Let me share something I’ve been thinking about recently 👍🤔 Throughout my career as a game designer, I’ve followed my instinct that amalgamation might lead us closer to perfection - or at the very least closer to ‘the next big thing’. When I designed Ori, I was already extremely passionate about Metroidvanias because that genre was already an amalgamation between a platformer and an adventure and yet, I felt like there was so much more we could do. Since we were still a young and naive company back then, I thought that if we’d get the Metroidvania aspects right and ‘just’ deliver a better platforming component than any other Metroidvania before, we might be on to something. I think we’ve achieved that and ultimately Ori worked and became a hit. The other big component that Ori brought to the genre was a heavier focus on storytelling and cutscenes and that decision was made simply because I wanted to tell stories for a long time, but never had an outlet, so I just had to do it there. Ori didn’t just follow the same pattern that was already out there - we brought other elements into it and I think that made it really enticing. With No Rest for the Wicked, I think it’s pretty clear that we’re following a similar pattern. Wicked is an ARPG at heart, but now we’re also trying to infuse Roguelite elements into it through the Crucible and if we get that to work in a big way, I think we might once again open Pandora’s Box a little. And we’re not stopping there - our farming component later on should deliver the same kick people get from games like Stardew or Animal Crossing… and so on and so on. Whilst other companies that make ARPGs often focus on a pretty narrow approach, I always felt like there are mechanics and designs out there that would be a natural fit for this genre, but nobody had yet managed to fuse them all together. In many ways, what excites me about Wicked is building not just a game, but a platform that allows us to dabble in many different spaces, but deliver all that in a way where all those spaces actually connect perfectly together… because that would be the ultimate satisfaction: Making a game that would be the videogame-equivalent to the everlasting gobstopper. Sometimes I’m doubting myself in that regard since so many other designers failed when it came to combining genres and mechanics together, but there’s something in me that just tells me that there’s gold at the end of this rainbow and I guess we’ll just have to find out 👍❤️

@thomasmahler It's great reading this, we are in a point in the medium in which the wheel has been invented and developers need to reinvent it over and over again to deliver something new and fresh; the ones who successfully achieve this, will see their games become nieche in the medium.