Remember Me's 'Neo-Paris' was a 'late choice,' US / AU both considered
The art style of Dontnod Entertainment's "Neo-Paris" in Remember Me is stunning, and the vision of a futuristic Eiffel Tower glimmering in the background of many images gives the game a distinctive look – not dissimilar from the beauty of modern day Paris. The city may be a staple of the game now, but Remember Me's development saw Nilin potentially memory jacking foes in the United States or Australia before settling on the dev team's home base.
"Since the beginning, I really wanted to have Remember Me not being all French, for instance," Dontnod creative lead Jean-Maxime Moris told us in an interview this week at Gamescom. "Neo-Paris was a late choice, because we wanted to stay away from it. We had that global warming element to the game," Moris added, a reference to the concepts we saw last year when the game was still known as "Adrift."
"First we thought about Australia or the US, and then we were like, 'Well, let's just stick to Paris, because we have all the material, it's a great city, and it hasn't been done in the way we wanna do it,'" Moris said. Beyond just a thematic shift, the choice of Neo-Paris fits with the game having an international feel, he said.
"There are French elements to the game, but we wanted it to have some American appeal – kind of really extending the scope of the city, and the characters, and the scope of the robots. And at the same time, there is definitely a Japanese feel to it with the cyberpunk theme. Japanese have been eating cyberpunk for breakfast for 30 years now. Ghost in the Shell, and Akira and all those things," Moris added.
We might've followed up to that question, but we were too busy thinking about Japanese people eating cyberpunk for breakfast. What a dangerous proposition!
