A Plague Tale goes bigger and better

Requiem’s lead level designer Kevin Pinson discusses greater freedom and heaps o’ rats

When you think about the creative possibilities raised by the latest and more powerful technology, you probably think of something that’s both large in scale and pleasing to the eye. In other words, even larger groups of disgusting, plague-carrying, flesh-eating rats was probably not among the things you pictured – though it does fit the bill.

But once A Plague Tale: Requiem, followup to surprise hit A Plague Tale: Innocence, is released on 18 October on PS5, you’ll never be too far from hordes of the rodents, which now swarm in bands of 300,000 rather than the 3,000 managed on PS4 (which we found impressive enough). The rats aren’t the only things being boosted, though: the hardware leap has also given developers more ways to work with visuals and mechanics, especially with light.

“Specificially, we are a game about light,” Asobo Studio’s lead level designer Kevin Pinson tells us. “The power of the PS5 allows us to have more lights, [and] do more things with it. It’s really expensive from a game engine perspective to use the light as a gameplay mechanic, but this current gen allows us to use more dynamic lights.” Light was, of course, an important mechanic in the previous game, enabling you to keep rats away from Amicia, but that’s being expanded with the use of tar. When you throw it at an open flame, that sticky stuff will increase a torch’s flaming radius for a time, the broader light allowing you to reach areas you couldn’t before. The process of remastering the