exploration.
Machine Games is an interesting choice of developer for this game. They had created an amazing run with the Wolfenstein first-person shooter series where you were able to kill Nazi soldiers in the most gruesome ways. But now they’re in charge of the family-friendly mainstream property of Indiana Jones — where you still kill Nazis. Do the Swedes really have the sense of humor needed for an Indy game?
The team analyzed the tone and the narrative beats when it comes to capturing the comedy of the Indiana Jones series. The tone has to shift between scenes that have a lot of action or suspense to those that have a lot of humor.
“The most appealing thing was just being able to work on such an iconic, classic IP,” game designer Jens Andersson told me at Gamescom. He added later, “It was obvious early on that certain aspects we might have indulged in earlier projects wouldn’t be a good fit for this project …. This time around it’s more of a Machine Games adventure, rather than a Machine Games shooter. It’s still very much a Machine Games game.”
The stakes are high. If all goes well, the action-adventure title could be the biggest form of entertainment in the Indiana Jones universe on any medium. And it is one of the things that will help Microsoft in its competition with console market leader Sony as well as nimble rival Nintendo.
The game — the first one since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 2003 — is set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). That setting tells me that Bethesda and partner Lucasfilm Games are going for a cross-generational strategy, catering to older gamers and their offspring or just brand new fans. This is one of the big games coming for Microsoft in a year when there aren’t any blockbuster adventure titles in Sony’s lineup.
Diving into the story
The story follows archaeologist Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford in the films and voiced by Troy Baker in the games) in 1937 as he tries to decipher the mysteries of the Great Circle, which shows that mysterious sites around the world are connected in a perfect circle when drawn around the globe.
During this time, Jones has left his fiancée, Marion Ravenwood, the lead female character in the first Indy movie. He investigates the theft of an artifact by going to the Vatican, and he realizes that sites of interest around the world form a perfect circle around the globe. Indy and Gina Lombardi (voiced by Alessandra Mastronardi) race against rival archaeologist Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis), who tries to manipulate them and find the secrets for the Nazis instead.
Players control Indy, who is paired with Gina Lombardi, an Italian investigative reporter. During the recent Gamescom trailer, we learn she is looking for her lost sister. As they uncover clues, they learn they’re unraveling a much bigger conspiracy.
I suggest you check out the trailer and then see would Andersson and I talked about. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: In these levels you’re showing here, is there a point you want to get across?
Jens Andersson: Kind of? Maybe this is something we created after the fact, but Marshall College really shows off that this is an adventure game. The interaction in the Vatican shows the infiltration, the stealth, the combat. You’re forced to take that on. And then we’re showing Giza to show, these are the open-ended areas of the game. I’m not sure if it was intended that way, but the only thing that’s not represented here from the game is the roller-coaster set pieces. I don’t know if you got to a proper puzzle in Giza, but we tried to show a lot of variety in the content you got to play. I think this represents it well.
GamesBeat: It felt like you could stay in these areas for a long time. But there’s a speedy gameplay track you could follow to go straight through.
Andersson: That’s absolutely true. It’s kind of why we’re not giving the number of hours for this game. We have people who just do the minimum, and that means they miss more than half of the content in the game. That’s okay, because it’s a big game. But there’s a lot of variety to how much time people invest in it depending on their play style.
That’s also why we have this revisit feature that you weren’t allowed to use this time. After you finish the game, you can go back and keep progressing. For me that’s very important, because that allows you to get all the content you want to enjoy in the game, even if you just made a beeline through the story.
GamesBeat: For Giza, you outlined how you could go through that map, but the way it looks, you could just randomly explore as well.
Andersson: We have three of these bigger areas in the game. You saw Sukhotai and you saw the Vatican as well. These are beefier parts of the game. They all have a different structure. In Giza we set you out early and we give you these points on the map. Here are the locations of the stone steles. By going after those you stumble on these bigger adventure elements. That’s the setup for Giza, but in the Vatican it’s a bit different, and in Sukhotai it’s different again.
GamesBeat: The stone steles, is that the main mission?
Andersson: That’s the main mission, yes. Getting those takes you to the next story mission. Our goal here is to make it clear to the player what they need to do to progress the story, but then let them loose. Do what you want. Pick up the journal if you’re not sure what the game wants you to do, but you’re encouraged to just go in a different direction and find a mystery. And it varies a lot throughout the game. The commonality is just that we want to encourage you to explore, but we also want to let you know what to do if you just want to progress the story.
GamesBeat: The whip isn’t so much a knockout weapon. It’s more of a distraction.
Andersson: The whip is a lot of things. It should be, because it’s such an important, iconic tool for Indy. We’ve tried to make sure it finds a use in all different styles of gameplay – traversals, scaling walls, stuff like that. For stealth you can use it as a distraction. I don’t know how much you experimented in combat, but you can disarm people with it. You can pull people in. There are also adventure books that allow you to expand the repertoire of what the whip can do.
GamesBeat: Is there some way you would have to figure out dogs? I came across one guard dog. Can you trick them in some way?
Andersson: No, you basically need to scare it away. You can use the whip, or just use the revolver.
GamesBeat: The sand falling in the video, is that in Giza?
Andersson: Yes, it’s one of the trap rooms in Giza. It’s part of the main storyline. We tried to vary up things quite a bit: having these kinds of story elements, having these roller-coaster sections, having these slower-paced sections. This is a typical trap room, like you see in the movies. “Oh, crap, I did it again!” There’s a lot of those moments in the game. This is one where the sand falls in. I really like that section. It looks very nice in the video, where you’re rushing out. As you now know, it’s not a roller-coaster game throughout. But that’s still an important part of what makes Indiana Jones.
GamesBeat: (I noted that I got a bit nauseous at the preview; Andersson wondered if it might be the size of the screens that affected me). Back to the motion sickness part, if you’re at 30 frames per second, is that affected at all? I wonder if it’s a bit too slow in some parts, and that throws your body off.
Andersson: The game is running–I don’t know about this PC, but it should be running at 60 frames per second. That’s how it’s going to run on the Xbox when we launch there. Obviously depending on your PC you’ll get different frame rates. Absolutely, frame rate does affect motion sickness. You want to run at a lower frame rate if you don’t want to get motion sick. I’m not completely sure how it will work for everyone, but there are options for that. It’s different with screens and VR, especially with this big screen in your field of view.
GamesBeat: You can turn on something that tells you where the puzzles are, or how to solve them. Can you flip that down when you get stuck, and then flip it back up?
Andersson: Oh, yes. There’s a bunch of aids that you have there. I don’t know what difficulty you ran on, but you set it on light, in adventure mode we always show the objective on screen. You have a marker in the world for where you need to go. A more classic video game style with a little more hand-holding, that option is available to you. For puzzles, there’s a simpler setup for puzzles on the light adventure difficulty. In the Marshall College puzzle, for example, some of these artifacts are pre-placed if you play on light difficulty. You only need to place one or two. Finally, there’s the camera. No matter what difficulty, you can pull it up and photograph things and get these hints.
It’s been important for us to be able to make challenging puzzles, but at the same time solve the issue where we don’t want players to get stuck. That’s what has dumbed down puzzles in triple-A games otherwise. They’re so afraid of players getting stuck. They focus on the cinematic aspects of the puzzle rather than the cerebral.
GamesBeat: Usually I just have one of my kids come in and solve the puzzle for me.
Andersson: The camera system is the perfect go-to now.
GamesBeat: How do you feel about getting so close to the end now?
Andersson: Tired. But compared to the rest of the team, I have the benefit of spending my time watching players. We’re bringing in external testers now. They get to play the game and I spend my days watching that and sending reports to the team. I get to see the game through the eyes of actual players. The rest of the team still gets to see it from their bug database list. They get to see everything that’s broken and I get to see everything that’s working.
I’m a couple of weeks ahead of the rest of the team in that sense, and I’m starting to feel very optimistic about this thing. There are still bugs, but people who spend time with the game start to engage with the game in a very nice way. They start to explore. It’s a very slow-paced game in many ways, but there’s a richness to it. Once you start to get over thinking, “I just need to advance,” you start to enjoy it. You take in the sights. You start reading the notes. A lot of people just click through initially, but then they settle down a bit and start to play the game–I won’t say play it as it was meant to be played, but play it in a way that makes the game shine.
For some people, they play that way from the starting point. For some people it takes a couple of hours. But spending time with the game makes the game better with every hour that you play. That’s what I’ve seen so far. That makes me very optimistic about it.
GamesBeat: In the blue tent there was more conversation than I expected.
Andersson: Yes, it’s a long stretch of exposition there.
GamesBeat: How often does that happen between destinations?
Andersson: The demo breaks up the pacing a bit. You’re coming from a really long stretch of gameplay in the previous chapter. This is a new chapter, new stuff, lots of story. The game does that. It goes up and down. You’ll get to experience that when the game is finished.
GamesBeat: In Santangelo, from reading other things–I believe there’s a secret passageway to the Vatican?
Andersson: That’s correct. You actually get to walk through that one. It speaks to all the research going into this game. It’s almost sad, I feel, in some ways, because there’s so much–I remember going to one of the level designers. “Hey, can we change this? It doesn’t really work. Can’t we have a whip climb here instead?” They said, “Well, but then it won’t look like the real thing.” “What? What do you mean?” Then they pull out this photo. It’s identical to how it looks in real life. I had no idea that it was all based on a real place.
I wish there was something we could do to highlight that better without breaking immersion, pointing out how much accuracy there is in the game. Maybe for the DLC. Assassin’s Creed has their educational mode for a version of that. “This actually happened! Here’s the history around it.” We have so much stuff that could benefit from something like that as well. People will have to discover it themselves for now.
That’s one of the coolest things we can create, I think. In Giza, I don’t know if you saw it, but in front of the Sphinx there’s this stone tablet called the green stele. It’s an actual artificat that exists there. We’re building some gameplay around it. My hope is that if people go there in real life and look at it, they’ll think, “Oh, I know what I can do here!” Those kinds of things are always awesome when you can pull them off.
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