Indiana Jones and The Great Circle offered such a great depiction of everyone's favourite Nazi thumping archaeologist that it's hard to imagine developer MachineGames building that game any differently. Yet according to design director Jens Andersson, getting the Indy feel of The Great Circle right represented a significant challenge for the Swedish studio.
One of the hardest problems MachineGames struggled with was the presence of guns in the game, specifically how to stop players from just blasting through armies of Nazis without making guns less fun to use. Speaking to FRVR, Andersson explained that having satisfying firearms in The Great Circle was "non-negotiable" as "we have a lot of people at Machine[Games] that love guns".
Since MachineGames wanted The Great Circle to be true to Spielberg's films, they needed guns to be a part of Indy's toolset and not the default response to every problem. One partial solution was to make reloading slow, encouraging players to use other tools like Indy's whip or his fists, but this alone wasn't enough.
"We had so many designs to try and get around that," Andersson continued. "For example, a GTA star level system when you shoot someone and reinforcements [start] coming in." The thinking here seems to have been to discourage players from going overboard with using loud weapons. "Because we were so afraid that this would be the default thing that the player would do. They take down a guy, they see a gun on the floor, and they clear the whole area with just guns."
In the end, the solution MachineGames stumbled upon was to provide alternative, breakable melee weapons ranging from frying pans to violins. These abundant, lightly comedic tools encouraged players to embrace the improvisational nature of how Indy fights, offering a quick knockout both in stealth and when the player's ammunition ran dry.
Remarkably, Andersson says that breakable weapons "got in very late" during development. But when the studio "saw how effective it was, that's when we started putting all this weird stuff in. The violin, all of this weird stuff that makes it a little slapstick-y, but not slapstick."
This system proved instrumental in getting the final balance of Indy's combat right, where stealth and fisticuffs are the primary approach, while guns tend to be a last resort. "We penalised shooting so much in that game. I know a lot of people are frustrated about that, but many more people love it," Andersson says. "The thing that really fixed it was that we made melee combat so interesting, fun, and easy. Not easy challenge-wise, but just it's easy to get into. You stealth up, you hit someone from behind, the breakable weapon system was super important to do that. 'Oh, there's a new weapon, it's a fly swatter, I want to try this.'"
Ultimately, Indy's dynamic combat was a bit part of what made it Machine Games' best game to date, earning it a score of 86 in PC Gamer's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Review. Whether we'll see another Indy game from Machine Games is still up in the air. But if it does happen, it probably won't be soon, as the studio has just confirmed that's it's working on Wolfenstein 3.
