Inspiration is everywhere you look. Did you know that the new Sonic redesign came about through Tyson Hesse, an American illustrator who in the past has drawn Sonic fan art? How about Fifty Shades of Grey? It's a Twilight fanfiction with the names swapped out. And the Forgotten City? A creative Skyrim mod transformed into a game of its own.
The Forgotten City was originally a famous Skyrim mod, which added a whole new settlement to the game along with new characters and a mysterious time-bending narrative. It was all such a departure from what you might expect of Skyrim that it proved hugely popular with the community, and now its creator, Nick Pearce, has set up his own development studio – named Modern Storyteller – and is releasing The Forgotten City as a full game.
We've had the opportunity to talk to Pearce about the development of The Forgotten City, how it went from mod to game, and how the Unreal Engine helped Modern Storyteller time travel. In-game, we mean – it looks good, but maybe not that good.
But first, if you hadn't heard about The Forgotten City until now, here's a quick summary by Pearce himself: "It's an open-world, story-driven adventure with RPG elements. As with the mod, the player discovers the ruins of an ancient underground city, travels back in time, meets the city's inhabitants, and tries to prevent the city's destruction. In doing so, they become caught in a Groundhog Day-style time loop, which they can cleverly exploit to try to change the city's fate." That fate can go several ways, with the original mod having multiple endings. If you've already played it though, don't fear – the new game has some original content and twists of its own.
In fact, if you played the original Forgotten City, you may not recognise the new game at all. The story has been transplanted to an ancient Roman setting just for starters. Why? Well, for a few reasons. "First, the core story – which involves a group of people being collectively punished because of one person's sins – meshes incredibly well with ancient Roman mythology," Pearce explains. "In particular the story about Roman gods wiping an entire city off the map because its inhabitants failed a secret morality test."
Second, Pearce liked the "bittersweet" feeling of exploring an authentic Roman city, being reminded of its beauty, and feeling that if such a civilisation as that can fail, "then perhaps ours can too".
And finally, "the story challenges players to grapple with difficult philosophical questions in a high-stakes setting where their answer could have life and death consequences. It asks questions like: are there any absolute moral truths which transcend time and place, or does morality simply boil down to 'when in Rome, do as the Romans do?'" So if you've already played the mod, the game is filled with "so much new content […] it'll feel like a new experience."
The Forgotten City was made from scratch in Unreal Engine 4 – no assets have been ported over from the mod. This allowed the team a lot of freedom in what they made, and Pearce to give proper attention to the best bits of the mod. "My goal has been to figure out all the things people liked about the mod and level them up," he explains. "For example, it has a new engine, a new setting, new story beats, twists and endings, and all-new art, voice-acting, animations, sound, and music."
Pretty much all Pearce's experience in game development came from working on The Forgotten City mod, and thanks to that experience he found Unreal "pretty intuitive to learn." That said, "the difference between modding and creating a game from scratch is like the difference between renovating your home and building a new home from scratch." Therefore he hired a specialist Unreal programmer to help him with the project, Alex Goss, who has been able to add some impressive new features to The Forgotten City.
"Unreal is incredibly powerful in the sense that if you can imagine something, you can probably do it," Pearce says. "In The Forgotten City, there's a mysterious law called The Golden Rule, where if even one person commits a 'sin', everyone will die. I said to my programmer, Alex: 'I know this is probably impossible, but I'd love it if we could make it so when The Golden Rule is broken, liquid gold creeps over the bodies of the city's inhabitants until they end up as solid gold statues.' His response was 'Yeah, we can do that.' And I think he did it in a day or something. The result is awesome."
Modern Storyteller has also found the Level Streaming feature of Unreal Engine helps create some of the jaw-dropping moments in The Forgotten City. This feature asynchronously loads and unloads levels during play in a way that decreases memory usage. The effect is that worlds can more seamlessly come together in a continuous fashion, letting the player do a little more exploring, and a little less waiting.
"We found that Unreal's level streaming system – which is designed to load levels in dynamically so the player doesn't have to wait for loading screens – is perfect for time travel too. By dividing up the game world into persistent and timeline-specific layers, we're able to quickly switch the player between timelines at will, wherever they are in the world, resulting in some pretty awesome 'wow' moments!"
As yet, we still don't know exactly when The Forgotten City will be launching, but Modern Storyteller is still targeting 2019. For now, we can play the mod and dream about a release date and hope our sins don't turn us to gold.
The Forgotten City will launch sometime later this year and you can learn more on its Steam page. Unreal Engine 4 development is now free.
In this sponsored series, we're looking at how game developers are taking advantage of Unreal Engine 4 to create a new generation of PC games. With thanks to Epic Games and Modern Storyteller.