French developer DON'T NOD may be most renowned for its adventure games (Life is Strange, Tell Me Why, Twin Mirror, Harmony: The Fall of Reverie), but its first game, Remember Me, was actually an action/adventure game like the upcoming Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden.

　　In between the two, DON'T NOD also released Vampyr. The game might not have been a masterpiece, but it was certainly very interesting and sold enough to ensure the partnership with Focus Home Interactive on action/adventure games would continue.

　　Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is now set to debut on February 13, 2024 (following a brief delay), marking the studio's third entry in this genre. We interviewed DON'T NOD to discuss their ambitions in this sizable segment of the market, the lessons learned and improvements applied from the previous experience, and several technical details (for example, the game will run on Unreal Engine 5 without incorporating its two trademark features, Lumen and Nanite).

　　As a reminder, the game will be released for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X, priced $49.99 on PC and $59.99 on consoles.

　　What were your influences on this kind of setting and story?

　　Stéphane Beauverger - Narrative Director: Once we decided to explore a “ghost, witchcraft, and superstitions” setting, we binged all kinds of material about these themes. The fantasy novel “Kill the Dead” by Tanith Lee has been an early major reference for us. Later on, the movies “The Witch”, “Crimson Peak”, “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Frighteners” also helped us shape the balance between the haunted living and the haunting ghosts we wanted to achieve.

　　Following the release of Vampyr, what were the main areas you wished to improve for your next action RPG?

　　Philippe Moreau - Creative Director: At the very beginning of the project, we wanted Banishers to be the spiritual successor of Vampyr and improve on it in every way (visual, gameplay, animation, tech, etc.), but keeping and transposing into a new context its main differentiating mechanic: investigating the lives and pasts of characters with heavy secrets, before deciding their fate through ambiguous moral choices.

　　We knew this concept was good and full of potential, but we also knew that we needed to step up the overall quality of the game if we wanted to succeed. The combat, for example, has been reworked entirely, with a new approach based on the “look & feel” where the focus is to develop an engaging combat that is easy to pick up, responsive, tight, and with satisfying visual and audio feedback. The goal was to develop a simple yet effective and rewarding gameplay loop, supported by the main idea of playing a couple working in synergy. We have iterated on the combat a lot - until the very last moment of the production - and I think we managed to deliver a much more satisfying combat experience than in Vampyr.

　　Can you share whether you were able to take advantage of a higher budget compared to Vampyr?

　　Philippe Moreau - Creative Director: The budget of Banishers was in line with our ambition to create a better game in every way. It’s the biggest project in the history of DON’T NOD and Focus Entertainment’s collaboration, our publisher. We also had the chance to recruit very talented people with fresh ideas and methods who helped us push the visual envelope of the game. Even though the budget was bigger than for Vampyr, it’s still an AA budget game which was done with a limited team size, so we needed to be creative and smart in our decision-making process to offer a game that remains competitive with AAA in terms of scope, visuals and gameplay.

　　One of the keys was to focus on what we do best and push forward the quality as high as we could. For example, we put a lot of effort into delivering convincing and well-executed storytelling with compelling and believable characters. We also tried to be smart in the development of some features to save time and money. For example, the fact that Antea is a ghost gave us the opportunity to simplify her A.I behavior. She didn’t have to behave as a human being and rely on a complex behavior system such as in The Last of Us or God of War. We just needed her to behave as a “regular ghost” - just as people expect a ghost to be: disappearing, teleporting, passing through walls…etc. This process of thinking helped us to focus on what matters the most and determine the right balance of polish we needed for the game.

　　What kind of refinements will you focus on with the additional development time afforded by the delay?

　　Karim Benfares - Executive Producer: The game development was already complete, so we did not need to initiate any big changes. We devoted the additional time to polishing visual effects, fixing bugs, and getting rid of remaining hitches on console platforms.

　　Moreover, we initially planned to add a Photo mode through a post-launch patch. Thanks to this extra time, we could implement this feature in the day one version.

　　Will it be possible to create different character builds (e.g., make Red and Antea either more resistant or more like glass cannons)?

　　Mathieu Bourgain – Lead Systems Design: Players will have access to a wide variety of builds.

　　Thanks to the skill tree, you can pick more than 80 abilities and reset your choices for free as often as you want. Those abilities can be combined with around 80 pieces of equipment to explore and find builds by yourself. Our goal was to give enough tools to players to focus on the gameplay they like the most. They will be able to focus on gameplay mechanics available in the game, such as Rifle builds, Manifestations builds (powers from Antea), full melee builds, tank builds, gap closer builds, Spirit Shield builds, Banish builds, control builds, cooldown reduction builds, burst damage builds, life leech builds, potion builds, etc. All builds can be hybridized together at your will.

　　Specialization can also go as far as creating a build focusing on only one of the two characters (if that's your thing!), like constantly playing Antea and her powers without any interruption. But the most extreme ones will require lots of fine-tuning, finding specific items, and theorycrafting.

　　Banishers is a game you can invest a lot of thought in if you want to reach the highest combat optimization.

　　Can you talk about the crafting system?

　　Mathieu Bourgain – Lead Systems Design: The Crafting System relies on a variety of resources you will be able to find in the world by harvesting or defeating enemies. You can also purchase them from the community merchants. Players will be able to upgrade any equipment in the game. We don't have any notion of "trash loot" or equipment that becomes obviously obsolete after a time.

　　Every piece of equipment can find its place in a build and can be treated as an endgame one with enough crafting investment to upgrade its tiers. Our design philosophy was to create unique equipment (with unique Perks) that can remain interesting and useful for specific builds during the whole game. Resources can also be spent in specific side content (named "Rituals") that can spawn various enemies with some surprising combat twists. Some Rituals can even be repeated multiple times, but their difficulty and combat twists increase and change each time.

　　These optional combats are a good way to obtain rare resources and improve your equipment via the crafting system.

　　Have you considered switching from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, as some developers are doing?

　　Nicolas Sérouart – Technical Director: Yes, we considered UE5 and actually decided to switch to it during production. This was more of a pragmatic decision. UE4 support could be discontinued, and we were willing to keep getting the latest improvements and fixes made by Epic on different Unreal Engine systems in UE5. In retrospect, we absolutely do not regret having made this choice.

　　Does that mean Banishers will take advantage of UE5's Lumen and/or Nanite?

　　Karim Benfares - Executive Producer: The game will not support Lumen or Nanite.

　　UE games have become infamous on PC lately as they are prone to stuttering. What are you doing to prevent that?

　　Nicolas Sérouart – Technical Director: This is a common issue and it is hard to tackle for us developers as it is time-consuming to completely get rid of them.

　　In particular, the PSO caching scheme in UE requires us to do a full, exhaustive walkthrough of the game to collect each and every shader variation that can be used and rendered on screen.

　　One missed shader not present in the cache means players will incur a noticeable stutter in the game, as the compilation of that shader will happen during gameplay.

　　Moreover, shaders are regularly invalidated during development, so this collection pass has to be done at a very late stage of production when developers are generally running out of time.

　　The good news is that we are well aware of this problem and have planned enough time to do this pass, so the game shouldn't suffer too much from this problem at release time.

　　Epic is also aware of this issue and has introduced a new method of collecting PSO in newer versions of the engine. Hopefully, it won't be that much of a problem for developers in the future.

　　You confirmed that NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR will be featured in Banishers. Is there any chance you'll add Frame Generation support for either (or both) to improve performance further?

　　Nicolas Sérouart – Technical Director: Yes, we are indeed considering adding DLSS Frame Generation. For FSR, that will probably not happen, as we would stick to FSR version 2.2.

　　Will the game support any ray tracing features? What about High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays?

　　Nicolas Sérouart – Technical Director: We experimented with ray tracing in different gameplay and cinematic scenes during production but found the performance cost was simply too high for the quality enhancement it brought. Our game is full of natural environments and does not have that many shiny materials, so the visual impact isn't that obvious, at least for reflections.

　　As for HDR, when we started production, its support in UE4 was a bit lacking in some areas (especially for Lighting artists to properly work and test HDR in the editor), and we decided not to implement it.

　　Are you taking advantage of the DualSense's haptics and adaptive triggers? If so, will the features be available on PC, too, when using the controller?

　　Nicolas Sérouart – Technical Director: We do support DualSense adaptive triggers, but not haptics. DualSense adaptive triggers will be available on PC, too.

　　Thank you for your time.