Deep Dive and Hands On with South of Midnight | Official Xbox Podcast

SPEAKER 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M.
LINA MADRID: Welcome to the official Xbox podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside Xbox.
I'm Lina, and way up there is Jeff.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I can see for miles up here.
LINA MADRID: Okay, you don't need to rub it in.
We're actually not at the studio right now.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: No, we're in New York, where we're among a number of media and content creators that are getting to be the first people outside of Compulsion Games to actually play South of Midnight, a game I know both of us have been really looking forward to.
LINA MADRID: Yes.
We get to see a lot of cool things, talk to a lot of cool people, which, as if right on cue, we have Whitney Clayton, the Art Director for South of Midnight.
Hi, Whitney.
WHITNEY CLAYTON: Hi.
LINA MADRID: Hi.
Okay, I have to ask.
The stop motion, the very first moment that we saw something from South of Midnight, you know, we had that trailer.
It was so visually arresting, the style and everything.
So I would love to know your journey in creating this world.
WHITNEY CLAYTON: Yeah, so I think we just really wanted to be very deliberate with this type of style we were going to do for the game.
So our previous games did have a style, a lot of world-building, a lot of very cohesive world direction, but we wanted to take it a step further and really define the style, so we leaned heavily into this handcrafted look, and it came from something that felt right with the setting.
So it's the Deep South, Southern Gothic, dark fantasy, folktale.
So having this handcrafted look seemed to encapsulate those themes really well.
It has soul, it has this feeling of craft, and so I think it's a timeless sort of style, but it has a lot of challenges bringing that into 3D because it's not actually real.
It's 3D, so we had to make it look like it was crafted.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Something that is real and is handcrafted is this right in front of us, this beautiful peach tree with Hazel sitting there weaving?
Who made this?
WHITNEY CLAYTON: Yeah, so this is Clyde Henry Productions, and they are a stop-motion animation studio.
We were looking for types of stop-motion animations that would feel right for the game.
We knew we were telling a dark, mature story, and it had to have this eerie, sophisticated feeling to it.
So they had done a really amazing short called "Madame Tutli-Putli," and we just loved it, and it was a really cool reference for the type of detailing and kind of the way it felt, just had this really nice feeling.
They are actually in Montreal, and so they let our team visit the studio and inspect all the maquettes and look at how they were made, so our team learned a lot about maquette-making so they could bring that back and try to reverse engineer it in 3D, so that was the first part of getting to know these guys.
And then at the end of production, we needed like an intro cinematic to bring the player into the type of world that they were going to be in South of Midnight and just sort of set them off on this journey, and we thought that would be perfect if that was in the style of stop motion, so then they agreed to do an actual stop motion for us.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And that's at the beginning of the game when you first load it up, right?
WHITNEY CLAYTON: Yeah, exactly.
So then they made a beautiful stop-motion film with us.
So the whole inspiration went full circle with them.
So it's been a really fun collaboration over the last couple years.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Whitney, thank you so much.
The game looks incredible.
These look amazing, these maquettes, but you know what else is beautiful?
Getting to spend about 90 minutes playing the game for the first time.
LINA MADRID: So excited.
Yeah, okay.
Let's go play.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Okay, all right.
We will see you.
LINA MADRID: Thank you.
[ Music ]
HAZEL: I'm looking for a creature, huge, sneaky, teeth like knives.
[ Music ]
CATFISH: My salvation.
HAZEL: A talking fish?
Um-um, nope.
Ain't no way.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So we just got finished actually playing South of Midnight.
We got to play it for over an hour, and it's always interesting, I feel like, when you see gameplay like we did at the Developer Direct pretty recently, but then you play it, you're like, ah, now I get it.
LINA MADRID: Yeah, it's like the full experience at that point, and it's so exciting.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So we played for, again, well over an hour.
We recorded video of it.
You're going to see a ton of that here in a bit, and we have a lot of questions, and fortunately, we have the right people here to help us answer those questions.
Zaire Lanier, you're the writer of South of Midnight.
ZAIRE LANIER: I'm one of the writers.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: One of the writers on South of Midnight, and then Jasmin Roy.
Please tell me I was close.
JASMIN ROY: Oh, yes, yes.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: You're the game director, but you're also podcast director every time I try to pronounce your name, and hopefully I was close here.
And so we've got questions for both of you.
There's so much.
So Lina, kick us off.
LINA MADRID: Yeah, so we talked about the beauty of the world earlier with Whitney, but let's dive into the story, because what we experienced there was layer upon layer, deep, rich lore.
So what can you tell us about the story that players are going to experience?
ZAIRE LANIER: Yeah, so you're going to play as Hazel, and as you see in the story trailer, she loses her mom in a hurricane.
The trailer gets swept downstream, and Hazel is running after it and trying to get to her.
She can't, and she will get basically chosen by the land, imbued with magic to be a weaver, and that weaver's journey is her going throughout the countryside of the game and all these different biomes and these different places, trying to get back to her mother, and all the creatures and cryptids and stuff she'll meet along the way that are based on a lot of Southern folklore.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk a little bit more about that.
So I used to live in the South.
I would go hiking outside, but even in the neighborhood, you would just see like lots of wildlife, like alligators, sometimes in the swimming pool.
Yes, I lived in Florida.
But raccoons and possums.
I didn't see a whole lot of talking catfish as well, but I used to catch quite a bit on my own.
But what drew you to that southern U.S.
setting?
ZAIRE LANIER: Yeah, well, our creative director is from the South and drew a lot of inspiration from there.
We have some people from the South on the team.
My family has roots in the South, as a lot of Americans do, and it's also just a place that we don't see in games that often.
It's not that it doesn't exist, but it's not something that you see on the regular, and it's really iconic.
The Spanish moss, the cypress trees, cicadas, the, like you said, the wildlife, there's just so much there.
It's just got like an aura and a presence to it that I think is really fun to dive into.
And the art team and the sound team did such an amazing job kind of replicating that and making it feel very authentic, and it's one of my favorite parts of the game.
LINA MADRID: Yeah, hearing the ambiance, all the critters and everything around, was really cool.
ZAIRE LANIER: Yeah, sometimes I'll pause the game and just sit and do work while just sitting there because it's just like, oh, it's like a little ASMR.
LINA MADRID: Yeah.
So we encounter the Haints, or monsters, throughout that we deal with.
They're bits of trauma, right?
Could you touch on that?
JASMIN ROY: So Haints are really evil spirits that you're going to encounter as you explore the world, and they're really drawn to when something terrible happens to someone, they are going to be drawn to it, and they are going to want very specific sections of the world that Hazel can go into.
You're going to see it in some of the trailers that we release.
We call this "stigma," and it's corrupted strands.
The same strands that Hazel manipulates, they get kind of corrupted all around and they form this kind of dark energy, and Hazel is able to go into these areas with her hooks and she's able to kind of banish these evil spirits.
She does this through the unravel that we've shown previously, and so they are directly tied to really what happens in the region, what happens between, you know, in the lore of the world.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Can we talk a little bit more about Hazel, like who she is?
Because at the very beginning, she seems like a pretty normal person, and all this stuff is pretty new to her as it is to us, the player.
ZAIRE LANIER: Yeah, one thing I really like about Hazel is like she's kind of a chosen one, but it's for something relatively, I won't say normal, but she's not saving the world.
She's not like bringing down an evil regime or anything.
She's a girl trying to find her mom, and along the way, she does encounter all these fantastical creatures and does encounter this trauma, but she's also very empathetic.
She's in this weird space between childhood and adulthood where you think you know everything, but then as you experience parts of the world, you change that worldview some.
You learn people aren't perfect, people make mistakes.
I don't necessarily understand how things work, or maybe someone did their best, even if their best wasn't good enough and they mean it wholeheartedly, but it's just a very human story, and I think she's relatable.
She's funny.
She's a little sassy.
I'm excited for people to play her because she's not perfect, but she is very well-meaning and she is doing her best throughout the game, and ultimately it is a story about a daughter trying to find her mother and the connection that they have over the course of the game, I think is portrayed really interestingly.
JASMIN ROY: One of the things is we really wanted to map Hazel and the player's journey together, and one of the things that's important in the game is that you start with Hazel in a very grounded environment and where she lives, so you get to know her situation, and as you progress through the game, you delve more and more into the fantastical.
So her journey actually grows into her as a weaver, and as she looks for her mother and encounters all the mythical creatures, she'll go to all those regions and further and further away from the normal world, and you're going to start seeing kind of weird things.
You're going to see tons of creatures, but also natural elements that might be out of proportion.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Giant beaches.
JASMIN ROY: Giant beaches.
There's hazards in there, like thorny brambles everywhere.
So the world starts to really shift and really brings you into a magical adventure.
ZAIRE LANIER: It really makes you feel like you're playing a folktale.
It's got a little bit of unworldliness to it that I really enjoy.
LINA MADRID: Yeah, and I think that music also plays a very big role in the feel, the overall feel for any kind of video game, and I just noticed how it would start off subtle and then start building, and then there were the quiet moments.
We talked about the ambient sounds also integrating in that.
[ Music ]
I know neither of you are the music director.
However, could you kind of tell us a little bit about how the music for South of Midnight came about?
JASMIN ROY: One of the first things we wanted to do with the music was to really integrate it into the gameplay.
That was something that Chris Fox, our audio director, would always refer the musicality, and you're going to hear a lot of that as you use the different spells.
You're going to hear music notes, and that builds up throughout all the experience.
As you progress, you're going to encounter giant creatures.
They all have a musical piece that's written about them.
The lyrics of those songs, they reflect the story.
They reflect what's going on and what you're going to learn about them.
So as you play one of the levels, you're going to slowly build the song.
You're going to get snippets of it, and that, usually towards the end, kind of a crescendo ensemble tied with some of the encounters we have with the mythical creature.
LINA MADRID: Yeah, the songs are so good.
They're so good.
"Two-Toed Tom," stuck in my head for weeks after I first heard it.
Loved it.
ZAIRE LANIER: They're very good.
LINA MADRID: So good.
ZAIRE LANIER: I enjoyed working with Chris at Narrative.
I also helped write a little bit of the lyrics for the songs because they're telling the story of the creature.
So we talked with Chris, and Chris and David, they wrote the lyrics together about the different creatures and their stories, but also Chris wanted to be really authentic to the region, and so we pulled from different styles of music.
There's like gospel music.
We have some blues-inspired pieces.
We have some folksy type stuff, and so we went down to the source, and I know they got some like Southern children's choir, Southern blues musicians to contribute to the game, and I think that also makes the world feel more authentic because these are people who live there and this is what they do.
And Chris really was like, "I felt like I learned so much," and it was really enlightening to see how people do these different styles of music while also making it fit the world of Midnight and our story and making it for the creature's lore, but it was very, very intentional and recognizing like, hey, this isn't necessarily my expertise, but as a collaborative group, we can make something really, really beautiful together, and I think they knocked it out of the park.
The music in the game, I think, is really, really good.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: It's definitely memorable.
One of the things that sort of jumped out at me as like a corollary to this is also just how people sound, their accents, their voices that sound like very authentic to the area.
CATFISH: It ain't every day I hear about a new weaver such as yourself.
And lo and behold, with a distaff and all.
HAZEL: I just found this thing.
My house got swept away in a storm with my mama in it, and I'm just trying to find my mama before -- CATFISH: Oh, you really don't know anything.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I'm just curious how you all thought about that.
A lot of times in mass media, sometimes in games, people in the South, maybe it's more of a caricature, but these people felt warm, even just like NPCs and stuff like that, and I'm just really curious how you thought about the voice acting and the performances there.
ZAIRE LANIER: We had dialect coaches that came from the South.
So I know Nona, one of our mo-cap actresses for Hazel, her family is from Mississippi, and she helped do some of the dialect coaching for Hazel's voice actress, and Adriyan, Hazel's VA, her family comes from North Carolina.
So again, it's just going to the source, and even with the other parts of the sound design in the game, they were in the swamps, recording from like sunup to sundown to capture this is what the swamp sounds, and this is what you're actually going to hear, and I have heard people say like, "Oh, it sounds like midnight in Mississippi to me," which I think is really, really cool because that's not something I necessarily would think to do, but I think that's just how dedicated the sound team was to making it seem as authentic as possible.
LINA MADRID: Okay, let's talk about gameplay.
When we were playing, it felt so smooth.
So could you tell us a bit about performance and what you're targeting?
JASMIN ROY: Yes, so we're targeting 60 FPS on Series X and S.
The game has this very handcrafted approach to it.
It's got its own unique animation style, and we also provide different accessibility options in the game.
This was one of our main focus.
So you can disable the stop-motion animation in gameplay, if that is your preference.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about the combat a little bit.
At the very beginning of the game, it starts off pretty simple.
There's some melees.
There's a charge attack that you can do, and there's a dodge that actually hurts enemies, which I think is really cool.
We played Chapter 3, throwing in spells, pushing and pulling, and there's a debuff spell that sort of freezes enemies that hang in place.
There's just enemies coming from all different directions, different types of enemies.
We're talking about the story and we're talking about all these things, but then you run into some pretty tough encounters by the time you get the battle really going.
So how do you balance the flow to keep the story going?
JASMIN ROY: Yes.
So it's twofold, really.
So our main intention with the game was to create a narrative-driven, third-person, action-adventure linear game that focuses on cinematographic action and storytelling.
So there was always that idea when we build the levels of pacing, we wanted to make sure that we would go from exploring the world of the South with a strong motivation, and then as we go along, we explore, and then having combat encounters come in and kind of permeate kind of the eye points of each of those levels.
So it was always a balance of making sure that we have all of our core components, traversal being there for a while, contemplative exploration of the environment, because the world is beautiful, there's all kinds of interesting things to look at, and then dive deeper into the high-octane action of combat.
So that idea of having very intense combat sequences mixed with traversal that also has challenges, but then exploration that might be a little bit more subdued was really at the heart of making these flows in the levels, with the idea of keeping Hazel's journey on a momentum.
She's looking for her mom.
She's disappeared.
The whole story unfolds over 24 hours.
It's very driven towards a specific goal.
In terms of balancing the combat itself, what we wanted to do was to make sure that we would slowly ramp up the action.
South of Midnight at its core is meant to be a more accessible experience.
It really is pick up and play.
Everybody should be able to kind of pick up the game and play, so we wanted to have that kind of smooth ramp-up into the tutorial, which is something that you talked about.
So we introduced all the powers one after the other so that you can kind of get the hang of it, and then as the game progresses, we start ramping up difficulty.
We still wanted the game to feel a little bit challenging further down the road, and that goes through two things.
One is to make sure the encounters start to have more enemies, different variety of archetypes that shows up, as well as the player unlocking a few of the upgrades that are going to make Hazel more powerful in combat, and that feeds back into what I was saying about pacing, having these moments of contemplative exploration, of collecting our currency called "floofs." Hazel all names about every powers or things she finds in the world, but the floofs will allow you to -- they're little pockets of strands that you can use to upgrade your powers.
And that's the other thing that played in the combat aside from just the archetype composition, but also the new powers you're going to get that are going to, at some point, make the game a bit easier.
Now, the thing that's important is that South of Midnight is not an RPG.
It is an action game, and what I mean by that is that you can always offset the challenge by just playing your skills.
You can get some abilities that are going to have some bonus damage on it, but at its core, it's really about your gameplay execution, being able to dodge your attack properly, do your counters properly, using your spells and strategic ways.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Skill issue, yes.
JASMIN ROY: But we do provide tons of different difficulty settings, and we do have one of them that is a bit more on the harder side for the more technical players around, but also two of them that are much more easier, much more story-driven.
If you just want to enjoy the ride, it's also part of that.
LINA MADRID: Yeah, talking about that perfect dodge, which, emphasis on perfect, some are more successful than others, but you damage the enemy with that perfect dodge.
Has anyone in the office, like how far have they gotten with just using a perfect dodge?
Are we going to see speed runs of this?
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: The no attack?
LINA MADRID: Yeah, exactly.
JASMIN ROY: I don't think anybody has tried it, so but now I'm intrigued.
Now I want to go back and try it.
LINA MADRID: I got really into the metagame of collecting floofs as well.
I can turn any game into a hundred-plus-hour game just from collecting alone, but some of them were so well hidden, and I knew I needed every single one so I can unlock abilities and upgrade and everything like that.
Do you have any tips on what to prioritize when upgrading?
JASMIN ROY: Okay, so there's different ways of prioritizing how you're going to upgrade.
One of the most important things to know is that prioritizing mostly happens as you progress through the game, but by the end of the game, if you explore a lot, you should have enough to buy everything.
But as you go along, you can get additional attacks or upgrade your existing attacks while the spells will add properties to them, and there's even sections in the upgrade system where some abilities that you're going to upgrade are going to be improved by other sections.
So one of the things you can do is, for example, you have the weave spell that allows you to stun enemies, but at one point, you can also upgrade the strength blast on that perfect dodge to also provide you with weave when it does, stunning the enemies even more.
So there's a couple of things there to kind of see and kind of explore as you see the upgrade system.
So in terms of what you should prioritize, I think it really depends on the play style, depending on which spells that you prefer, or if you prefer to fight from far away, you might prioritize pull, to be able to pull people towards you, while if you're more of a melee fighter or you want to go up close, you've got more attacks there.
I would say the upgrade damage on the weave is probably a staple that mostly people get, to send weave and now it does more damage, and as you unlock other sections later, you're going to provide with more weaves, things like that.
It's not the only possible options.
It's just one of the options.
Another thing to add, the game is about 12 hours long, and in terms of upgrade, it's kind of mapped out for that 12 hours.
So like I said, yeah, it's not necessarily an RPG.
It's really an experience based around action.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: But you're going to want to find all those floofs.
LINA MADRID: All of them, yeah.
ZAIRE LANIER: I upgrade my dodge all the time.
If you can't hit me, I'm not going to die.
LINA MADRID: I don't know what the name for it is, but when you leap into the air and slam down.
ZAIRE LANIER: Oh, I think it's aerial rend.
JASMIN ROY: Yes, it is.
It is aerial rend.
ZAIRE LANIER: Oh, okay.
Yeah, they were like make all the attacks weaving-based, and I was like, okay.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Something else that seemed like really weaving-based is these magical objects that Hazel gets.
There's these hooks.
My kid does crochet, but they're not as violent as these, that I'm aware of.
There's a distaff, which allows Hazel to see things, like maybe the ghosts and other things of the past.
The spindles, which are magic.
There's a magic bottle.
Are these things that were from lore, like a bottle tree, things from the South, or were these things straight out of the imagination of the folks at Compulsion?
ZAIRE LANIER: Well, the bottles themselves, that's part of Southern lore.
You'll have a bottle tree, or sometimes people will paint the underside of their porch a shade called "Haint blue" and it's meant to keep Haints and evil spirits away from your house, and that's what the bottle tree does.
It wards them away.
And so when she collects the painful memories in the bottle, she's kind of helping, not necessarily completely heal that trauma, but it allows us to look at it in a different way.
So she has the three different elements, the distaff, the spindles, and the hooks.
Those aren't necessarily Southern folklore, but the South has a pretty rich history of textiles, quilting, lace, and the idea of magic that's based on seeing the connecting lines in the universe is, I think, a pretty decent staple in fantasy and magic-based systems.
So we just kind of ran with that.
So I know the art team did a really good job, like what does that look like?
What does the -- we call it the "grand tapestry of the universe," so what does the grand tapestry look like?
What does the strand, what do they look like?
And making the whole aesthetic seem kind of familiar, but also something very magical, which I think, as always, they did a really good job of.
JASMIN ROY: And it was really the basis of what we decided to do with the features afterward, because the idea of infusing the traditional art of crafting with magic in it, that was really the genesis of the idea, and then we're like, okay, what kind of feature are we going to build around that?
So it was always like, if you're a character that can manipulate these unbreakable kind of strands there, what can you do with them.
So we restarted with pull and weave at the beginning, pull being the one where we're like, okay, I want to be able to move objects around, I want to be able to pull objects, pull enemies, pull myself towards something, so that was kind of the basis with it, and then weave is a spell that allows Hazel to use these strands to construct objects.
The objects are things that she sees in the world beyond that she can't pull back, so she might encounter a broken telephone pole, and now she's able to use her spindle to kind of recreate it.
When you weave an object, it's a temporary element that you're going to use for traversal, and it's there for only a little while, so you're going to need to time your traversal actions with it.
And in combat, weave is used to use all the strands to hold the creatures together.
So those are the first two spells that we kind of dived in.
Then we added push on it because we wanted to be able to pull a knob, move it, kind of move around, and with that, that formed the basis of everything we did with the character as she kind of used them.
You're going to see she pulls out the objects, and the objects sometimes dematerialize and they reappear, and you get all these little interaction and animation that are super fun to watch.
We also fit the idea of weaving in that picture into the traversal system.
So when you do a double jump, you're going to see Hazel's feet kind of jump off one of that like ghostly fabric.
It's the same thing when she does the glide.
She's got like these wings that she kind of builds out of basically the strands themselves.
So we really started with the idea of the spindle and the staff and manipulating all of these strands together.
ZAIRE LANIER: Yeah, and also she does use these objects in combat, but they also allow her to see things from the past, so things that might have happened to people or creatures in the story.
Every place has history, and every place has stories.
Everyone has things going on.
Obviously, we don't get visions of, oh, your childhood trauma, that explains so much, but I like that it gives the writing team the chance to show Hazel being empathetic and maybe like, oh, I came into this situation with this creature feeling one kind of way, and because I'm able to see their story and how they got here, I have some understanding of them, and I think that's something that's really cool.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That actually brings us to our final question.
At the very beginning, when I loaded up the demo, I noticed it said "South of Midnight is a game about empathy and healing." So can you just talk about what motivated the team to put that there?
ZAIRE LANIER: Oh, yeah.
I think when you have a game that does deal with trauma and people's painful pasts, sometimes it can be easy to kind of gloss it over with, oh, it's a trauma game, it's a sad game, but I think one of the things I really enjoy about Midnight is people have those traumas and they react to them in different ways, but Hazel's job as a weaver isn't necessarily to heal them because you can't externally heal someone's inner pain and the things they go through, but she does kind of lend them voice.
She sees them, she hears them, and she empathizes with them, and I think that's something that I really enjoy about her character, is she encounters all these wildly different creatures who've gone through very different traumas, some human, some not, and I think it's really, really cool that she will look at someone and she might say, "Hey, this isn't your fault," or she'll see something that happened like 100 years ago or something, and she'll go, "Oh, man, that's really rough," and I think it's hopeful that your trauma doesn't define you.
There is something beyond that, even if having it looked at is painful.
I think it's something I just really, really like about her character, is that she looks at it and she's there with you in it, and I think that's something that's really cool about what a weaver does.
It's like I can't fix you, but I can help you, and I think that's something really cool.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Jasmin, Zaire, thank you so much for taking time with us.
I know this is kind of a cool week, and it's the first time people get to go hands-on with the game outside of the studio, so I'm looking forward to seeing all the coverage and all the stuff that will be out there today, and we get to play.
It's not going to be that far away, right?
April 8th?
JASMIN ROY: April 8th it's going to be there.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Very cool.
Coming to Xbox Series X and S, PC, Game Pass.
It's happening soon.
So what's next for you all?
JASMIN ROY: Currently, we're finishing the last few bugs.
We want to make it as perfect as possible, and we really hope that players are going to enjoy it as much as we enjoyed working on it.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And just like that, our brief time with South of Midnight is over, and so is this episode.
Lina, what was your favorite part of playing?
LINA MADRID: I think the wall running, just the whole traversal of it all was so much fun.
Very smooth, fluid, just going running, and then I jump, double jump, and then I create a platform, and then I -- it was a lot.
It was great.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: It was good.
You did well.
I was standing over your shoulder trying to make you nervous.
Didn't work.
But that's fine because all of us are going to get to play on cloud, console, PC, and Game Pass.
South of Midnight out April 8th.
It's not that long.
So thanks so much for joining us here this episode of The Official Xbox Podcast.
We're going to see you soon.
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