One of the biggest surprises of Steam’s most recent Next Fest was Far Far West, a robot wizard cowboy co-op FPS with some yeehaw-worthy gunslinging and spellcasting that earned it a place among the event’s top five most-played demos. Far Far West is now days away from its early access launch after its demo earned an Overwhelmingly Positive rating from over 6,000 reviews by Next Fest’s end.
According to Nicolas Meyssonnier, studio head of Far Far West developer Evil Raptor, those numbers were “way, way above” what the France-based, eight-person indie studio expected. In an interview with PC Gamer, Meyssonier said Evil Raptor’s previous work developing “very niche” 3D platformers had left it totally unprepared for the massive Next Fest response.
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“We don’t expect a lot of people and everything is way above what we could ever imagine,” Meyssonnier said. “I’m not used to that much positive feedback, and we had to organize around all that—find ways to receive all the feedback and bug reports. That’s a lot of organization work for us. Everything is new for us.”
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According to Meyssonier, the studio decided to pivot to a co-op FPS the same way he decided to make his first game, Pumpkin Jack. A fan of 3D platformers like Jak and Daxter, Meysonnier said he struggled to find a game that’d scratch that itch on PC, so he decided to make his own.
“I just typed on Google ‘how to make games,'” Meysonnier said. “That took quite long, but yeah.”
After assembling Evil Raptor for his next game, Akimbot, Meysonnier said the studio would spend a lot of time playing games together, but couldn’t find a co-op shooter to suit its tastes.
“So I said, ‘Okay, there’s no perfect game for us, and we do make games,'” he said. “Let’s make a co-op game to play for us.”
Evil Raptor’s jump from singleplayer platformers to multiplayer FPS has involved a lot of learning on the fly, with its developers putting themselves through crash courses on managing bandwidth, new types of level design, and—because “people expect to play with friends who have a shitty computer”—more intensive optimization.
Settling on robot wizard cowboys, however, was motivated by a combination of market strategy, technical constraints, and the fact that—well—everyone loves magic.
According to Meyssonnier, Evil Raptor wanted a theme that would help the studio break out of obscurity while differentiating the game from other available shooters. Scifi was plenty saturated with Deep Rock Galactic and Helldivers; Sea of Thieves had pirates locked down.
“We took a look at Steam and we skipped them one by one, and Western was left empty,” Meyssonnier said. “There weren’t many stylized Western games, so why not make a Western? It has a lot of tropes that we could stylize, and it’s a really colorful setting. That worked really well for us.”
But “as for the robots,” he said, “that was absolutely a technical constraint.” Animating the rigid, mechanical figure of a robot cowboy is much simpler than modeling and animating an organic cattleman. Evil Raptor simplified things further by giving all its robots Rayman-style floating hands, allowing it to design just one set of animations for each weapon instead of requiring separate first- and third-person animations like most multiplayer FPSes.
The robots only started slinging spells alongside their guns, however, once early playtesting made it clear that Far Far West’s gunplay needed an additional layer.
“We felt it needed something more and that we could do more, and magic is always cool,” said Evil Raptor “handyman” Arnaud Petit.
Turning the robot cowboys into wizards gave players more buttons to push and manage in combat, and allowing spells to combo their effects and status ailments opened up additional opportunities for cooperation.
“It was basically perfect for the game,” Petit said.
As Far Far West’s early access launch nears, Meysonnier confessed to a certain amount of trepidation after its demo’s success.
“Imposter syndrome. I feel that,” Meysonnier said. “I’ve had that for Pumpkin Jack also, back in 2020. But we just try to do what kind of game we would like to play.”
Far Far West hits early access on Steam on April 28.
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