David Goldfarb, you might remember, actually wrote something here on Eurogamer once, about the big, wide-eyed “what if” questions that drive the creativity of developers. Metal: Hellsinger, the FPS veteran’s newly announced effort, is definitely a “what if” game. What if, it asks, you crossed the chaotic, arena shooting action of modern Doom with the rhythm and sound of Guitar Hero? The result is… strange. Metal: Hellsinger is an extremely unusual, rub your tummy and pat your head genre mix, but for better or worse it’s totally unlike anything else I’ve played.
Metal Hellsinger – Announcement Trailer Watch on YouTubeMetal: Hellsinger previewDeveloper: The OutsidersPublisher: FuncomPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: 2021, on PC, Xbox One, PS4, Xbox Series X, PS5
It also comes in the wake of Darkborn, Goldfarb’s studio The Outsiders’ first game (you might remember it as Project Wight) that was suddenly cancelled earlier this year. “It was rough, for a little while there,” he told me, when I asked about the decision. “We didn’t know how things were going to work out, or if they would work out at all, honestly. We’re lucky that things worked out the way they did and we found a great partner with Funcom.” It’s an unusual partnership – Funcom’s best known for publishing MMOs like Age of Conan and Anarchy Online, as opposed to the more traditional multiplayer shooters or single-player games Goldfarb’s worked on before – and how Hellsinger’s going to be monetised, in terms of whether it’ll be free-to-play like Funcom’s other games or not, wasn’t up for discussion at the time of our chat.
Without digging too far into it though, the reality is that it’s probably a marriage of convenience for now. “I’m gonna use a weight lifting metaphor,” Goldfarb said. “A lot of the lifting that we did, which was really hard in the beginning, I think we got used to it. We got strong enough to be able to just force up a fairly heavy thing and make it work. We got into shape, is the short version of it. And that helped us get to the next thing because we had learned all the things we could do wrong.”
It’s also, to go back to that question of “what if”, allowed The Outsiders to release something that actually sounds like a bit of a dream. “When I was thinking about this game,” he explained, “I was thinking about it in the context of other games that did stuff that I liked, but never put them together. So I would play Doom and listen to music that I really liked listening to – or even just the great stuff in [Doom] 2016 or whatever – but it wasn’t… like I would get to a point in the song and I would know it was that part. So I’m like, ‘Oh this is awesome’, and if I was lucky, I would kill a monster or something at that point in the song. But I kept thinking that the flow state that I want is a little bit different, because I’m also a giant Rock Band and Guitar Hero nerd, and that level of engagement is different for me than it was to play a shooter at a higher flow level.