The nostalgia of retro-styled games, particularly those of the 1990s, makes for a powerful and accessible way for indie developers to be recognized. There are even recent titlesreleased on the thirty-year-old Sega Genesis, which creates instant intrigue.Farworld Pioneersis one of the latest titles to evoke the past, though developer Igloosoft has leaned into the aesthetic more seriously than most.
Farworld Pioneershas ample reason to evoke older titles, as it is helmed by aStarboundveteran and takes inspiration from other pixel artgames likeRimworldandTerraria. ButFarworldis more devoted to an MS-DOS vibe than other games, lead developer Rho Watson told Game Rant in a recent interview.
RELATED:7 Forgotten MS-DOS Games
For instance,Farworld Pioneersis designed to run at a low resolution, not justevoke the pixel art lookat higher resolutions. This, Watson said, makes a massive difference between looking retro and looking retro-inspired.
“One of the things from the start that I insisted on from an art perspective was limiting the game to 640 by 360 or so pixels. Something a lot of modern games that ape older games do is they’ll have pixel art but they won’t truly represent the pixels, if that makes sense? They’ll render the pixels but at a larger resolution so that assets can rotate and the pixels themselves will rotate rather than being rendered at a true native resolution. It was important to me from the start that we render things at the right pixel resolution and magnify them up so that it retains that true blocky resolution.”
Watson wanted the game to feel like it was actuallyan old early-90s gamerunning in DOS, the precursor to the Windows operating system. DOS, or Disk Operating System, was a platform for classic games such as Commander Keen orWolfenstein 3D, which fill an important part of the history of modern video games. Matching the old resolution of those games wasn’t Watson’s only way to evoke the feeling of classic DOS gaming.
“We did a lot of tributes to old games. One in particular for me is, bam, seen at the very start as soon as you load the game up. There’s this imitation DOS startup sequence that replicates older DOS games, and also we pay tribute to the old Westwood Studios intro sequence with the logo they used to have. In the menu we have touches like ‘Exit to DOS’ rather than ‘Exit Game.’ There are lots of smaller touches like that within the game that we just left lying around for the player to find.”
While making the game actually designed for DOS might have put a burden on players used to more modern gameplay features and with limited experience with the ancient operating system, it does what it can to recreate the feeling. But some of the more modern features ofFarworld Pioneerswouldn’t work with DOS-era tools. For instance,Farworld Pioneerscombines hand-crafted design elements with procedurally generated landscapes to create a diverse selection of worlds with handcrafted elements, much inthe same wayStarfieldintendsto do. This isn’t just to add the human touch to the worlds, but to help ensure the player has the resources they need to progress.
“The terrains, features, set pieces, and so forth, those are randomly generated. So, no two planets will ever be the same, but the types of planets, the biomes, the planets within the star systems, those are predefined. So in any given star system there will always be X amount of ice planets, X amount of deaths, plus X mammal-filled planets, but when you actually visit those planets, the terrain will always be different between playthroughs.”
Underpinned by a dash of modern technology and a helping of DOS stylings,Farworld Pioneersaims to bring modern gamers a blend of past and present.
Farworld Pioneersis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
MORE:Starfield’s Procedural Worlds Need to Learn One Big Lesson from Mass Effect
