Banishers Ghosts of New Eden devs on bringing its romantic ghost story to life
I spoke to the creative team behind Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden to learn more about the journey of making a single-player RPG in the modern age.
I said in my five-star Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden review that it’s “the kind of game we don’t get very often”, referring to its nature as a staunchly single-player affair with a focus on characters, world, and story above all else. At a time when video games seem to be dominated by online-oriented, live service multiplayer titles such as Fortnite or even (to an extent) the recently released Helldivers 2, Don’t Nod Entertainment’s title centred on two ghost hunters elects to place value on weaving a good narrative – totally removed from the need to drip-feed players superfluous reasons to keep coming back. Unfortunately, what was once commonplace 10 years ago now feels refreshing.
Do live service games have a reason to exist in today’s gaming climate? Absolutely. There’s an increasing hunger for them from a particular audience that publishers would be daft to ignore – even if the market is seemingly getting more saturated month to month. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, however, feels far more old-school in its approach and is much better for it. To learn more about how Don’t Nod Entertainment crafted one of the most memorable action RPG stories I’ve played in recent years, I spoke to narrative director, Stéphane Beauverger, and creative director, Philippe Moreau, for their take on how the new titles fits into the current landscape.
Long-time Don’t Nod fans will notice that its newest release shares a lot in common with Vampyr, the studio’s 2018 game about a doctor-made-bloodsucker that also placed choice front and centre. This is where the idea for Banishers first came from. “We had this ambition to make a love story with a supernatural twist: one being dead, one being alive,” Moreau reveals. “From this very idea, we've developed all the lore of the game, the setting, the characters, the gameplay… This is the way the whole creative process usually starts at Don’t Nod: with a single idea that must be strong and unique enough to become the foundation of a new IP – and it’s often linked to the main character and his/her specificities”.
Red and Antea's strong bond is reinforced to you constantly throughout this 25-hour adventure. (Don't Nod Entertainment)Don’t Nod has tackled this many times before with the likes of Vampyr’s vampiric doctor (go figure) and Remember Me’s Memory Hacker. The goal with Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, though, was always to step up the mainstream appeal. Doing so would let it spread its unique storytelling approach to an all-new audience. This went on to greatly influence Red and Antea’s ghostly love story and make it an action RPG in the most modern sense, playing more similarly to 2018’s God of War than Vampyr or Remember Me before it.
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“We aim to create games with strong and universal themes that can be experienced by everyone,” continues Moreau. “After Vampyr, our ambition was to create a better and more accessible game, and that’s one of the reasons why we decided to build a new IP from scratch. The goal was to keep what makes Vampyr unique (investigating the lives and pasts of characters with heavy secrets) but with a different approach regarding the core design”. For all the slight similarities, unlike Vampyr, your choices in Banishers don’t affect the difficulty of the game, but rather have a narrative impact on both the central couple and the consequences for the different communities throughout the titular New Eden.
Bring me to life
The most obvious way Don’t Nod went about highlighting the importance of choice is through a unique mission type called Hauntings, where players must investigate specific cases that usually have a supernatural bent. To make these tightly contained stories as engaging as possible, the studio chose to fully lean into Red and Antea’s nature as ghost hunters.
“Especially in Western folklore, ghosts are the embodiment of regret, melancholia, and more generally of something unfinished,” Beauverger explains. “And as humans, we are very receptive to these themes. Otherwise, ghost stories would not fascinate us so much. So all we had to do, really, was to tell compelling stories about secrets to be confessed, confession to be heard, truth to be revealed, and forgiveness to be spoken… And then let the players investigate these hidden events from the past”.
The ghostly bond that can connect people together is perhaps best explored between Red and Antea themselves – the two heroes players regularly switch between when tackling hordes of the undead or traversing the North American Wilderness of the 1700s together. As soon as telling a ghost story was agreed upon collectively as the game's core concept, Don’t Nod saw it as an opportunity to explore the lengths one would go to for someone they care about. It did this by making Antea and Red not just business partners, but intimate lovers too.
“Narratively speaking, ghosts often are the embodiment of something unfinished: a secret to be told, a truth to be revealed, a vengeance to be fulfilled, a love to be confessed,” Beauverger posits. “Once we knew the players were going to control two characters in the game – one alive and the other dead – we were convinced they both had to be in love, to let each player decide how he wanted to solve the couple’s situation: to let Antea go for good, or to try to bring her back to life”. This forms the narrative backbone of the game throughout, tasking Red with either staying true to his original Banisher oath or breaking it for the purest of reasons: love. “A love story was perceived by our team as a very strong commitment for the audience”.
Helping the story of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden to be told more tightly is undoubtedly Don’t Nod’s approach to world design. Because rather than give into the mainstream temptation to go fully open-world, with objective markers sprawled out in every direction and completable in any order, New Eden and its surrounding areas aren’t as big as they initially seem. Instead, Red and Antea must explore and chip away at semi-open, more contained zones that work perfectly to host its exciting dual combat – but also prevents the story (and flow of it) from growing all the more unwieldy.
Red can choose to banish a spirt or help them ascend on peacefully, depending on your thoughts on the case. (Don't Nod Entertainment)It's not surprising, then, to learn that there was never a version of New Eden that functioned as a true open-world as seen in many Ubisoft games. “We wanted to make a semi open-world with large open areas connected by 'corridors' to help us control the pacing and the degree of freedom in exploration,” says Moreau. “It’s the perfect structure to well-balance exploration, combat and investigation which are our three game pillars. Making a true open-world is way different and it would have required developing new tools, especially for narrative-driven games”. Don’t Nod had to utilise its budget carefully too. “Regarding the scope of the game, it would have been too ambitious and probably out of control to design such a deep story in an open context”.
As somebody with an affinity for video game storytelling, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden’s narrative is one I didn’t want to end. Because in addition to online multiplayer games that deliver vast amounts of continuous fun, much like Antea, I see the value of moving on. By placing old-school single-player values onto the bones of a more modern-feeling action RPG, Don’t Nod’s latest comes across as a very complete package indeed – regardless of the ultimate outcome players get as a result of their choices. Even still, should the opportunity to return to this world present itself, Don’t Nod is ready and waiting.
“Remember Me, Vampyr, Banishers, have not been conceived as ‘one shot’ stories, but as large universes with a vast lore to be explored through different episodes,” sums up Beauverger. “Players who already enjoyed Vampyr may realize, through subtle hints left here and there in Banishers, that both games are actually taking place in the same universe”.
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