This is the first island, and I don't think it's any secret that there are multiple islands. How do you add variety to all the different islands? Is there a theme to this first one, or is it just easing people in?

There definitely was a theme, sort of mixed between gameplay mechanic themes and also telling the story, I suppose, of the Ninetales attack on these platforms. Luke would probably be the best to talk about how he tackled that side of it art-wise.

Yeah, so the theme that we discussed with the creative director Ian, that we really wanted to bring home on this first island, is really this Normandy beach landing experience. You come out of the shoreline. You're there, explosions are happening. The fight is immediately intense. You're trying to push up. We're fighting uphill. We had the mortar section that we just went through. So it's really like, we're here, it's not a stealth approach. You're getting tossed into it straight away. And I think that really defines this first couple of areas. And then we'll see what the next area has entailed for us.

When you're designing encounters and missions, you always want to try for nice, what we call, peaks and troughs, where there's points of high intensity that then chill out. Because if it was constant high intensity, it gives you a different feeling and experience compared to ones where it's like, okay, now we can breathe, we can gather up, we can sort ourselves out.