The shooter we now know as Fuse, and which was formerly known as Overstrike, looks like a reasonably realistic third-person shooter. The first time we saw it, though, it was a little more cartoony. Which apparently is nowhere near as cartoony as it was originally.
“The game started out with a much more stylised and campy direction. We were actually going for something on the level of Ratchet & Clank, except with humans”, Insomniac Creative Director Brian Allgeier tells IGN. “Maybe it was going to appeal to gamers who, we thought at the time, might be in their late teens. The industry’s changed quite a bit… We would focus test the game in front of a lot of gamers, and get their opinion. These are people that regularly play PlayStation 3 and Xbox games. We started to discover that everyone thought this was a game for their younger brother. We would hear this from 12-year-olds. So we decided that we needed to make a game that had an older appeal.”
He goes on to say “that’s kind of the reason for the delay. It’s like moving the herd of elephants, or turning the ship. Just turning a massive ship into a different direction and charting a new course.”
Now, Overstrike’s first trailer was nowhere near “campy” or “Ratchet & Clank”, so I’m assuming that was the game’s starting point before setting off on the long creative voyage where we now find it, perhaps slightly adrift, today.
It’s important to remember that games change art styles all the time while they’re early in development. What’s notable about Overstrike/Fuse’s metamorphosis is that it’s done so publicly.
Always Independent: The Story of Insomniac Games [IGN, via Tagg9 @ NeoGAF]
Top image courtesy of Giant Bomb
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