Lies of P’s Future Begins with a Journey into the Past

Xbox Wire: I watched the recent Overture trailer and then I went and watched some very detailed fan videos that broke down every bit of the trailer frame by frame, to try to guess what’s happening. What do you want people to take away from the trailer? Anything they should be paying extra special attention to?

Ji-won Choi: I also saw those frame-by-frame analyses from the fans. First of all, that made me realize how much love that we have been receiving from our fan base around the world. I was deeply touched by that. What we wanted to really convey to the fans was quite simple: we wanted to let the fans know that we have gotten a lot of feedback, very meaningful feedback and reception of all kinds for a very long time. And we wanted to deliver content for the fans that they will intuitively know that we listen to them. And that’s what we wanted to deliver in our trailer.

Xbox Wire: I’m very curious about that. Lies that P was made, I would expect, with not a lot of expectations, externally. I mean it looked good, but nobody knew really what to expect. Now people know how good Lies of P is, and are anticipating Overture, so when you hear the fan feedback, I’m curious which things you are taking into account, or do you have to shut some of that out to complete your vision?

Ji-won Choi: Really meaningful question. We see this whole process as a collaboration and we take it seriously – a collaboration between developers and the customers. We carefully study all these elements all together and the key is to understand what we are doing well is resonating, and to understand what we’re doing wrong and how we identify it and improve upon it. So, when we get this type of feedback to ourselves, there are elements that are easily acceptable, and there are other elements that are sort of debatable, but we don’t just discard them. What we usually do is we bring those elements internally to our development team and we get to write it down and we start testing very quickly. Based on that, we can validate if those claims work out well for us or it doesn’t. We take it seriously: we test it, and we validate.

Xbox Wire: Going back to the trailer, my personal take away is that in the base game, it’s a very lonely experience most of the time. Yes, you can come back to the Hotel Krat and you get to see other people, which is great. But when you’re out in the world, you’re alone. And in this trailer, P is not alone very often – P blows the horn, and and I think it’s Aladoro comes smashing through the window, we see this masked stalker fighting alongside P. Is Overture going to be a less lonely affair?

Ji-won Choi: The whole feeling of loneliness and any other emotion, that’s something that’s hard for me to sort of predict… What we really focused on was to really elaborate on the attractive characters we started developing. When you play the base game, you see many different characters… or actually you only heard of through some hints throughout the game. When you experience the expansion, you will get to learn far more about these characters that we have hinted quite a bit. We want you to make sure that you have a much more thorough and complete experience of the attractive characters that we begin to introduce here again.