Eidos Montreal’s Olivier Proulx & Mary DeMarle on Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy was today officially announced by Eidos Montreal and Square Enix. Ahead of time, Stevivor was fortunate enough to check out the upcoming single-player game and speak with Eidos Montreal about it. We below, we discuss design choices, Easter eggs and more with Mary DeMarle (Executive Narrative Director) and Olivier Proulx (Game Director). You can listen as part of the Friendly Fire Show podcast or simply refer to the handy transcript that follows. Steve Wright, Stevivor: I guess I'm going to start with the sort of elephant in the room being Avengers and it's, you know, obviously a completely different beast. It's a single player game. It's a multiplayer game. It's a game as a service. It's a looter shooter and Guardians of the Galaxy is a single player narrative story. I was just curious to learn about the design process and how you got to that? Mary DeMarle: One of Eidos Montreal philosophies as a design team, when we're starting on games, is to really immerse ourselves in... the material that we're dealing with and figure out what is the best player fantasy. So when we started this, of course we did consider ‘should this be a multiplayer? Should this be Co-op? Should this be whatever?,’ but the more we started to dive into it and the more we started to look at it, we realised that the real strength of the Guardians is that you have this team of completely unpredictable characters who are so true to who they are, but they respond to things in very foreign and unexpected ways. We thought, 'I really want to hang out with these guys'. The best way to do that, we kind of realised, [is through] Peter Quill. Number one, he's human, so we can understand the human. Number two, he is the 'so-called leader' of the team. So what would it be like to actually have to be wrangling these people and being the leader who has to react to the unpredictability of what they do. You make a choice in the game -- because we put choice and consequence in -- as Peter you're making choices and then you're getting reactions from these guys and you have to respond to that, and you have to figure that out. Once we kind of settled on that, it became very obvious to us that we wanted to keep it a single-player game and we wanted to focus on redefining what team gameplay is from a single-player perspective. Olivier Proulx: To add to what Mary said, at Eidos Montreal we love to do those single-player experiences with really strong narrative arcs and and strong characters as well. So when we had the option to discuss with Marvel and approach these amazing characters in this franchise, for us it was kind of tapping into our strengths as well, and we felt really comfortable going with that approach. Stevivor: Now I definitely don't mean to do a disservice to your design, but if I had to boil it down like in a little snippet, I would kind of call it like a combination of the comics and like the MCU. I'm sure there's more to it than that, so I'd like your take on that. The other thing is, considering Square Enix and Avengers, there was a bit of backlash when Avengers was first shown and fans were like, ‘that look like Chris Hemsworth!’ How have you factored that into design? Mary DeMarle: Well, we were already pretty deep in our designs by then. I think we already had our designs all settled by the time that happened. I have to say, The Avengers did a really good job at creating an original origin story for Kamala Khan. And we were looking at that afterwards and saying, ‘well, that's really cool’ because Marvel basically gave us license to this; we're creating our version and our own origin stories and our own stuff like that. But you know,