GamesBeat: Let’s see the demo.
Alltimes: We’ll show you an ape scene and a human scene in the demo. A bit of background to the apes—we had to create a new set of characters, because every single character in our story can live or die. There are three main ending. The apes can win, humans can win, or you can find peace. Then there are another eight variations depending on who survives, for at least 11 different endings. We want to encourage people to replay it. That’s another advantage of it being such a short game. Very few people go back and play a 10-hour experience. What we want you to do is just like watching a movie. Watch it once, then get to see it again and get different endings.
Our ape story is—they follow Koba at the end of Dawn. The battle between the apes and humans has taken place. Over the course of a year, they’ve migrated into a mountain network in the Rocky Mountains, where they think they can find sanctuary. But they’ve arrived in the spring when food is plentiful, and now winter is drawing in. Food is becoming scarce. The apes are running out of food. The leader of the ape tribe sends out his three sons to go and forage.
The eldest son, Tala, is aggressive and impulsive. It’s implied, but not made explicit, that there’s no mother there, that she’s been killed by the humans in the conflict. He has no time for humans. You play the middle son. Your story arc is all about how you deal with the conflict between the two different philosophies that exist in your family, and your divided loyalty between your brother and your father. Your brother is out for war and revenge against humans. Your father just wants to keep the tribe safe and avoid any conflict. The third son we’ll talk about when we show you the demo.
This demo starts about 20 minutes into the story. The game is split into five chapters, a five-act structure. They’re designed so that if you only want to play for 35 or 40 minutes in a session, you can cut in and out. A friend of mine just had a kid. Even two or three hours is going to be hard for him.
You’ve gone out hunting for food. Tala is in charge of the hunting party. He’s ignored your father’s orders and gone into the valley. You’ve come across cattle, which are clearly the sort of thing humans tend to look after. What happens in this first sequence—that’s you. This is your brother. It’s basically whether you agree that this is a good idea, or decide that this is going to be dangerous.
So, do you take out the humans, or just take the cattle?
GamesBeat: Can somebody play with a controller as well as a phone?
Alltimes: On PlayStation 4 you can mix and match, yes. We’re controller-neutral. That was a dialogue sequence. The thing about those, there’s no time limit. You can take as long as you like to make a decision. It’s all about majority rule, so not everyone has to agree for the game to move forward. On action choices, which is what this scene leads into, everyone has to vote and agree that they’re going to do something, because usually it involves life or death, and there’s a time limit.
We’re deliberately not going to act here. You can see that there’s a payoff even if you don’t use violence. Even if you don’t attack, Brutus will come in and take out the humans. You can try to tell him to stop, but we’re not going to do that. We will try to kill this human now, though, so we can demonstrate how it works. We’ll put haptic feedback in here as well, so you know when these things are happening.
The key thing is, whatever you do, you can’t keep everyone happy. Whatever decisions you made, Tala will or won’t be happy, Juno will or won’t be happy, and ultimately when you go back to your father, depending on what actions you’ve taken, and whether you choose to lie or not, you can’t keep him happy. Everyone has different opinions. That’s part of the trick of the game.
GamesBeat: Did you wind up with much food out of that?
Alltimes: You’ll end up with a lot of food, yeah. There’s a bunch of cattle there.
GamesBeat: But the humans will come back.
Alltimes: Exactly. This is the instant that sparks the conflict between apes and humans. The humans are set up very differently. When we started to think about who would survive 13 years after the outbreak of simian flu, we thought it would be farmers. People who could raise animals, grow crops, practical with your hands. You also realize things are going back to the 1880s, where there’s very little electricity or fuel. People ride around on horses. It almost becomes like a western, but the symbolism is all reversed. The humans are in retreat, but the apes are advancing.
The humans have taken a town at the base of the mountains and cordoned off three blocks of it, turning that into a fortified compound where they survive. The character that you play on the human side is a woman. She’s the wife of the founder and owner of the town, who’s just died and is being buried as the story starts. The point is we put you in a position of vulnerability. You have some questions over your legitimacy. You have forces that are competing to be the leader, who don’t think you’re up to it. You have to demonstrate that you’re capable of leading, and what sort of leader you’ll become.
This scene takes place after two or three skirmishes. Lots of humans have died, but you’ve caught and ape prisoner, and you think he might be able to help you. We try to present you with a dilemma. Hopefully you don’t enjoy watching apes being beaten. We know it should be quite tough for a player to watch. The instinct is to stop it. But we present the counter-argument, what Willits is saying: “You don’t want to do this? But if you don’t interrogate this ape, you could get wiped out. It happened to me. It happened to my daughter.”
Maria is the medic in the town, and she’ll always advocate non-violence, whatever happens. She’s the moral force in the story. But what we can hopefully demonstrate is that it’s not straightforward. Everyone has a legitimate viewpoint.
Here we’ve come to a tiebreaker. You’ve decided to go with him. What happens at this point is we can debate. You can convince me or I convince you. You think Willits is right.
GamesBeat: Well, we already have an indicator that there are more apes out there, and it would be good to know how many.
Alltimes: I’ll take that. You’ve convinced me. And now we have another tiebreaker. This time, if we can’t agree–everyone gets one tiebreaker. You can overrule me and have that happen, but once you’ve used yours, you won’t get it back until everyone else in the room has used theirs. Just hit that button again.
What you see here, we’re escalating the stakes and allowing you to change your mind, but this is the final choice. What are you going to do? Now, the thing is, I’m in control. I would, under normal circumstances—most people tend to be pacifists. But we tend to enjoy the “say nothing” option more than the alternative. We’re going to have to work on that sound effect some more.
So you see two very different scenes. As you go through the game, the stakes start to escalate.
GamesBeat: What’s your timing for this like?
Alltimes: It’s going to be this holiday season. We’re saying fall 2017 right now. We’re waiting to confirm some details, and then we’ll announce. Similarly, with pricing, it’ll be digital only, and it won’t be full price, but we’re waiting for Sony to give us some indications on pricing.
GamesBeat: Is this the first Planet of the Apes game in the recent franchise?
Alltimes: I think there was a Planet of the Apes game by Ubisoft, but I don’t know how they got it, because I can tell you—it’s quite an interesting story. When we went to see Fox about the Apes license, they didn’t actually own the video game rights.
When the original movies came out with Charlton Heston, it was based on a French book. There was no such thing as video games at the time, of course, so when Fox did the original movies they didn’t own the rights to make games. Somehow, a French company must have signed a deal directly with the estate that owned them. Maybe 24 hours after Dawn came out, Fox got the rights to make games based on the new movies, negotiating directly with the French estate.
GamesBeat: So Fox does the licensing now for all of the Apes movies?
Alltimes: Yeah, yeah. And now this is the first one.
GamesBeat: Do you know whether there will be more coming, from you or anybody else? It seems like quite a bit of time has passed between the revival movies and this game.
Alltimes: I think Fox is working out what to do. I’m sure they’ll want to try to—you’d have to talk to Fox about that. The key thing they wanted to do is make sure they could set it up as an ongoing franchise. The original movies, there were five or six of them. I think their hope would be that they could extend beyond this trilogy.
If you look at any of the YouTube Easter egg videos out there, in the first movie, Rise, they showed that there’s been a launch of the rocket in the original movies. In theory, if they do another trilogy, that could reconnect with the original story. Also, if you’ve seen the third movie, there’s a military group in it called Alpha and Omega. If you go back, that’s the name of the mutants in the second Heston movie. They develop the bomb that blows up the entire planet.
It doesn’t look like it on the surface, but they really are connecting the dots. Still, I don’t know what they’re going to do after this.