In space, no one can hear you screaming in agony as you fight for your life against DNA-copying alien lifeforms. Well, except for your fellow crew members, of course.
In the upcoming Supermassive Games title Directive 8020, the fifth entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology series, Earth is on the brink of death. While setting off on a mission to find other inhabitable planets, astronaut pilot Brianna Young (Lashana Lynch) and her team of space explorers crash land on Tau Ceti f—a real exoplanet in the Tau Ceti star system—where they are hunted by a terrifying extraterrestrial that can mimic its prey. To help the crew survive—or meet their untimely demise–players’ choices in terms of relationship building and skills at evading other terrors that roam the planet determine where the story takes you. The series is expected to drop on our atmosphere on October 2 for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.
Here, creative director Will Doyle speaks with Deadline about developing scares that focus on “humanity as a virus,” a new combat system and casting Lashana Lynch.
DEADLINE: The Supermassive Games brand is known for its quick-time events and multilinear choices. Talk about the new additions to Directive 8020.
WILL DOYLE: There’s live combat this time around. We make horror games and want to scare people. We’re trying to increase the danger as much as possible. So that’s the reason we added this element in addition to thinking that nothing gets your heart pumping more than when you’re in direct control, on the sticks, and moving your character while there’s something out there prowling about trying to kill you.
In this game, you don’t have a gun or anything like that to defend yourself, so it’s not about fighting monsters; it’s about evading them. When you do come up against these creatures, it’s all about stealth. It’s about staying in the shadows, trying not to make noise, and avoiding detection by letting your flashlight or anything else be seen. You must hide until you get past it.
Directive 8020
Supermassive Games
DEADLINE: What was the biggest challenge in creating this game?
DOYLE: I think we’ve added a lot to this one. So, compared to our previous Dark Pictures, we took the time to examine each of our individual systems and rebuild some of them from the ground up. So, adding in stealth meant that we had to look at the character controls again. As you play, you’ll see that the character controls are a lot smoother than in our previous games. The camera’s under full player control; it’s much closer to other action/adventure games. That was completely rebuilt from the ground up. And then getting the stealth working was a big thing. We have a bunch of other new features, too, for example, a feature called Turning Points.
DEADLINE: What does that mean?
DOYLE: We have a big, branching story. In our games, you control multiple characters. Everyone can live, everyone can die, and there’s a whole load of different outcomes to the story. So, what Turning Points is available on pause at any time in the game you can see a visual map of the game. You’ll be able to see all the beats of the story portrayed as a flow chart with your path taken through it shown. And then, at any time, you can rewind to these points. We did this for a couple of reasons. One is to help people see all the content we make. We know people play through our games and then often give it multiple shots to come back in and try to find out all the different branches. So, it’s just really showing players that there’s an easier way to access these different points.
DEADLINE: Every time I play a Supermassive Game, I think about how stressful it must be to create these hundreds of outcomes as a team. How do you all process that?
DOYLE: It is bonkers. Using Turning Points as an example, this is a condensed, simplified version of what’s actually happening. So, within each of those story nodes, there’s actually a whole different branch of the game. Within that, you could have different characters, alive or dead, just within that one node. We use a tool that we’ve developed internally, called the Storyboard Tool, which allows us to visually map out something similar to this but much more complex in terms of how the story unfolds. Initially, we sit down and think about the big branches of the story. It’s like moving index cards around in a way. It’s a lot, but it’s very fun. When I was a kid, I used to be really into the Fighting Fantasy book series. They were choose-your-own-adventure books, where you turned to different pages to get different story results. So, I’ve always loved that way of looking at stories and figuring out how we can break them down and give the player agency to have different endings. It’s always been a big thing for me.
DEADLINE: The star power in Supermassive Games is also off the charts. This time, you have Lashana Lynch. Talk more about when you approached her. What did this collaboration look like?
DOYLE: When we cast our games, it’s similar to making a movie. We go through casting agencies and everything. As a studio, we pride ourselves on big, cinematic games that have star power heft behind them to make players go, “Wow, it’s this person in this game?” But even then, we pinched ourselves when we got Lashana. She’s big. She’s in The Day of the Jackal, The Woman King, Captain Marvel and the 007 franchise. She’s getting bigger and bigger. And she was already big when we acquired her for this, so we got really lucky. She was brilliant.
In this story, Earth is in real trouble, and the characters are looking for a new homeland for humanity. So, the whole cast is taken from different nationalities. You’ve got Brits, Dutch, Americans and all sorts. Lashana is British, so we were looking for a talented British talent for that, and it’s just amazing that we could get her; she was so gracious and game for everything.
Supermassive Games
DEADLINE: While I think diversity in gaming is getting better, there undoubtedly remains a lot of contention in the gaming fandom surrounding female-led games, especially Black female-led games. What were some conversations about this on the backend?
DOYLE: Diversity is absolutely important to us. We primarily wanted to tell a story, as I mentioned before, about the whole world being in danger and a crew of astronauts from across the world coming together to save humanity. So, we came at it as a story first. Diversity is important and like, if we’re living in a world where we can’t have a female Black lead, I don’t want to live there. We’re so proud of what we’ve done.
DEADLINE: When I was playing, I got cinematic vibes from The Thing, Annihilation and Alien. What were the inspirations for Directive 8020?
DOYLE: Yeah, there’s quite a few inspirations. I’ve always been a massive fan of horror and sci-fi horror. For me, as a kid, I remember that my babysitter let me and my brother watch Alien. She shouldn’t have done it, but it blew me away. And that’s probably my favorite film, along with Aliens, Covenant and Prometheus. All the films in that world informed a lot of the look of the game. The Thing definitely was the premise of it a bit. Another was Event Horizon, which was a messed up film, so that’s where some of the dark nastiness comes from.
We also like cosmic horror, which is this idea that the universe is huge and unforgiving and we’re just little specks of dust in it. So, there’s a bit of that. There’s a really fun thing that happens in this story where we’re going to this other world, which we presume is empty, and when we get there, we realize actually, there’s something living there, and we’re the aliens to that planet. It’s about humanity as a virus, in a way, spreading across the stars. There are loads of themes bubbling away in this one.
DEADLINE: What are you most excited for fans to experience with this game?
DOYLE: I always look upon it as we have two groups of fans here crossing over. We’ve got people who are really interested in the story, and we’ve got people who really like the creeping around in the dark aspect. And we’ve elevated both of those areas. We’ve got the threats that you face in this game and more action in it, and then we’ve got all of the character stuff that you know and love from our games and branching stories and all of that’s aided by the Turning Point system for narrative fans to see the story broken up.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
