In a recent interview, the Senior Narrative Designer of Returnal discusses how Housemarque may be able to include some elements in their new, upcoming IP that they had to leave out of the development of Returnal.
A few months ago, at the beginning of March, we learned that Housemarque—the developer behind Returnal—is working on a brand-new IP. In an interview with VentureBeat, Ilari Kuittinen—CEO and Co-founder of Housemarque—admitted that they were working on a new IP while explaining that branching into multiplayer wasn’t working out for them. “We had our stint working on multiplayer games, because a few years back it seemed like you needed to have some kind of multiplayer experience,” they explained. “We tried that, and we really didn’t do it as well. But it’s early days with us starting a new game, a new IP, concepting it out. We’ll see what comes with that.”
Fast forward to today, and another interview has gone live this month, this time with Returnal’s Senior Narrative Designer, Eevi Korhonen. Though VGC confirmed with Korhonen that this upcoming game wilbe a new IP, Korhonen gave Returnal fans a bit of exciting news.
Returnal was so ambitious. We dreamt super big, but we still had to leave so much on the cutting room floor—all of these ideas and narrative systems. I’m super excited to pick up those pieces and see how those fit our new IP story.
Not only would this mean that elements from Returnal will be in the new IP, but this suggests the new IP could expand beyond the scope of what the team was able to accomplish with Returnal. In fact, Korhonen goes on to suggest this further by explaining how they’re starting from a better place than when they were building Returnal.
We didn’t quite have the handle on how big [Returnal] was going to be, building for a new platform on a new engine with a new team, all of those things require some learning. Now we have that team that has gone through the fire and learned how to build a game like Returnal. So now we get to start off stronger.
There’s no word on when we might see some new content regarding this new IP. But if it’s anything like Returnal, it’s bound to see massive success.
