Paweł Kowalewski is one of the game designers behind the recently unveiled Shadow Warrior 3. Returning to the linear style first seen in the first game of the reboot trilogy, Shadow Warrior 3 looks to take tricks from the last game and layer them onto a straightforward adventure. However, while the levels may go from A to B, the enemies that series protagonist Lo Wang must face are anything but every day. A whole host of demonic foes stand in Lo Wang’s way, and he uses a mixture of swords, sorcery, and shotguns to slay them.
Shadow Warrior 3 is Flying Wild Hog’s fourth FPS release, and it leans closer to the style they introduced in their cyberpunk shooter Hard Reset. Shadow Warrior 2 featured an expanded loot system and procedurally generated levels, making it lean more towards Borderlands than the old school FPS of yesteryear. While the game was a success for everyone involved, its clear that the dramatic change in direction wasn’t the best fit for the Shadow Warrior name.
Following Shadow Warrior 3‘s gameplay trailer that aired during the Devolver Direct presentation, Pawel sat down with Screen Rant to discuss what the team at Flying Wild Hog brought forward from the procedurally generated maps of Shadow Warrior 2. He also shared the origins of some of Shadow Warrior 3‘s new systems and the goals that led to adding verticality to the franchise formula.
Shadow Warrior 3 seems like another pretty dramatic change of direction for the series. I was curious, what did the team learn coming out of Shadow Warrior 2 and the reaction to its different style of gameplay? How does that apply to what you’re done with the new game?
As far as the reaction goes, the reactions for Shadow Warrior 2 were pretty positive. Mostly. People liked this new direction and we also liked it. We really loved that new approach. Random level generation, the more complex loot system and upgrading your character.
However, when we’ve been talking about the game, especially before we started making the third one, we felt that we had lost a bit of that story element. That focus on this over the top adventure that the first Shadow Warrior kind of had. Especially given this cool relationship between Lo Wang and his sidekick. So we’ve been revisiting Shadow Warrior and our first game, which was Hard Reset. It was also a homage to the the old school shooters.
We also looked closely again at the classic Shadow Warrior and we realized, when you are working with a franchise that has some sort of legacy to it, we need to use the certain ingredients without which this franchise cannot exist. So that’s what we decided. We knew what kind of story we want to tell with this game, we knew what kind of gameplay features we want to make and you know compelling pros and cons we all agreed within the company that going with the linear campaign and a focus on a single player adventure is going to be the best approach.
It makes sense, and it looks like it’s going to be a good setup.
Especially having such a charismatic protagonist as Lo Wang, we really want his personality to shine.
One of the things that stick out in the gameplay is the weapons system. You have executions that are reminiscent of Glory Kills from Doom, but then you also get a powerful weapon out of it. Some of them are actual weapons, then there’s some like this ice shard that freezes people. What’s the balance between the two, and is there an even greater variety than that?
First of all, we wanted to have finishing moves in Shadow Warrior. We wanted to have them ever since Shadow Warrior 1, but for various reasons, this was one of the features that we said “Okay, we will make it in the next one.” That moment finally came with Shadow Warrior 3. Finishing moves, as a feature, were commonly used in third-person games. They have become more popular in first-person shooters as well. We thought, “We’re kind of late to the party, let’s make something cool about it that players haven’t seen before.”
So the whole idea is that each enemy that we are designing has some unique trick. A weapon that the enemy is using, a certain magical attack. Any kind of unique ability that makes this enemy stand out. What you can do when performing a finisher is not only observe this flashy over the top animation, but you also acquire that enemy’s unique trick.
We have this huge enemy who has like this hammer-like hand. So you hit the bone of his forearm and you take it as a and use it as a weapon. Each enemy in the game has that kind of unique trait that you can inherit for this. These are not the weapons that will land in your player loadout. You can use them for like 20 30 seconds then they break and you go back to your default weapons until you finish off an enemy again.
When you say every enemy, do you mean even the fodder guys, the guys with barrels and enemies like that?
Yes, we haven’t shown everything in this demo, but every enemy you can be finished off and you can acquire something.
Considering this over-the-top arsenal of weapon rewards, how do you balance the player’s standard arsenal to keep up?
We started with the basic weapons. Even before we began implementing the finishing moves and those abilities, we knew that the weapon prototypes from the player loadout are interesting and have a purpose. We want to teach the players when they should be using each particular weapon. They don’t have to, but if they see that a weapon is effective, that’s the weapon that should deal with certain types of enemies. So every weapon has that purpose.
I think that the the railgun is quite a good example. This is a very powerful weapon, and you need to charge it for a while before you can take a shot. However, if you damage anything, you’ll deal massive damage. So it’s a good weapon against bigger enemies. But it’s also an effective weapons because of its piercing ability. So it’s also very good to deal with lesser enemies running towards you. Very often, two or three of them will be running in a straight line. With a single shot, you can take out multiple enemies at once.
We want every weapon to have that kind of purpose, you just have to play with it and find those windows of opportunity to use the weapons the most efficiently.
I feel like the combat arenas look smaller than they were in Shadow Warrior 2. Tell me about that change and how it affects the level design.
The second Shadow Warrior was basically made from these larger blocks that were connected together to form this bigger level and give you that experience of a semi-open world. In Shadow Warrior 3, it’s not like the combat is only in the combat arenas, but each level has perhaps like three or four of them where you have bigger encounters and then you exit the arena and you proceed through traversal sections where the encounters are optional. You’ll be fighting lesser enemies, but there’s still a lot going on outside the combat space.
Right. And in both the traversal and the combat arenas, it feels like the environment plays a big part in the combat. You can see guys fall to their deaths as you create a platform to wall run, and there’s the huge showpiece at the end with the sawblades. It’s a lot of over-the-top action overall. If you had to pick one thing in that vein that hasn’t really been on display from the game, what would it be?
The coolest thing about the original Shadow Warrior that is over the top in general is the melee combat. That isn’t something we were focusing on too much in this demo, as we wanted to put more focus on the newer features like wall-running, the grappling hook, and the finishing moves. But yeah, we approached the subject of melee, close-range, a bit differently this time around.
Right now, the katana has its own separate attack button, so the playstyle involves switching between your last used firearm and your sword, and it all depends on the button you’re pressing. The transition between playstyles is basically seamless, and it feels more like first-person Devil May Cry.
You can also see the damage to the opponents and the world as you’re hacking and slashing.
Yeah! This is actually an evolution of the system we came up with during the second Shadow Warrior. In that game, you could also rip chunks off enemies body or shoot them so you could see through them. So this is a system that comes back, but it’s a second iteration of that system.
You said earlier that the finishing moves were something you’ve wanted to do since the first Shadow Warrior. What about the grappling hook and the verticality? Is that something that came up for this game specifically or is it something that came up in the past as well?
Verticality is also an evolution of something from Shadow Warrior 2. After Shadow Warrior, when we’ve come up with this reimagined version of Lo Wang, this Asian hero using a sword, we always thought about him like a ninja. That’s why we added dashing in the first game, which wasn’t very popular at the time. But, it was very useful in combat and it fit the personality of the character. In Shadow Warrior 2, we knew we wanted to add some elements to the movement. So we added double jumps, aerial dashes, wall jumping, jumping from one rooftop to another.
For Shadow Warrior 3, we started thinking about what kind of features we could add in order to give the players that ultimate ninja experience. So once again, we’ve opened our drawer with various ideas from the second on. I remember that wall running and the grappling hook were briefly talked about during development of the second one, but finally, now that we know we have this linear linear level structure, we are more confident about implementing such a future in the game.
That makes sense. And I feel like stuff like the dashes has been integrated into FPS games more and more since that first game.
Yeah, when we started developing Shadow Warrior 3, there was one term that we come up with when we were establishing the pillars. We wanted the game to feel like a ninja playground. So, all of the combat tools that you have access to, all of your movement, we wanted to give you that ultimate experience, like you’re entering a team park for ninjas and you play around with all your toys.
As far as I’ve seen, that mission was accomplished. To end things off, have you been enjoying any other games during the development of Shadow Warrior 3?
Actually, I’ve been revisiting Dishonored 2. I really missed the game, but I recently watched material about Arkane Studios and I felt that longing for the franchise. I’ve got all three games and I’m once again entering this world. It’s amazing.
Shadow Warrior 3 is aiming for a release in 2021 on PC.