For Wild Bastards, the sequel to the 2019 first person roguelike, Void Bastards, developer Blue Manchu pretty quickly homed in on a wild west team-up, Magnificent Seven sort of deal. But there was a problem.
"In first person games, it's really hard to do a gang well, like AI teammates, even after 20 or 30 years of work on it, they're still really annoying most of the time, and we wanted to make a singleplayer game," explained Jonathan Chey, design director at Wild Bastards developer Blue Manchu and a veteran of Irrational Games and Looking Glass. "We had this problem, which is we want a group of people working together, but don't want to have the AI controlling your teammates. How are we going to do that? That's when we really focused on the swapping mechanic."
