A44 is a somewhat unusual studio. The New Zealand developer first launched Ashen in 2018, a Souls-like action RPG with a unique, streamlined art style. One look at Ashes and you’ll know what it is, but spending time on it will eventually reveal a deeper game than it originally appeared.
A44 is back Flintlock: Siege of Dawn, a major new project for a small team. The flintlock is everything the ashes are, and everything it isn’t. It’s also an action RPG with demanding combat inspired by Souls games. Between missions, you’ll return to a hub area that you’ll see grow and evolve over the course of the campaign, shaped by the people you meet on your travels and those you bring back.
But it doesn’t look like Ashen at all. Flintlock looks like an expensive AAA game with stunning but more traditional visuals. It’s set in an open world where you can explore multiple locations inspired by the studio’s native New Zealand, and you’ll do so with your AI companions who accompany you along the way. Flintlock’s narrative is more realistic, the character animations are credible, and the story is told more clearly.
One aspect about the flintlock in particular stood out to me: its setting. See, this name is no coincidence. Like dieselpunk, steampunk, and other fantasy subgenres, Flintlock is a novel of its own.
“It’s a fairly accurate reenactment of history, mixed with fantasy. So in this case, the machine is somehow a fusion of magic, not steampunk,” explained creative director and studio CEO Derek Bradley road.
“It’s all in the mud, in the dirt—the dirt under everyone’s fingernails. The flintlock fantasy is just that.”
Whether you know what this particular fantasy brand is or not, it all translates into a world where combat is primarily fought with melee weapons, while relying on early guns and some magic when needed. But it’s all very dangerous; magic is dark and can lead its wielder down a certain path, and flintlock rifles are not reliable modern weapons.
This combination provides a very unique opportunity to build diverse, exciting game scenarios that still require a certain level of skill from the player. Like Ashes, Flintlock: Siege of Dawn also draws inspiration from Soul Fight, but it pushes those familiar concepts in unusual directions.
Bradley outlined the team’s combat design philosophy this time around. “What we’re really drawn to is the sense of rhythm, the sense of commitment to your movements when you’re playing Souls-like games,” he said.
“That said, we’ve dug into this and pretty much wrote our [moves] Love the music before we animate them. So they’re actually done with a beat structure. “
But it’s not all high-level terms. A44 allows this process to inform the game’s encounter design.
“It’s more about dancing than winning,” Bradley jokingly declared. “We kind of describe our axe fights, our hand-to-hand fights, like words in a sentence, and then gunfights are kind of like commas and periods in a sentence.”
In practice, this translates to something like this: “If you hit with the axe, then hit with the axe, then pull out the flintlock pistol – it’s all actually pretty smooth, like you’re This very skilled gunman is through these things.
“If you follow that shot with another axe swing, there’s a specific custom animation to get it out of it perfectly. The whole thing is kind of like a symphony of movements. Then you can use the bigger, more magical ultimate skills to kill a bunch of enemies, or they turn you into a hulking behemoth, or do all those really fun things to break it.”
While flintlock combat is designed for this jack-of-all-trades approach, the game’s customizable skill tree allows for more specialized builds. You can focus on gunplay, or rely heavily on magic.
Co-op is one of Ashen’s most defining aspects, but for Flintlock, it’s not returning. Instead, Enki is a fox creature useful in combat, but his role in the story is another element that makes the narrative unfold differently than it does in Ashes. However, Bradley suggested that co-op might return in future games, so the team hasn’t given up on it.
In some ways, forgoing collaboration has helped Flintlock develop its technical ambitions, especially for a small team. It’s a bigger game with more varied locations, challenging main and sub-boss encounters, a more diverse arsenal, more complex combat, and a longer average duration of around 40 hours. Even finer details, such as character animations and cutscenes, rely on more advanced technologies such as Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman system.
You can imagine how difficult it would be to maintain all of this in a co-op.
But in the current era, the size of a game world and the time it takes to complete are rarely exciting metrics. It’s all about how you use the world and how long you can last to surprise players and make time exploring it fun.
Elden Ring is the current benchmark in the field, but Ashen doesn’t get enough credit for how much it does with a fairly simple demo. With the flintlock, the A44 wanted to maintain that sense of discovery for as long as possible.
“I think the way you guide the player’s eye is almost like the vocabulary you’re working on,” Bradley said eloquently.
“So whenever I play with the team, if I just describe what I see in that vocabulary, it’s like, well, now I’m looking at this and it’s grabbing my attention, this thing Being making I feel like I want to go this route. If a designer says, ‘Oh, I don’t actually want you to go there,’ at least I’ve expressed it to them and they can see what that vocabulary is.”
The idea of thinking of it as dialogue also extends to enemy designs. Bradley explained that each enemy not only needs to look interesting, but also needs to tell you something about itself. For example, this could be some geometric shape reflected in its outline.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is coming soon and is the latest generation of the console, and while Bradley couldn’t share details on resolution and performance targets, he said he hoped the game would be a showcase for the new machine.
Xbox Series X/S owners also don’t have to buy the game to find out, as it’s available on Xbox Game Pass. It will also arrive on PC Game Pass at launch.