“Beholder 2” Developer’s Interview

[b]Please kindly introduce your team. (Maybe from the aspect of the team’s milestone,  members, any important moment you would like to share and etc.)

[/b]Alawar is an international developer and publisher of computer games, founded in 1999. The company released over 350 titles including the brands like "Farm Frenzy" and "The Treasures of Montezuma," on more than 15 platforms. Alawar Premium is a subdivision of Alawar that is developing and publishing games on Steam.

Warm Lamp Games is an in-house development studio of Alawar. It was created in 2015 specifically for developing games for Steam. The developers from WLG had previously worked at Alawar on other games for different platforms and had a strong background of experience in creating and developing successful projects for the casual games market.

[b]Where did you get the idea of “Beholder 2”? (Novel? Movie? Any historical event? Or…also, please introduce some things about your game art styles or the story design?)

[/b]

Beholder 2 is a sequel of a successful title Beholder, created by Alawar and published in Steam in November 2016. Beholder 2 inherits both the game universe and the developers’ approach to creating games, so in this interview we will be referring a lot to the original Beholder.

The original Beholder is a dystopian story about a life on an ordinary man in an imaginary totalitarian State. The protagonist Carl is a landlord who runs an apartment house and lends apartment to different people. He is also subordinate to the authorities and must spy on the tenants, peep and eavesdrop to find and report those who violate the laws and directives. Every character in the game has its own story and background, players eventually learn more about the tenants and establish emotional connections with them. Since the core feature of the game is moral choices, sooner or later players will have to decide what happens in the game; sometimes they will have to choose between reporting on a criminal or just keeping silent, but sometimes the choice will be more difficult to make (for instance, to report on a doctor who is the only person that can help your own daughter).

Beholder 2 is set in the same universe, but with a slightly different premise: this time we offer players to take up a role of a newly employed officer at the Ministry of the same totalitarian State. Players are making their way up the career ladder trying to get as far as possible and – probably – get to the top and become the new Wise Leader. As well as in the Original Beholder there will be rich storylines, thoroughly developed character and moral choices.

The inspiration was taken from the success of Beholder 2 

Speaking of the inspiration –and here we should talk about the original Beholder game – it all began with a simple idea that people always wanted to know more about what is happening behind the closed doors of their neighbours. We all want to know a little bit more about the lives of the others, and, maybe, this is the reason why tabloids are so popular, and paparazzi are so well-paid. So, we decided to make a game about spying on other people. We were thinking of a moral choice as a game feature from the very beginning of the development, but we could not decide what setting to choose to make this game feature even more important. Eventually we came up with a totalitarian State, where different people live and suffer from oppression and every now and then they have to make a choice. We wanted to create a game that would differ from what is already published by other developers, and we believe that we have succeeded.

As for Beholder 2 – it was a very logical transition. First, we showed a life of people that are oppressed by some Ministry, then we decided to show what the Ministry was. A separate good thing is after we released the original Beholder, many players asked for a sequel about a Ministry.

[b]What do you want your players to get from “Beholder 2”? And any things you wanna say to your players?

[/b]

We do not send any messages, either political or social. We do not provide you with a moral compass either. We are making games J Yes, games are entertainment, and Beholder is not quite entertaining, but still it is a game that provides a different game experience, and we are aiming at giving a player new feelings and emotions. We are afraid that our game may leave a player indifferent – that would mean that we fail. But still, we do not carry any statement. Whatever you see in our game – it’s your personal takeaway, it is your opinion, it is the beauty that you see, the beauty that is in the eye of a Beholder.

We are happy to see that our games are popular among Chinese players. We are glad to say that our decision to translate the first Beholder (and then Beholder 2) into Simplified Chinese was a right decision, and we will continue to bring more good games to Chinese players.

[b]

What comes to be the most important thing when developing your game? (the story? the audio or visual effects or anything else?)

[/b]

We are absolutely sure that a good combination of art, story, play mode and audio is highly important. Each game is different so there is no exact answer to those questions we guess.

[b]

Any difficulties when developing “Beholder 2”? [/b]

A lot of stories and details were cut due to deadlines. Unfortunately, we did have enough time to localize some quests into all languages, and we had to lessen the number of text quests in the full version. Another storyline that we had to drop was the story of Evan’s Family. They were to come to Helmer and join Evan to become a significant part of the main storyline, but again – the deadlines told us that we would be able to do this.

[b]

We know that in the“Beholder 2”, there is always a gap among money, power and reputation, which one is the most important for you?

[/b]

There is no exact answer. Money is needed to get new staff, i.e. to study new things and pay the rent. Power and reputation make you grow inside the game. So, each and every part is important but we tried to make money less important than it was in the first part.

[b]Most importantly, some players may wanna a happy ending, no blood, no wars, will it be supplemented as a DLC?

[/b]

Not for this game. We did create a VANILLA version of Beholder, the first part, especially for Chinese Government approval needs. But this game became different: you can’t have a very good ending or a very “clean” way to the positive ending – this is a dystopian game. But, again, who judges what ending is good and what is bad. They all have got a possibility to exist.