The story was just there to take you to a new environment. "The landscapes are what I enjoy the most - making the world itself," Sala says. He swapped the dragon model from Oberon's Court he had used for the prototype with a human soldier on the back of a giant bird, and set about creating the universe they would navigate together. A prototype cobbled together from bits and parts of Oberon's Court pointed Sala towards the aerial combat games he loved as a kid Star Wars: Tie Fighter, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Aces of the Pacific, and Crimson Skies. The seed of The Falconeer was planted quickly. After that point, I decided to do something new." "If you're not aware of it, you can't analyse it, you can't build on it, you can't criticise it - it's just subconscious, and very rough. "I think lots of people go through these things you get locked into a certain way of living, you break down, and when you come out of it you have a little bit of distaste, initially, on how you look back on yourself. "I couldn't finish it, because it was too dark, it was too confronting," he says. "If you're not aware of it, you can't analyse it, you can't build on it, you can't criticise it" However, despite starting it at "the tail-end of the first indie boom" in 2013 and pouring years of work into its development, that moment of insight from Sala's partner made further progress impossible. That game was Oberon's Court, Sala's first attempt at making a commercial game following his widely praised Skyrim mod, Moonpath to Elsweyr. It has no meaning other than the gameplay.' She looked at me, like, 'yeah.' That was a pivotal moment, because I realised that I had been expressing myself in the stuff I was creating, and that I had been so uptight and locked into my very limited way of looking at games that I had no idea I was doing that." "I said, 'no, no, no, that's not how we do things in games. She looked at a character I was making - which was a fox with a cape that looked like a hand crushing it - and she said, 'Oh, that's you right?' The Falconeer has the scope of a project made by a much larger team, but it is the personal vision of a single creator My partner Camille is a ceramics artist, and so she looks at what you make really differently than I did at that time. "At some point, I had a new relationship and life was looking up a bit. "I started making during a burnout - fairly severe - and a relationship that broke up," he says.
The Dutch developer ran a work-for-hire studio in Amsterdam, Little Chicken Game Company, for 18 years, and first explored making a game of his own in a period of professional and emotional stress. The fact that The Falconeer now sits alongside Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and doesn't wither by comparison is testament to Sala's skill and endeavour - but it is also a deeply personal validation. Although Wired Productions has been onboard as publisher since early 2019, Sala built The Falconeer from a rough prototype into a striking fusion of aerial combat, open-world exploration, multi-layered narrative, and dystopian fantasy entirely alone. When Sala is described as "the developer behind The Falconeer," that is more literal than you might think. "And now it's for all to see, because it's a really strange generational launch, with COVID and the delays to the big titles - these are very, very strange days." "Being part of something new, being in the limelight - it's incomprehensible" That's all you want to find the group of people that enjoy the specific combination of ingredients you cooked with. Initially, you'd just hope that it finds an audience. "Being part of something new, being in the limelight - it's incomprehensible. "That has been its own rollercoaster ride," says Tomas Sala, the developer behind the Xbox launch exclusive The Falconeer. It is a relatively small group, to be sure, but the developers within it have the kind of captive and highly engaged audience that can only be found on a brand new platform - and without the likes of Halo Infinite and Cyberpunk 2077 competing for eyeballs.
With COVID-19 disrupting production and depleting the Series X|S launch day line-up, Xbox loyalists will be looking toward third-party exclusives for new games that can't also be found on PS5. well, in terms of first-party games at least, the pickings are a little slim. On PlayStation 5, that could be Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Sackboy, Astro's Playroom, or a particularly fine looking remake of Demon's Souls. With two console launches just this week, there will currently be hundreds of thousands of people searching for something new to play.