Interview: Wild Bastards Dev on Why You Should Be Gunning for This Slick Sci-Fi Shooter on PS5

Following up on 2020's Void Bastards — a moreish first-person shooter with a distinctly tactical edge — the talented team at Blue Manchu is back with more, er, bastards. Its new title, Wild Bastards, should be a hoot if the studio's previous work is anything to go by, and so we caught up with game designer Jonathan Chey to learn all about this promising PS5 project.

Push Square: To start with, can you give us an overview of what Wild Bastards is?

Jonathan Chey, game designer: Wild Bastards is the “spiritual successor” to Void Bastards but this time, instead of controlling a single desperate prisoner trying to escape, you’re in charge of the 13 outlaws who make up the Wild Bastards gang. Just as in Void Bastards, this is a roguelike first-person shooter with a strategic twist. Only now you have to manage a group of wildly divergent mutants, aliens, and robots, all of whom have not only their own powers and abilities, but also their own agendas and relationships.

13 playable characters is quite ambitious for this type of shooter — how difficult was it to make
each outlaw feel unique?

In many ways, the game is similar to multiplayer hero shooters — only focussed entirely on the single-player experience. Just as in those games, we make sure that each character has their own strengths and weaknesses and that each rewards different play styles. Achieving this was not easy, but we were helped by the fact that our outlaws are not all just humans with different guns. Some of them are robots, others are aliens — they’re all odd in some way. This lets us vary their movement patterns (slithering like a snake, hovering like a cloud of vapor) as well as their damage resistances, guns, special abilities, and more.

In addition, we’re helped by the fact that, just like Void Bastards, Wild Bastards has a strategic layer (or layers) as well as first-person combat. That means that outlaws can have traits that affect strategic play as well as combat. For example, Roswell helps your outlaws stay on target when they beam down from their ship to the planet and Smoky is able to make better use of the chowhouse location where he can cook meals to distract guards.

Was it difficult to balance each outlaw, given the size of the roster?

One of the good things about the way Wild Bastards is designed is that it’s not strictly necessary for each outlaw to be perfectly balanced against the others. For one thing, most outlaws have good matchups and bad matchups. So, even though you may find that Judge is a very powerful sniper, he’s going to have trouble matched against swarming Kyotes or hosts of summoned Spirits. In addition, outlaws get fatigued if you constantly use them, rewarding you for cycling through which outlaws you take when beaming down to a planet. Of course, they can also get injured, knocking them entirely out of contention until you can find a way of healing them.

Your previous 'Bastards' game, Void Bastards, was really well received by both critics and players. What lessons did you take from Void Bastards when developing this spiritual successor?

We always try to say something new with each game we do. There are so many excellent games now and we don’t want to just do something that’s been done elsewhere but better. We like to put new challenges and decisions in front of players that they may not have seen before. For example, in Void Bastards we asked the player to get to grips with a situation in which they went into first-person combat with the goal not of killing enemies, but of obtaining loot in the most efficient way possible. They could employ stealth and strategic thinking as well as combat skills. In many ways, it was like a single-player extraction shooter before this genre became popular.

In Wild Bastards, we continued this thinking, so we’re not presenting the same kinds of decisions and situations. Wild Bastards is a game where managing your gang is paramount. It’s less of a desperate struggle for survival and more of an adventure with powerful but flawed protagonists. Because you’re not re-rolling a character each time you get reset in the roguelike loop, we can put more effort into developing the characters and their relationships.

Are there any specific areas of gameplay that you most wanted to improve upon with Wild Bastards?

Yeah, we felt that we could definitely improve on the basics of our first-person combat. So, for example, we’ve added things like per-pixel hit detection, rewarding precise aiming. To go along with that, we added aiming down sights and zooming. Our range of weaponry is also more diverse, featuring things like dual wielded weapons, a lasso, throwing knives, and a bow.

Our enemies have a lot more animation than in Void Bastards. This allows us to make their behaviors a lot more sophisticated. In particular, they’re now able to take cover and reposition to tactically advantageous positions instead of just carrying out simple attack patterns. Our environments feature bigger spaces and much more use of verticality.

How long has Wild Bastards been in development? And how big's the team at Blue Manchu?

Blue Manchu is a small team (about seven people contributing different amounts) and this allows us to keep our burn rate down. As a result, we can take longer to develop each product — in the case of Wild Bastards about four years! Some of that was COVID affected but it has still had a good amount of time to get polished up.

Do you have any plans for post-release support of Wild Bastards?

We’ll definitely be addressing any post-release problems via patches and looking for feedback. Along with that, hopefully there will be an opportunity to do some DLC that extends the game via new outlaws, enemies — much as we did with Void Bastards.

Does Wild Bastards take advantage of the DualSense's haptics or adaptive triggers at all?

Haptics is always important for FPS games, so we definitely support it.

We have to ask, has the use of 'Bastards' ever resulted in any problems with platform holders or advertising partners, etc?

In regard to the Bastards nomenclature — yes, it’s caused problems. Right now, we’re trying to get the name approved on a storefront because it violates their naming policy. We’ve had pushback from potential publishing partners who’ve wanted us to change the name to something less edgy. Of course, we didn’t choose the name for that reason — we just like the way it sounds and the way it fits with the position of our protagonists in the game universes. In both Bastards games, the player characters are outsiders who do not enjoy a position of respect in their worlds, to say the least.

We've grown addicted to saying 'Bastards' at this point. Do you have that problem as well? And do you have anything you'd like to say to our readers?

We look forward to the day when our intellectual property will be a host of Bastards products. Then we can start work on the Bastards cinematic universe.

Huge thanks to Jonathan Chey for taking the time to answer our questions. Special thanks to Thomas Schulenberg and the team at Tinsley PR for making this interview possible.

Wild Bastards is set to launch on the 12th September for PS5, but will you be accompanying these crazy aliens on their law-breaking adventures? Start blasting in the comments section below.