CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Game Hyenas
Developer Creative Assembly
Publisher Sega
Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Release 2023
A team of three thieves sneak through a cavernous spaceship. They tangle with the ship's guards, some of them wrapped in mech exoskeletons that resemble the power loader from the end of Aliens, and with other player-controlled squads with similarly felonious intent. Grenades are thrown out that blossom into clumpy walls of goo. Grappling hooks launch the thieves at speed through low-gravity environments. Finally, a safe-cracking device is attached to the vault they're here to rob, lasers drawing a molten line around the door's perimeter. It falls open, revealing the thieves' prize: a cassette with a hand-written label and a doodle of a disco ball. All this for a mixtape?
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Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised. After all, Hyenas comes from the same part of Creative Assembly that previously created Alien Isolation, with around half of the 150 developers on this game coming across, including multiple leads. That was the team that, lest we forget, once transferred elements of Isolation's Ul onto VHS tape and then back, to achieve the perfectly imperfect analogue fuzz. Seeing the future through the lens of the past has always been a clear fascination here, and while it couldn't look much less like the Sevastopol, this new spaceship is like a temple to that same mindset. Instead of blocky CRT terminals and steely architecture lifted from Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, here we're faced with a colossal recreation of a Roland TR-808 drum machine that towers overhead, and an Atari-themed arcade populated with real machines, the wonderfully garish art running up the side of a Centipede cabinet unmistakable as our thieves rush past.
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These are just a few of the details elided in our initial description of events. Perhaps we should have mentioned that the gunfight with a rival squad played out on a staircase decorated like the walk-on piano from Big, the oversized keys lighting up under players' feet as they strafe and slide. Or that the safe-cracking device is housed within the familiar black shell of a Mega Drive, which emits a startup chime to indicate its laser cutters are coming online. Which sounds, inevitably, like this: "SEGAAA".
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In the context of the game's story, these items are relics of a ruined Earth, in the process of being shuttled to Mars on the whims of its billionaire inhabitants. (Or, in the case of the Mega Drive, salvaged from its wreckage and repurposed by an underclass who want their damn stuff back.) In the context of the game's development, however, they're representations of licensing deals struck with a wide variety of manufacturers, publishers, stores and even municipal bodies - just one of many logistical headaches that Hyenas' creators decided to give themselves in taking on the project.
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The first discussions about what would eventually become Hyenas began in 2017, after the team finished Halo Wars 2. Having worked on a strategy game based on another company's property, it seems clear that they wanted to push in an entirely different direction, as creative director Charlie Bewsher explains. "They were very keen to take their first-person experience from Alien Isolation a stage further, and do something more dynamic and more action-orientated," he says. They landed on the idea of a multiplayer shooter - a market that Bewsher acknowledges is tough to crack on your first try - and, just to make things extra tricky, one that doesn't just focus on PvP combat but also folds in a PvE layer of Al opponents.
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"And then we had to make a new IP," Bewsher adds. "That's an incredibly hard, time-consuming aspect of what we've done. And then we had to get into licensing IP as well. And then, on top of all those things, we were really keen to develop a live game experience. We love [this idea of the relationship you have with your players when you're doing games as a service, when you're doing a live game - and that's something we hadn't experienced as a team before." No wonder the game has taken five years and counting to make.
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And that long development has in turn brought extra challenges. "The shooter market has changed massively since we started making this," Bewsher says. That might be understating things, as live product director Alex Hunnisett points out: "I mean, it's very different to what it looked like about six months ago! It is rapidly changing and evolving." That applies to what the cutting edge of design looks like, but also the business around these games. "So, yeah, it's really a moving target," Bewsher admits. "But that's why we wanted to be in [this space]."
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In fact, it was one of these big shakeups that inspired Hyenas in the first place. "In 2017, that was the rise of battle royales," Bewsher says. "And we were really interested in how they upended the shooter market." Specifically, the way these games threw out the careful symmetry of old arena shooters in favour of skirmishes that might involve three or four teams, all of differing sizes. "And you'd have these unbalanced loadouts - I have a frying pan, you've got an AK: how do we resolve that? Well. That situation usually resolves itself very quickly."
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Hyenas, we should clarify up front, isn't a battle royale game. But was that ever on the table? "We didn't consider it," Bewsher begins, then quickly corrects himself. "I mean, we had the conversation, but we immediately dismissed it. We knew that space would be very quickly dominated by very experienced shooting teams - and it has been, right? So we thought, we don't want to compete there." He adds something that seems to define Creative Assembly's approach with Hyenas: "We didn't want to compete on other people's terms."
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Hence the distinctive shape into which the game has, after various incarnations and experiments, finally settled: a competitive crime spree where five teams of three compete to grab the most merchandise and make it out alive. We can detect the influence of other games, but it's a broad range. The raids of Escape From Tarkov, Payday 2's heist-movie framing, the interstellar playground of Arkane's Prey, Hunt: Showdown's escape-route ambushes - and, yes, more than a little battle royale.
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You don't start a Hyenas match unarmed, as in those games, but additional gadgets and weapon upgrades are collected from randomised loot drops. And games certainly end in similar fashion, with a climactic shootout in a tightly bounded space in this case, a designated extraction point that the team with most loot must defend while waiting for their teleporter to warm up. The question of what happens if you die has a familiar answer, too. Following a brief down-but-not-out state that offers the chance to be revived, you can be brought back by teammates, so long as they can get to a respawner booth that looks like one of Rapture's Vita-Chambers but functions exactly like Apex Legends' Respawn Beacons.
 
STOLEN GOODS
"We decided early on not to make up IPs - not to fake them, like other games do, where they make up their own version of Coca-Cola or whatever," Bewsher says of Hyenas' robbable merch. "I can understand why they fake it now," he laughs. The team begin with a lengthy wishlist for each ship's theme ('1980s' and 'New York City' being the two revealed so far). From there, Bewsher explains: "It's trying to persuade the company, to talk about what we're doing, what we do with IP, and why we selected their stuff. It's a lot of face-to-face conversations. But it's hard work. I remember when we were talking about it at the start, it was like: 'Come up with 100 and you'll get five'. And it really is that hard."
The 2019 arrival of Respawn's game really left a mark on Hyenas' development, it seems. "When Apex Legends released, we played a lot of that in the office," lead meta-game designer Christoph Will recalls. He references his own background playing Counter-Strike and Quake as a personal influence on Hyenas - "but Apex is prol the single gest] one, especially with the hero transition". Initially, the game had been loadout-based, with players picking their tools before insertion. Bewsher admits that they realised - "slightly late, probably" - that a roster of defined characters would provide an added hook for players coming to this unusual game, with its potentially overwhelming stew of ideas. And so the Hyenas - the cast of "screwball characters," as Will calls them, who give the game its name - were born.
The trio we're following through this ship is led by El Silbon, a sniper character dressed in sunglasses, urban-camo trousers and a flak vest marked 'FBI'. Pretty unremarkable by videogame standards, then, but, next to her partners in crime, she stands out like a sore thumb. Prima is our cover star, an unhinged black swan who uses a zero-g bubble for feats of mid-air ballet. Galaxia is a drag queen with Barbarella-inspired fashion sense, able to catch incoming bullets in the air like Neo at the end of The Matrix.
The rest of the Hyenas revealed so far - bank robber, videogame player, astronaut - are built around similarly strong archetypes. But vitally, Bewsher tells us, not stereotypes. "It'd be really easy for us to make a clichéd drag queen based on an amalgamation of people we'd seen on RuPaul's Drag Race," he says of Galaxia. "We didn't want to fall in that trap." The solution was to work with a consultant for each character: in this case, an as-yet-unnamed "very famous drag queen", who advised on everything from makeup to dialogue.
Finding Galaxia's place in the roster, meanwhile, was a case of matching mechanics to persona. "Drag queens get heckled a lot on stage. They're these big, brave characters who stand up there, they take a lot of heckling, and, with their roasts or whatever, they give it back to the audience," Bewsher says. "And so that idea immediately transformed itself into the gravity shield she has, where she takes in all of the bullets, and then she just throws them back." That connection is really sold by Galaxia's little 'no, no' finger wag animation while the shield is up. It's both an amusing character beat and a warning to other players that, as Bewsher says, "if you're not thinking in that moment, and you start shooting, it's gonna be a very difficult outcome for you".
In Overwatch terms, the power is essentially Reinhardt's barrier field multiplied by Genji's deflect ability. Indeed, many of the Hyenas' abilities are just as archetypal as their identities. The Pro, the game's Nixon-masked career criminal, has a deployable turret. Doc Hotfix, the videogame player in his VR headset, is a healer who sends out a drone to patch up allies. El Silbon can fire out probes from an underslung launcher to send out a scanning pulse, highlighting players and NPCs alike through walls. More unusual is Captain Wright, the career astronaut in her NASA-esque spacesuit, who comes equipped with something that looks an awful lot like Prey's Gloo Gun.
"The foam gun is my favourite toy in Hyenas so far," Hunnisett says. "Just because it can be used in so many ways." It has offensive capabilities, able to seal guards in a cocoon or gunk up the workings of a mech. "But it can also be used for traversal," he adds. "You can whack up a bit of foam, jump onto that and get to otherwise inaccessible areas of the map."
"Yet the foam's primary application, it seems, is defensive. "If you're raiding a vault, you can put a foam wall up and just be like, hey, leave us alone," Hunnisett explains. Fire it at a vent or window and it'll close off that opening entirely, making it especially useful for a hasty retreat. "Wright is really good at disengaging," Will "If your teammate goes down and you want to respawn them, running away and dropping a lot of foam behind you to delay the enemies, that's what she's really good at." says.
BEHIND THE CURVE
Hyenas has changed in many ways over the course of development. When Christoph Will joined in 2018, the prototype that existed "was very much more stealth-focused, more PvE, than it is right now". Players were also split into four teams of four, rather than five trios. "The flow of the match just didn't feel right," he says. "Often, you would either have too few encounters with other players, or you had too many early encounters where aggressive players could wipe out most of the map." Much effort has been focused on what Will calls "the tension curve" making sure that matches build towards a satisfying climax. "Generally, it ramps up over the session, and there's almost guaranteed to be a two-way - but generally even a three- or four-way-fight at the getaway at the end. And that's where the game really comes together."
These varied applications of a single tool cover the spectrum of playstyles the Hyenas team are designing towards, which they refer to as "the three Es": Engage, Evade and Exploit. Engage is the simple head-on approach: fight everyone at the first opportunity, and hope that your shooter skills are enough to bring you out on top. Evade, meanwhile, involves a little more subtlety, as you sneak around the ship's defences (which, along with NPC guards, include tripwires and alarmed entryways) and rival player teams.
"Your strategy could be: we're going to actively avoid these hotspots and wait to jump folks when they've got loot," Hunnisett says. "It could be that you're willing to go into hotspots early, which means you're more likely to encounter players." These are approaches that will no doubt be familiar to any battle royale player, a connection that Bewsher makes explicit. "I'm the guy who hides in a bush right up to the last player in PUBG," he says. "I'm quite happy with an Evade path." But there are no bushes to be found on these spaceships - or at least not the ones we've seen. Rather, the best friend of any Evade player is the verticality of these high-ceilinged spaces - especially once the gravity gets turned off.
"We were very nervous about touching this, because I haven't played many games where I've really enjoyed zero-g," Bewsher admits. To find a fresh approach, the team took inspiration from two cinematic touchstones. The first was Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, and the way it expressed zero-g movement not as floating but "falling fast in every direction". The way Hyenas' equivalent is most often described to us is "point-to-point jumping", with the player given some limited control over steering between those points. We see one thief fire their gravity hook at a far wall, before their teammates latch onto their now-hurtling figure and are carried along in their wake. It's a little like footage of ducklings following their mother being played in fast-forward.
The other touchstone was the first Guardians Of The Galaxy movie - specifically the moment in its jailbreak sequence where Rocket deactivates the artificial gravity in order to send the prison guards tumbling helplessly upwards. You can do pretty much exactly this in Hyenas, by pressing (or even shooting) switches in each part of the ship. Which brings us, finally, to Exploit. "There are these elements of how you can weaponise the environment," Hunnisett s...