One of the most memorable announcements from Sony's latest State of Play, Project Windless immediately turned heads because its protagonist is a hulking humanoid rooster.
"We knew that the hero would create a shock," creative director Patrik Méthé tells PC Gamer.
"But I was surprised by the amount of people who were like 'what the f-huh?', but then were like 'I'm in', before three quarters of the trailer had even played."
Apparently, this was exactly the kind of reaction the dev team was hoping for; Krafton Montreal's gone big and bold with this one, and it's clearly paid off.
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But why did the studio decide on the giant chicken-man to begin with? Well, Méthé says that when the developer was in the initial process of hiring for the game, it would show candidates concept art of the four races that make up The Bird That Drinks Tears — the Korean fantasy series that Project Windless is based on.
The four races include humans, the goblin-like tokkebi, the reptilian nhaga, and the bird-like rekon. Méthé says that there was an overwhelming interest in the rekon from day one.
Méthé recalls: "When every candidate was leaving, they would say, 'I hope I will hear from you, but one thing for sure, I want to be able to play that character'. All of them. All of them — and we were like, 'okay'."
And so the team found its focus. The rekon that you play as in the game is the Hero King — a "mythical character" who supposedly existed long before the events of the source material.
"He's remembered, but no one is still alive who was there. It gives us a level of flexibility, because the worst thing for us would have been to try to emulate too closely what's in the novel at the expense of the game," Méthé explains.
On the topic of how the Hero King actually looks, Méthé goes into more detail: "This character visually stands out from the typical action adventure RPG, but it needs to be more than an eight-foot, 600-pound guy. It's not a guy in a suit. It's a race, and the race has specific skills and attributes you don't find in a human."
And that's evident in the aforementioned reveal trailer, which shows our feathered protagonist sweeping hordes of foes aside with relative ease.
From our perspective, we're just pleased to see a video game protagonist who looks interesting and unique right from the word go. We say this all the time, but first impressions count for so much in this industry — and Project Windless is off to a great start in that regard.
What are your hopes for Project Windless? What do you make of the Hero King? Try not to get in his way in the comments section below.