Dontnod’s first open-world game is more Dishonored than Dracula
Among the things we disliked about our first glimpse of Vampyr, Dontnod’s tale of occult predation in wartime London, was its combat – a graceless third-person mishmash of three-hit combos and pistol exchanges, peppered with crowdcontrol spells and teleport dashes. It was a shaky advert for a developer now wandering back into action-adventure territory after the success of episodic adventure Life Is Strange, but the addition of Teppei Takehana to Dontnod’s ranks goes some way towards addressing our misgivings. Hired as animation director in June 2016, he brings ten years of experience as an animator at Kojima Productions and Quantic Dream, whose games tread a similar line between motioncaptured plausibility and outright fantasy. While Dontnod doesn’t have any new combat footage to show during our visit to the studio’s Parisian HQ, Takehana’s matter-offactness is reassuring. “To make a responsive action game is really easy,” he notes. “To have a responsive action game that looks realistic is more difficult. This is our challenge.”
