How A Plague Tale came back from the brink

Sometimes it's hard to imagine, when a game becomes a series and an admired one at that, that once upon a time there was nothing. There was nothing tangible. All there were, were hopes and ideas, swirling around. And the process of materialising them into something: it's a fragile thing. There's no certainty that what will come out the other end will even survive that process. And A Plague Tale: Innocence, it turns out, very nearly didn't.

For one dread-filled moment near the end of the originally-allotted development time, the Plague Tale project nearly failed. French studio Asobo suffered a sucker-punch of a setback that meant the game, and any aspirations of making story-led games like this in the future, was in serious jeopardy. It's a moment series director Kevin Choteau understandably doesn't like to recollect.

"I will speak about something that I don't like to talk [about] normally..." he tells me.

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