The Iron Lords, Lord Cognito and Lord Addict were at Summer Games Fest and had a chance to sit down and chat with SuperMassive Games Executive Producer Dan McDonald about the highly anticipated, upcoming release, Directive 8020.
Supermassive Goes Sci-Fi in a Big Way
The team at Supermassive Games has done a lot of different horror-based stories. They’ve touched on a “Ghost Ship” vibe and sort of witchcraft in Little Hope, then vampires in the desert, and a murder castle. Now the team is taking the player to the future with space as the backdrop. The player will get to experience the new and different dangers that the situation brings.
“It’s our first foray into the future, in sci-fi. It’s our, it’s the thing in space. That’s what we want it to be. You know, I’ve been working on the series (The Dark Pictures Anthology) from the start, you know, all the great stories. Yeah. They’re my twisted babies…”
Dan McDonald
SuperMassive Games Executive Producer
More Experienced Character Leads to (Hopefully) More Informed Choices
In Directive 8020 the player, or players, will be portraying professional astronauts; not a bunch of teenagers in the woods. So they’re hopefully a bit more unflappable and aware of the situation. But they’re thousands of light years away from Earth. So there’s going to be no help from Earth. They are totally isolated. Space is a dangerous place. And then, of course, there’s an alien.
Directive 8020 Is New Inside and Out
According to Dan, Supermassive took more time with Directive 8020 than they had with previous games: “We managed to do one every year, which was a real challenge, but it was a lot of fun to do. We wanted to really change everything up and make it as good as it possibly could be. So everything’s new, all the controls, the animation systems, new from the ground up.”. These changes make the game feel a lot more like an action-adventure in terms of how you move around, with strafing and stealth moments.
Threat and Exploration
Directive 8020‘s goal is to scare the player in new ways. In their previous games, you’ve been safe when you’ve been walking around, reading the puzzles, and figuring things out. Whereas now, there’s a real threat. A hunter is going to get you, which means we can kill the player in loads more ways in loads more places. You can still play it like the old Dark Pictures games. You can make that easy for yourself and, you know, have that lean-back movie-style gameplay. If you choose.
New Engine For a New Generation
Directive 8020 has been built with Unreal Engine 5 for the current generation of consoles. The folks at Supermassive had to basically build the game from scratch, allowing them to really lean into it and make the experience look as good as possible.
Rewind and Re-Do
Supermassive is introducing the “Turning Point” system into Directive 8020. Now the player can rewind to the previous moment and change what happened, or they can go all the way back to the start, or any different branching event, and it doesn’t overwrite what you’ve done. The Turning Point system will work alongside the full map that will let the player see all of the different branching, allowing them to go back and see what will happen if they make a different decision at key points. It will also allow them to collect things they may have missed.
Fight or Flight… or Hide?
In Directive 8020, It’s all about choice. There’s a number of ways you can face this monster. You have a way of fighting back against it, but you wont be powerful. The player doesn’t have massive weapons that allow you can fight back. It’s not that kind of game. It’s horror. You’re weak. You have to run. You have to hide. So yeah, while you can fight back against it in some small way, you can sneak past it. You can learn its behaviors, where it’s going to move. You can distract it. There’s ways of you interacting with the ship, changing the power, turning screens on, turning on little robots, drawing it into different places so that you can get past it. So there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff there.
Moving Up With Couch Co-Op (From Faraway Couches)
Supermassive knows that a lot of their fans, they play these together. So they’ve introduced Moving Up mode, which is up to five players together on one sofa. Perfect for Halloween parties. Can’t get together on the same sofa? You can be anywhere. It can be five people on different computers playing together or two on one machine and three on another. So you can have that party, even if your friends are halfway across the country, you can still play with them.
The End… Or Is It?
As with the previous entries in the Dark Pictures series, Directive 8020 offers a multitude of possible endings depending on the situation the player finds themselves in at the end of the game.
You can imagine the kind of things that might happen in space, right?
They’re stuck on a planet. Maybe they’ve got away. Maybe they haven’t got fuel to get away. Maybe the alien’s still with them.
Directive 8020 Launches October 2nd, 2025 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
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