A new Ghibli-inspired open-world game is coming next month and it looks beautiful

For those who’re an enormous fan of Studio Ghibli, or end up wishing you may dive into its worlds as you watch the movies, you may need to try the upcoming recreation Towers of Aghasba. Earlier this month, epicgamejourney attended a distant preview the place the devs showcased a prerecorded take a look at the sport and talked about their inspiration.

The open-world fantasy survival builder recreation is the primary title from Dreamlit Video games — with builders having beforehand labored on the whole lot from Hawken to Titanfall and Name of Obligation 2, to not point out movies equivalent to Independence Day and Prepared Participant One.

In Towers of Aghasba, gamers tackle the position of junior architect for the fictional Shimu folks, who needed to flee their homeland after a mysterious pressure ravaged it. Now, the participant should nurture the land again to life, restoring its wildlife, and rebuild the villages. As soon as that’s accomplished, multiplayer is unlocked — with gamers in a position to discover, commerce, hunt, and battle with as much as three buddies.

The unique thought for Towers got here in 2009, taking inspiration from Minecraft as a sandbox expertise the place gamers make the most of assets to construct, in addition to Shadow of the Colossus for visible inspiration. However the largest affect, Dreamlit CEO and director Khang Le mentioned within the recorded preview, was the Ghibli movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. “It looks like a spot I need to discover and dwell in,” Le mentioned, after stating the movie’s large creatures, unusual forest, and teenage princess Nausicaä harvesting spores.

Le pushed Towers to the background whereas creating Hawken, which was launched in 2012. Then, when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was launched in 2017, he revisited the thought, this time seeing it as extra of an exploration and builder recreation, drawing inspiration from Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, alongside Viva Piñata and Princess Mononoke for the forest-building and luring creatures facet.

“For the visible fashion, the selection was to go along with a bit extra African and Aztec, and historical cultures just like the Jōmon from Japan,” Le mentioned. “I feel a tribal fantasy fashion suits our recreation mechanic.”

One of many issues Le wished to check out for Towers was utilizing actual, hand-painted textures within the recreation, quite than doing the whole lot digitally. As a part of this course of, he turned buddies with one of many background portray artists from Studio Ghibli, Yoichi Nishikawa, who hand-painted some (however not all) of Towers’ textures utilizing poster colours.

“Being an enormous fan of Ghibli Studio and all their movies, it’s such an honor to have the ability to have a bunch of those textures the place […] if you look down at your ft or stare at a rock or sure partitions, you may see the hand-painted texture on them and it’s fairly stunning.”

The textures aren’t the one analog a part of the event course of; the map can be handcrafted, with Le saying throughout the Q&A portion of the preview that “it took a very long time” and the workforce is “nonetheless wrapping it up.” With the ability to handcraft the terrains has been a part of the enjoyable for the event workforce, in line with Le, as a substitute of utilizing different conventional instruments like procedural era.

Even for those who’re not a fan of Studio Ghibli, it seems like there will likely be rather a lot to discover in Towers of Aghasba as soon as it’s launched into early entry for PC and PS5 on Nov. 19.