Latest news with #Brothers:ATaleofTwoSons
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘No micro transactions, no bullshit': Josef Fares on Split Fiction and the joy of co-op video games
There aren't many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelight's Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly firy and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, 'It doesn't matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that's refreshing – but isn't it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!' Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares' adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war. Twenty years, five feature films and three video games later, Zozo was just one of many cathartic endeavours for Fares. 'I've always been a storyteller,' he says. 'When I was young, I'd draw my own comics. The first time I got a camera I borrowed it from a friend's father, and that was that.' With no formal training, he learned by doing. 'I started to make my own movies in the early 90s … and I just kept creating. I made 50 short movies until I did my first feature. So there was a lot of trial and error – just doing, doing, doing, doing until I got it right.' It's this DIY, inquisitive approach that guided Fares towards game-making, his pivot into interactive entertainment born from that same unflappable curiosity. 'I've always been a huge gamer,' Fares says. ' I was lucky. I had the first [console] in Lebanon, an Atari. I played Pong and I was like, wow! I was just utterly fascinated with it. Games have always been my first love.' Once Fares finished work on his fifth feature film, a friend encouraged him to pursue his love of games, and convinced him to participate in a student-led game jam. 'I was so excited! I came up with the concept of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons the same night' Fares says. ' I couldn't sleep that night because I was like, I want to do this! I came up with how you control the two brothers, how it feels to play, everything. All in that same night.' He soon took his evolving prototype to a respected game studio in Stockholm – Starbreeze. 'They were like, 'Well, maybe you can do this as a kind of test project.' But I'm like, fuck a test, I'm going to do the whole thing!' That passion fuelled a year and a half of intense work, with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons being released in 2013. The co-op adventure about siblings embarking on a dangerous journey to find a cure for their sick father has now sold over 10m copies. Despite its success, many in Sweden were baffled by his artistic pivot, a transition for Fares that felt natural. 'With movies, I came to a point where I felt that the passion really wasn't there. Passion lead me to video games. It was very challenging being new in the industry and coming in with a different approach – wanting to create new mechanics. Today it's different because [people] listen to me, but it was very hard in the beginning.' After Brothers' success, Fares started his own gaming studio, Hazelight – a team focused on making story-driven co-op games, a surprisingly rare proposition in our online age. 'Hazelight started because me and a friend tried – and failed – to find a game where it's not just drop-in, drop-out [co-op] but something that you can play together and share a story experience. We couldn't believe that no one was doing this. It's why we don't just make games with a split-screen element at Hazelight – all our games are designed and written right from the beginning to be co-op.' Much like Hideo Kojima, Fares can't code, but instead assumes the role of writer and director on his games, laying out the vision for the story and gameplay mechanics, entrusting his talented team to bring his vision to life. Fast forward 12 years, and a new Hazelight game is now a massive event. Fares' most recent release was the colourful co-op platformer It Takes Two, about two parents who find themselves magically miniaturised and must fight through their home to reach their young daughter. Highly acclaimed by critics, it won game of the year at the 2021 Game Awards. Now Fares is previewing his latest co-op extravaganza, Split Fiction. Much like Hazelight's previous work, it's a thrill ride of exhilarating successive set pieces. As dual protagonists Mio and Zoe battle their way across hostile re-creations of their own sci-fi and fantasy novels, each level throws new ideas at the player with Nintendo-esque abandon. 'Variation and pacing – how things shift all the time, I think that comes from my movie background,' Fares says. 'Other people say, 'If you have this crazy scene, why do you only use it for 10 minutes?' Because if you have a cool scene in a movie, you don't repeat it just because it's cool and costs a lot of money!' Despite his undeniable talent for storytelling, Fares says he finds interactive narratives far more difficult to construct than their Hollywood counterparts. 'It's way harder to make games, because games are interactive and movies are passive. Movies spend much longer in production, writing, everything too – they just have more time for you to figure it all out. I always joke that if I want to go on vacation, I'm going to make a movie.' 'I believe that we're still figuring out how to actually tell a story in games,' he continues. 'But that's the fun part! Even the movie industry is now realising that great shit is happening in video games.' What Fares finds less fun, however, is the direction in which the games industry has been heading in recent years. 'I don't like live service games – I think that they're bad for the industry,' he says. 'I understand that money is important, and that we live in a capitalist society, but creativity and money have to meet somewhere in the middle. It can't be either too much creativity or too much money. We should focus on pushing our medium forward: no micro transactions, no bullshit, just pure gaming love – because, ultimately, great games will do well.' Split Fiction is released on PC, PS5 and Xbox on 6 March
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Split Fiction Hands-On: A Fun Co-Op Adventure to Grow (and Test) Friendships
What's better than playing a game as a cyberpunk ninja, shapeshifting ape, flying dragon and hopping hot dog? Playing it with a friend on the couch next to you -- and relying on each other to move from one wacky, earnest adventure to another. In a warehouse in Hollywood, California, I sat down next to a stranger and played a few hours of EA's Hazelight Studios' next game, Split Fiction. By the end of our session, which capped off with a particularly grueling pinball boss, we high-fived and shook hands. Bonded through narrow escapes and clutch wins, we were no longer strangers. Collaboration has been the appeal of Hazelight's prior games, its 2018 debut A Way Out and its award-winning 2021 follow-up It Takes Two. But whereas those games centered on well-established relationships -- between outlaw brothers and a married couple on the brink of divorce, respectively -- Split Fiction imitates my journey: Two strangers, Zoe and Mio, are shoved together and must rely on each other to escape a series of progressively outlandish challenges. Hazelight has built a reputation for inventive mechanics in its cooperative sections and moving stories. The former make up a lot of the trailer showcases and memorable gameplay moments from past games. From my few hours playing, I can tell that Split Fiction will have a lot of those, too. The studio spends tons of time developing one-off experiences that feel cinematic, Hazelight founder and Split Fiction director Joseph Fares told me. "We have scenes [in Split Fiction] with dragons that goes on for ten minutes where they have big dragons because [the players] evolve the dragons -- and just one dragon took, like, 18 months to create," Fares said, emphasizing that Hazelight doesn't want these moments to overstay their welcome. "If you look at a great movie, you have a great scene, you don't repeat that scene, because it takes the edge out of it." While these sequences are flashy, the overarching story is just as important. Each game Fares and his teams have made has a different thematic focus regarding the relationship between the two player characters, even going back to the pre-Hazelight game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. "Every [one of our] games has a word to it: Brothers is 'sorrow,' A Way Out is 'trust,' It Takes Two is 'collaboration,' and this one's about friendships," Fares said, describing Split Fiction as a "buddy movie" featuring two entirely different strangers who grow closer as you play. "We're going to go deep into their trauma, their back stories and learn more about them." My preview kicked off at the start of Split Fiction, when Mio and Zoe show up to the same call for writers to come see their creative stories visualized by a corporation, Rader Publishing, and its cutting-edge virtual reality pod technology. But when Mio gets unnerved by the company's exploitative vibes, she stumbles into Zoe's pod -- and players are off to the races, playing through stages made of each character's genre stories. Naturally, this leads to learning the inspiration behind Mio's exciting science fiction yarns and Zoe's cozy fantasy stories. Hazelight uses this premise to put players in a roulette of scenarios, and what I saw ran a wide gamut of co-op platforming mainstays, from jumping between cybercars to shapeshifting through fantastical lakes and valleys to hopping around a grill as a hot dog (the sillier vignettes are optional side stories). With several co-op games under Hazelight's belt, Fares prided his developers not just on how much they've developed their technical tools but also in refining the variety of mechanics (that is, the unique abilities given to players in each stage) to be fun but not overstay their welcome -- which are arguably the studio's signature elements. "That is [the] tricky part with a Hazelight game: finding these mechanics that kind of feed each other and help each other and complement each other in a great way," Fares said. Hazelight has gotten better at the technical side of things too, Fares said, even if players don't see it. "I think that people forget about our games is that we have to render two screens at the same time," he noted. Still, he assured that the game will maintain 60 frames per second on consoles, even with the more complex sequences Hazelight dreamed up. As another journalist at the preview pointed out to me, Split Fiction changes these challenges as you play. In the first few chapters, Zoe and Mio separately progress through their own slices of levels, but in the later game they're actively using these mechanics to aid and rely on each other -- for example, in the fantasy shape-changing section, I used my ape form to slam different panels that blew air currents for my partner (in fairy form) to fly through. These collaborative sections required a lot of timing and coordination, and in our chat, Fares admitted that balancing mechanics for different skill levels of players is "kind of like the hardest part." Reader, I believed it: The aforementioned pinball boss, in which my partner clung to walls like Samus' morph ball while I bounced them around with giant flippers, was one of my hardest gaming challenges in recent memory. I white-knuckled through to the end after many deaths due to missed timing on my or my partner's part. While we sealed our successful partnership with a high-five at the end of our session, I could imagine lots of partner pairs straining to finish these challenging chapters -- which hopefully won't fray their out-of-game friendships in ways that other tough co-op games like Overcooked tend to do. For creators, there's always a hidden temptation to make stories about creation, which results in a range of self-reflective commentaries from novel to navelgazing. Thankfully, Split Fiction seems more interested in using creativity as a lens for exploring the relationship between Zoe and Mio. From the outset, the game's heroines voice traditional critiques of each other's favorite genres: Mio doesn't understand the cozy fantasy Zoe writes in, while Zoe dismisses Mio's action-packed science fiction. Given my preview jumped liberally between slices of the game, I didn't see much development in these attitudes, though I'd expect they'll get closer as they share more about each other as creators: "It's not only about the stories they write, it's why they write them so we will understand that their stories are related to what they have experienced in their life," Fares said. And there's some real-world topical commentary about creation, too -- specifically about AI. Early in the game, it's revealed that Rader Publishing lured Zoe, Mio and the other writers to use their immersive pod technology in order to steal all their stories. "It is a little bit of a reference to AI -- I mean, it's a big company stealing ideas, it's something we talked about when we were writing this," Fares said, adding that Hazelight began working on and writing Split Fiction three years ago. "I think most people who play it can sense it." But Fares assured me that the game's main focus is on the growing friendship between Zoe and Mio. In an industry filled with narratives about seeking revenge or slaying gods, it's a relief that Hazelight's games put the spotlight on people and how they change -- often, how they become better versions of themselves through overcoming adversity together. With the dearth of local co-op games, Hazelight's oeuvre stands out -- which Fares credits to the passion in the studio's developers. "Look, we've always had success in our games. I truly believe that when you create something out of passion, people will feel it -- they will sense the passion, they will play it, and they will love it," Fares said. Players will get their chance on March 6 when Split Fiction gets released, but it's coming with inherited goodwill as the game's predecessor It Takes Two won Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards. I'll admit I was surprised that a co-op game won such high honors, but Fares is confident in Split Fiction's chances next year: "Why not? I don't see why it can't win again."
