Dan Houser Talks About Plans to Create a Video Game Based on American Caper

During his trip to England, Dan Houser also gave an interview to The Guardian, in which he confirmed that a video game based on a new franchise from his company, Absurd Ventures, is in development. The third project — following Absurdaverse and A Better Paradise, which were announced earlier — and potentially coming to consoles and PC, could be American Caper. A comic book series set in this universe has already launched, with the third issue expected to be released in ten days. Unlike the other projects, it is closer than anything else to Grand Theft Auto, although, according to the author, it will be very different.

I’m not making an open-world game for that. We’re actually looking at maybe doing more of a story game. We’re still kind of exploring it.

We’re trying to be ambitious, to make new stuff. At some level [our projects] are traditional console games, accessible, but action-oriented story-driven open world console games – but then at the same time, we’re doing it a slightly different way or with slightly different subject matter. Three years ago we were watching one of those PlayStation showcases, and if you blinked and missed the credit sequences, you couldn’t tell where one game ended and the other began. Everything was sort of dark purple and about space ninjas. They were about this apocalypse or that apocalypse but always felt the same. That’s fine. Some of them are amazing games. But we were like, well, we’ve got limited money and we are starting from scratch. We have to have good stories and fun dialogue, and make sure our gameplay is amazing and accessible, and our art direction has to be fresh – at all points, it has to feel different. We have to make stuff where people go, ‘Well, I’ve never played a game about that’, and then treat the audience, not just as gamers, but as human beings.

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