- Toys for Bob wanted to recapture the feeling of playing previous games during development Spyro: A Realm Beyond
- It wanted to focus on “the feeling we fell in love with” rather than worrying about a list of features
- Chief creative officer and head of studio Paul Yan says: “If you stick too much to nostalgia, it feels like you’re resuming”
Toys for Bob focused on recreating how the team felt after playing previous games when they were making Spyro: A Realm Beyondinstead of worrying about a list of features to include.
That’s according to Studio Head Paul Yan, who told TechRadar Gaming in an interview at Summer Game Fest that the game’s foundation was built on what the team loves about the series.
When asked if there are any core features from previous games that the team avoided or tried to modernize, Yan said “everything gets touched,” but as it worked on a new title, “one of the things we try and do is really slide down and try to isolate how that franchise makes us feel, not specific feature lists, not comparing parts, but the feeling that we fell in love.”
“We’re also looking into the fan community,” he added, “we’re looking at the communication from the outside, our own communication, and we’re starting to isolate and figure out what that means, like, what are the fantasies that we want, so when we say, you know, a zen-like kind of exploration with a fluid movement that’s more important for us to identify as critical to feeling like Spyro than saying, ‘Oh, his charge moves x number of units over x amount of time,’ or things that happen.”
“So we build that kind of knowledge and ingrain and canonize those feelings, and that’s where we build from, and then throughout development we’ll have those conversations about whether we change them or touch it, is it new, do we keep it, don’t we.
“But at the same time, the spearhead is the emotions we want to preserve and we want to reinforce more than any specific feature institute.”
Yan also said that it’s a challenge to balance nostalgia when making a new game “versus how much you branch out,” explaining that both can be bad in some cases.
“If you stick too much to nostalgia, it feels like you’re enjoying yourself,” Yan said. “‘Why did we even bother doing this?’ […] Then you go to the other extreme and you change everything and now it’s like ‘I don’t even recognize this character’. So we’re very proud of the fact that through the process of this we’ve been very thoughtful about it and tried to talk about the tone and the core and make sure we reference all the feedback from fans and all the feelings and insights that have come from Reignited Trilogyso we feel confident that that base has given us a lot of information and informed our own weapons instincts as to what Spyro is, and so our vision for Spyro is that this is just one of many games for the future.
“We would love to see more in this franchise. Hopefully, you know, around Beyond puts him on a really strong footing.”
Spyro: A Realm Beyond launching in spring 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
The best gaming consoles
