- Toys for Bob wanted to bring back the feeling of playing previous games when developing Spyro: a realm beyond
- He wanted to focus on “the feeling we fall in love with” rather than worrying about a list of features.
- Creative director and studio head Paul Yan says, “If you get too attached to nostalgia, it feels like you’re repeating yourself.”
Toys for Bob focused on recapturing how the team felt playing previous games by creating Spyro: a realm beyondrather than worrying about a list of features to include.
That’s according to studio head Paul Yan, who told TechRadar Gaming in an interview at Summer Game Fest that the foundation of the game was based on what the team loves about the series.
When asked if there are any core features from previous games that the team avoided or tried to modernize, Yan said that “everything is going to be tweaked,” but when working on a new title “one of the things we try to do is really hunker down and try to isolate how that franchise makes us feel, not lists of specific features, not comparison of parts, but the feeling that we fell in love with.”
“We also look at the fan community,” he added, “we look at the external communication, our own communication, and we start to isolate and imagine what that means, what are the fantasies that we want, so when we say, you know, a kind of Zen exploration with a fluidity of movement, it’s more important for us to identify that as essential to feeling like spy “You have to say, ‘Oh, your cargo moves x number of units for x number of times,’ or things that happen.”
“So we build that kind of knowledge, we ingrain and canonize those feelings, and we build from there, and then throughout development we’ll have those conversations about whether we’re going to change them or touch on that, if it’s new, keep it or not.
“But at the same time, the spearhead is the feelings that we want to preserve and we want to amplify more than any specific characteristic of the institute.”
Yan also said that there’s a challenge in balancing nostalgia when creating a new game, “versus how much you diversify,” and explained that both can be bad in some cases.
“If you get too attached to nostalgia, it feels like you’re repeating yourself,” Yan said. “‘Why do we bother doing this?’ […] Then you go to the other extreme and change everything, and now it’s like ‘I don’t even recognize this character.’ So we’re very proud of the fact that through the process of this, we’ve been very thoughtful about it, trying to talk about the tone and the core, and making sure to reference all the fan feedback, and all the feelings and ideas that have come out of the Rebooted Trilogyso we’re sure that that base has given us a lot of information that has informed our own gun instincts about what spy is, and then our vision of spy is that this is just one of the many games of the future.
“We would love to see more in this franchise. Hopefully, you know, around Beyond It puts it on a really solid foundation.”
Spyro: a realm beyond launches in spring 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
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