Paradise Killer’s intro: the story behind that heavenly title card sequence

blog.playstation.com:

How do you start a game? That is such a difficult question. There are so many things a game needs to do for a player at the start; introduce them to the world, teach them how to play and most importantly, hook them in. We spent a lot of time and effort on the beginning of Paradise Killer to try to get it right. I haven’t done the maths on this but I know that the start of the game is the most commonly shared video clip from Paradise Killer on social media so I guess something worked!

In Paradise Killer you play Lady Love Dies (LD), an investigator brought out of exile to investigate the crime to end all crimes on the bizarre Paradise Island. We knew that the start of the game would depict LD arriving on the island and introducing the player to the world. As we were making an open world game, we wanted to start by showing the player the whole world at the start. The island is quite big and you can explore the whole thing, but you don’t usually get to see the scale of what you are about to explore in games. We hoped that giving the player a bird’s-eye view of a huge vista that was ready for them would blow them away and whet their appetite for exploration.

With this in mind, our initial story draft started with LD arriving by plane, allowing the player to see the island as they flew over it. It wasn’t very exciting and it didn’t feel right for our game, so we shelved the idea and worked on other things while we thought about it. Eventually Phil, our technical director, said to me: “I want an intro like the beginning of Bayonetta”. That’s quite the challenge! For those who haven’t played it, the beginning of Bayonetta sees the player fighting a huge army of angel freaks on a ruined cathedral that’s plummeting through the