No Law Lets You Kill Every Shopkeeper And Close Every Store

There’s always at least one game that takes you by surprise at Gamescom. Even if it was already on your radar or it had already grabbed your attention, there’s typically one where seeing it first-hand just blows those expectations out of the water and leaves you obsessed. This year, that game was No Law.

No Law is an open-world cyberpunk adventure set in the city of Port Desire. Players take on the role of mustachioed Grey Harker, an ex-military trying to settle down and live the quiet life, but of course, he doesn’t get what he wants. Where would be the fun in that?

What immediately captured my attention was the level of depth and detail in every small facet of the game. You walk into a store and you can pick individual items off the shelves to purchase them. Or not. If you want to try and run out the front door with your stolen goods then you can, but there will be consequences. You can even steal the little beeper machine that alerts the store owner that a customer has entered, and then use it to create a customised hand grenade later as a proximity trigger. That’s No Law in a nutshell really: you can play your own way.

That sense of freedom only became more apparent as I played through a couple of sections of No Law with Neon Giant co-founders and creative directors Tor Frick and Arcade Berg, who talked me through just how much of the game is built around letting players do things their own way.

“You play Grey Harker, the beginning of the game, you are wronged, they take something from you, you want it back,” Berg tells me. “That's the story. If that's all you want it to be, if that's the only excuse you need to go and shoot people in the face, great. If you want more story, there’s plenty. If you want world-building story and characters, that's when you start digging into the conversations, right? That's when you start reading the files and the emails and all that. But it's all opt-in, because some people don't care, or some people don't want it, and we don't want to force that on you.”

The team shows me the city during a nice summer day, so I can see all the greenery and lush vegetation in the warmer Mediterranean climate. “That's one of the things that puts us apart from a lot of the typical cyberpunk stuff you experience,” Berg says before showing me a corner of the city he particularly loves where the vegetation is bleeding into the city. “They're constantly fighting vegetation back with chemicals, and so the vegetation will just take over because of the warm climate, and feel like it's putting us somewhere else than we typically would find in the universe.”

Port Desire is open world. You can go wherever you want and the map is densely packed to fit its scale. Berg explains as he shows me around the city, “There's never a lonely street, you never need to teleport somewhere, and you can go wherever you want. You can go into the bazaar in the market over there, where you can buy weird stuff, and it's just people doing their day-to-day.”

The team wants players to explore and stumble across locations. You might only visit a hotel because of a specific mission, but perhaps you’ve been there before while looking for treasure. There’s also a great sense of verticality, as the team wanted to avoid the feeling of a “flat city”, so you can climb up to balconies and truly explore however you want.

سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/no-law-gamescom-interview-cant-play-game-wrong/