ShackNews recently held an interview at PAX with Mega Cat Studios, the developers behind WrestleQuest, a new game that mixes both RPG elements and wrestling. In this interview, ShackNews and the Mega Cat team discussed various topics like the game’s story, the gameplay, and the inspiration behind it.
When talking about the story, this is what the team members had to say about one of the characters later in the game:
We’re showing off a character called “The Luchador”, he’s a Lucha Libre Champion and he’s about to retire but he’s unsure if he wants to or not because he’s gonna have to pass the belt over to this total dirtbag so he’s not sure if he can do that, to give the championship of this promotion that he’s helped build and create over years of work, but he’s excited to retire because he wants to spend some time with his family with his wife and kids.
He’s not sure what he’s gonna do. His wife asked him ‘what’s your decision? you know what? You have a mistress, it’s that wrestling ring because you’re with her every night instead of me’ so it’s definitely this kind of climactic dramatic moment, and the reason we had a story like this is because we want to celebrate wrestling, but we also wanted to showcase everything that goes in, all the sacrifice these guys make to be on the road 365 days a year, and the pain and trauma their bodies go through. We wanted to be authentic in how we represent wrestling and the wrestlers in our game.
The next point they discuss is the gameplay and how wrestling and RPGs mix together thanks to their similarities:
When we were conceptualizing the game, we realized the foundation of both RPGs and wrestling is storytelling. RPGs are obviously about characters and plotlines, but the same is true for wrestling. It’s not just about people throwing each other out the ring, it’s about larger than life personalities, the betrayals, the dramatic reveals, so they meshed together very well and what we did is we took that classic JRPG formula and just updated it tweaked it by adding wrestling elements.
And finally, they discuss how WrestleQuest actually differs from other games in the RPG genre:
In a lot of RPGs after a while you can go on autopilot and spam the attack button; in WrestleQuest that won’t fly because we’ve added things like timed button presses for attacks; enemies can bounce off the ropes after you hit them and then follow up to do a secondary attack; but most importantly, it has a hype meter, which is an indicator of the audience’s engagement with the fight, so if you come in and just keep hitting attack, they’ll get bored. When that happens your enemies get stronger, but if you approach with a little bit more showmanship and creativity, you’ll be able to fill it up for you and then you’ll get stronger, you get better abilities, more damage, and even better loot after the battle, so it’s all about putting on a good show and entertaining that audience.
These are just some of the tidbits we compiled from this great interview. If you’d like to know more about the game, don’t forget to watch the rest in the video above!
WrestleQuest is ‘coming soon’ to Nintendo Switch.
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