Saying that your game is the “most complex” that you’ve worked on, or your studio’s “most ambitious”, can carry different meanings depending on your past work. So when one of the key figures behind Fallout’s creation, Brian Fargo, says this about inXile’s Clockwork Revolution, you know it carries some weight.
Even more so when game director Chad Moore, who previously worked on Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, tells Game Informer that the studio is “very focused on making sure the game responds to player choices in a natural way. We want every choice to lead to moments that feel personal, surprising, and true to the story they’re shaping.”
In Clockwork Revolution, you venture through the steampunk-esque city of Avalon, where the upper echelon has access to time travel. You can thus imagine that things shake up extensively when protagonist Morgan Vanette has the same technology, allowing the player to reshape the city as they see fit. Moore notes that the studio wanted these shifts to “feel intuitive, immersive, and uniquely theirs.”
“The biggest thing for us is the depth of the visual reactivity. When you go back in time in Clockwork Revolution and change something, you’re not just opening a new branch; you’re coming back to a present that’s been physically reshaped around those choices. Avalon has been handcrafted to reflect those changes in ways that feel surprising and earned. It reacts to what you’ve done in ways that you just don’t see in many other games,” said Moore.
It’s a stunning proposition, especially considering how there are numerous factions to deal with, each with a unique agenda (and perhaps leveraging Vanette’s time-traveling capabilities). The decisions could run as deep as Wasteland 3, the studio’s previous masterpiece, but considering the increased budget and scale, Clockwork Revolution could surprise us.
Of course, those same factors may also be a reason why there’s no release date, even with a former writer indicating a launch this year. Nevertheless, with Xbox potentially exploring another Developer_Direct and other showcases planned for this year, it wouldn’t be surprising if the time-traveling misadventures of Vanette resurface at some point.
