According to the game’s creative director Axel Torvenius, while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will allow players to pick up and pick off enemies with a variety of guns, the team at MachineGames took special care to “not encourage” this method of play because, in their opinion, such a depiction would not “be true” to the eponymous hero’s character.
Torvenius, whose ongoing tenure with said developer has seen him previously serve as the art director on all of their Wolfenstein entries – The New Order, The Old Blood, The New Colossus, Cyberpilot, and Youngblood – revealed this detail regarding Dr. Jones’ upcoming adventure during a recent interview with Edge Magazine’s Jesse Vitelli.
“We do not encourage gunplay,” explained the game’s creative director. “It’s not being pushed as the primary way forward. The primary way forward is always trying to use your wits and your whip.”
As to why they did not wish to portray the titular archaeologist as a full-blown gunslinger, Torvenius argued that his team’s decision was based on the fact that, simply put, “Indy doesn’t have superpowers.”
“Very often, you can tell that it’s not easy for him to be in a fight,” he explained to his host. “At the end of the day, he’s a teacher and a somewhat clumsy archeologist. He just happens to have this passion that puts him in these weird situations constantly with enemies and traps.”
“It wouldn’t be true to the character to have him constantly shooting camps for all enemies constantly, and the team at MachineGames wants to emphasize the danger level,” Torvenius continued. “We’ve been trying to capture that sense that, if you need to engage in combat, it’s very dangerous to be shot at. It’s also very dangerous to shoot at enemies, because they will have an alarm system and reinforcements coming in.”
Jumping off of his colleague’s notes, game director Jerk Gustafsson, who was also being interviewed alongside Torvenius, further detailed, “we have a game where there’s plenty of guns in there but you choose not to use them, because it’s too loud and it’s too dangerous. You can pick up a gun and switch it to use as a melee weapon. That’s a very in-character use of a gun for Indiana Jones.”
Notably, this is not the first insight revealed regarding the narrative direction of Indiana Jones and The Great Circle.
Per the game’s senior narrative designer Edward Curtis-Sivess, as detailed during the 2024 Xbox Dev Direct, The Great Circle is being viewed by MachineGames as “a chance to tell a new Indiana Jones story for a modern gaming audience.”
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At current, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is set to begin whipping away its way across Windows PC and Xbox Series X/S platforms on December 9th.