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Making and breaking the Max Payne-like rules of El Paso, Elsewhere
26.09.2023 - 14:57 / gamedeveloper.com
In 2021, Strange Scaffold director Xalavier Nelson, Jr. began promoting his next upcoming video game El Paso, Elsewhere with two clear goals: it would bring back the third-person action mechanics that made 2001’s Max Payne a smash hit, and it would ship by the end of 2022.
Only one of those things came true. But nine months after his original, self-imposed deadline, Nelson couldn’t be more pleased with the results.
“Over the course of development, so many of the team members exhibited skillsets, perspective, and abilities that were not apparent at the beginning of our journey–without necessarily increasing scope, even,” Nelson told Game Developer on the eve of the game’s September 26 launch on PC. “The picture of what the game could be grew larger, weirder, and more polished than we could have imagined.”
How does a video game blow past a deadline “without increasing scope,” then? The team at Strange Scaffold took some time out from El Paso, Elsewhere’s last-minute patching process to offer some insights.
Nelson described the original design doc for El Paso, Elsewhere: The game was conceived as having third-person monster-killing action with a lo-fi aesthetic (somewhere between the Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast’s graphical prowess) whose mechanical foundation would borrow equally from Max Payne 2 and Max Payne 3.
Each level would take place on a flat, single-floor level, and most would include hostages who need rescuing—the player must find them, escort them to safety, and then escape “before reality broke down around you.”
Nelson cited a number of non-Payne video game influences that were part of his original El Paso, Elsewhere plans, such as Quake 1 for its combat design and Hotline Miami for its die-and-retry quickness.
He mentioned the Die Hard film trilogy repeatedly, as it contributed to El Paso Elsewhere’s lack of ceilings—which opens up the player’s vision of upcoming objectives and possible battles. Shift your view inside El Paso, Elsewhere at any time, and you might see a light cone from the sky pointing to a hostage who needs saving, or a suggestion that a certain path won’t be fruitful.
"A game gets way more interesting when you confront assumptions about what has to be there and what purpose it serves,” Nelson said. “If you remove ceilings from a level, the game you’re making, the decisions players get to make, and the types of visuals you can pull upon become far more vibrant."
“We didn’t think we would have stairs and verticality in this game,” Nelson said. “That was an original rule. This game has some fucking verticality now, and at a certain point, we had crashes every time you would dive onto a staircase. But does it also mean that what we get to say with the game has grown alongside it?
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