Stranger Preview

By Kristan Reed Published 17 June, 2004

Lorne Lanning reveals the first details about Oddworld's next title.

It's been the subject of intense speculation for a few days now, but an enlightening Gamespot interview with Oddworld Inhabitants' main man Lorne Lanning reveals the first nuggets of information about the game unofficially known as 'Stranger'.

According to Lanning, Stranger is "the first game that has been an enjoyable experience for me to work on throughout the entire production", and was full of praise for his "committed" team, which he describes as "amazingly talented" and "intensely passionate about breaking some new ground and doing it to the best of their ability". The game, the Oddworld chief says is about a Stranger who makes his way around as a bounty hunter.

"He's a loner with no shortage of resentful enemies. This lays a nice groundwork for heavy action as well as an unfolding epic. From there, this game had a much greater team participation to the creative process than our previous titles, which set the stage for a lot of happy surprises," he says.

Nice surprises

'Stranger' Screenshot 1

Here is the only image of Stranger released to date, and rather swish he is too

Pleasant surprise is something Lanning is convinced we will all be feeling when we see the game "I think gamers are going to be very surprised by Stranger, and surprised that Oddworld built a game like this. We have no doubts that a lot of people who didn't attract to the previous Oddworld games will be attracted to Stranger."

Lanning admits that Oddworld maybe relied too heavily on the puzzle element in its previous titles and seems determined to redress the balance: "Puzzle play is difficult to ramp successfully without getting repetitive," he admits. "This time we went for a much heavier action mix with a 'puzzle lite' weave".

But he insist the trademark humour would still remain: "We [have] retained and evolved upon the humour, sarcastic wit sensibilities, and character depth that they always felt made Oddworld uniquely entertaining...while also blazing a lot of new ground for us. My personal lesson is to keep a continued focus on less equals more."

A man with prowess

However, the usual goofy, slightly retarded nature of previous lead characters is no more. Inspired by "those who look out for themselves when confronted by racist cultures" he says that "Stranger is our first hero that is quite strong and possesses prowess," Lanning says, determined to shake off accusations of making cutesy platform puzzlers.

"We wanted to show that we're far more than the Abe and Munch puzzle-platformer company. To be pigeon-holed like that concerned us and we wanted to give ourselves more flexibility and opportunity to break out from those perceptions. Hence, the creation of Stranger," the Oddworld chief asserts.

Lanning claims in the interview that Stranger is "a much more powerful yet mysterious hero who embraces shooting and melee capabilities" and promises "several unique twists that add greater options for gamers to enjoy entirely different play styles and strategies".

An end to open

And Lanning presses home the point that an open ended gameplay style was "an important design goal" with players able to play the game via stealth, "balls out" or maybe a mixture of the two. "All approaches were to be rewarding, and I feel we've accomplished that".

Anyone fearing that Stranger is a major departure from the Oddworld 'universe' will be relieved to learn that although it's "beyond the boundaries of previous Oddworld territories, it's on the same planet, yet in a different locale". "This enabled us to retain some consistency per the divisions between the rich and the poor, the dark side of globalization, etc... but also gave us the freedom to create an entirely new cast and gameplay style, without being hampered by what boundaries fans might have thought the old cast should adhere to," he says.

Quizzed on his thoughts about its previous Xbox-only title, Lanning admits he regrets listening to the focus testing on Munch's Oddysee. "I suspect that the lessons learned from the Xbox launch come down to trusting, or not trusting, focus testing. You've got to be extremely careful with how you use this data and how much of it you can trust. On Munch, we were too trusting of the focus testing data, and not trusting enough of our own critical analysis."

Past mistakes

In a further admission on the relative commercial disappointment of Munch's Oddysee, he says: "Making sure you meet launch as a first priority is not always the best thing for the box or the game," which to us, at least, implies he was not entirely happy with the game being rushed out before it was ready in order to meet the Xbox launch - and his comments regarding focus testing are the clearest indication yet that he believes it wasn't a match made in heaven.

But careful to maintain a dignified air, Lanning says "Microsoft was a great partner and we have no doubts that they will continue to be very successful in the game business." On the other hand his delight to be working with EA was uncontained: "With Electronic Arts, one of the things that you immediately notice is just how tightly buttoned up they are. These people really know how to build multi-platform games and how to get them to market successfully."

For the full interview see Gamespot's transcript.

Picture of Kristan.

About Kristan Reed

Kristan is a former editor of Eurogamer, dad, Stone Roses bore and Norwich City supporter who sometimes mutters optimistically about Team Silent getting back together.

Read more articles from Kristan by visiting the Kristan Reed archive page.

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Comments (11) Latest comment 8 years ago

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  • Kami #1 8 years ago

    I -LOVE- that artwork!

    That looks so kick-ass! Hope the game is just as good!

  • HarryB #2 8 years ago

    Well from the sounds of it even the designers face that Munch was a bit of a dodgy title so hopefully they can fix everything and make the kind of title they feel right about

  • Feanor #3 8 years ago

    To go off topic somewhat, I can never understand why many people act like globalization is the cause of poverty in the world. Perhaps if trade/investment/immigration was severely curtailed, global poverty would be reduced by making rich people poorer or poor people richer. But it's extremely hard to envision any such reduction being of a significant magnitude.

    The sad fact is that almost all people who are poor are poor because they society they live in is not as productive as the rest of the world on average.

    500 years ago the world was obviously much less globalized. But absolue poverty was far higher because production technology was so much less efficient.
    Edited by 1 at 18/06/04 @ 04:13

  • Bru-Man #4 8 years ago

    Love that quote:

    "a much more powerful yet mysterious hero who embraces shooting and melee capabilities"

    Just as I embrace driving and ambulatory capabilities. Daftness.
    Well, it made *me* smile anyway :)

  • Zero Beat #5 8 years ago

    I can't wait for my next dose of odd! Anyone else interested in one of those artbooks?

  • Feanor #6 8 years ago

    I meant productivity in terms of everything that goes into production: technology, unskilled labour, skilled labour, climate, intellectual property laws, property rights... everything.

    I don't believe that America as a whole becomes less wealthy by outsourcing. What happens is that wealth is redistributed from the incomes of working people into the profits of large companies. This is not a good thing for American society, but it would be cheaper for the affected workers to be compensated directly by the government. Trade restrictions to stop outsourcing (or for any other eason) are likely to cause large deadweight efficiency losses. Also, it seems to be forgotten that whens jobs are outsourced from Western countries, there are many, many people in poorer countries who get better jobs than they otherwise would have had.
    Edited by 1 at 18/06/04 @ 04:21

  • 3william56 #7 8 years ago

    So, that'll be Llama Croft, then

    /coat
    /peers back in through the door

    The artwork is cute, but has a rancid whiff of the Van Helsings about it.

  • Blerk #8 8 years ago

    Platforms
    PS2 and Xbox

    Heh heh - what'd I say? Eh? :-D

    Interesting to see he doesn't mention his previous 'dummy spitting' incident with the PS2 hardware. :-)

    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway. I liked Abe a lot, I wasn't so keen on Munch although it had its moments. Hopefully this one will put things back on track. And I'll actually be able to play it at my house given that there'll be a PS2 version.

  • smirny #9 8 years ago

    i'm surprised no-ones mentioned yet the fact he looks exactly like clint eastwood in the man-with-no-name trilogy... i'm not saying this is a bad thing btw :)

  • pjmaybe #10 8 years ago

    Also looks a lot like Dredd in the "Dead Man" saga.

    Isn't this just an FPS though?

    Peej

  • Bru-Man #11 8 years ago

    It looks more like Eddy (of Iron Maiden fame) crossed with the Grinch.