Summary

• VR adventure game Skydance's Behemoth will receive a special graphic novel expansion, as revealed by Screen Rant.
• The recently announced collaboration with author Matt Forbeck brings new immersive lore to the game's canon.
• The graphic novel adds depth to the Forsaken Lands, Behemoths, & characters pre-game.

Skydance’s Behemoth is a new fantasy adventure title that pushes the limits of the latest generation of VR technology. The title comes from developer Skydance Interactive, which previously produced the well-received The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners series. This time, instead of taking down walkers, players will face Behemoths - large monsters that roam the Forsaken Lands, scaling the giant beasts in first person.

The game draws inspiration from games like Shadow of the Colossus and other monster fighting adventures while also cultivating its own identity - an identity which the team recently announced will be further cultivated by a special graphic novel companion. Since Behemoth drops players right into the middle of the action when the game begins, the book will expand on the backstory of the Forsaken Lands, Behemoths, and the game’s main characters. Matt Forbeck has helped spearhead the project, an author who’s previously written a slew of comics, core rule set books, and more.

Screen Rant interviewed author Matt Forbeck and Shawn Kittelsen, SVP Creative at Skydance Games, to discuss bringing Skydance’s Behemoth to the page, translating the massive scale of the Behemoths, and the importance of expanding upon the story of the Forsaken Lands.

Bringing Skydance’s Behemoth Onto The Page

The Collaboration Process & The Importance Of Giving Players Lore

Screen Rant: I would love to hear a little bit just about what the collaboration process was like of bringing Behemoth into the world of a graphic novel. Were you always certain about the exact story you wanted the book to be telling or did that change along the way?

Shawn Kittelsen: It definitely wasn't a straight path, but our team, there's a lot of love for graphic novels. I've written graphic novels, obviously. I love them. But Guy Constantini, who was one of our marketing leadership team , just loved the idea of, "Wow, we did this Walking Dead game that was related to this famed comic book and graphic novel series. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could continue some kind of thread or connection to comics in our next title?" He really spearheaded putting together Matt and a whole team to make this comic happen.

From there, it was not a straight shot of what the story would be, because the game story was changing so much over the course of development. The further you go in developing a game, the more you learn about the game that you're making, the more you realize what you actually need and you end up rewriting everything.

Matt definitely rolled with a lot of changes coming from us constantly, but I think he also came up with a concept and we were able to allow him the space in the universe and the setting to say, "Here's some time and place where you can go do anything with these characters." Matt, I think that's sort of the brief that we gave you to roll with over the course of multiple iterations.

Matt Forbeck: Yeah, you guys had a lot of great ideas for the whole game. As Sean was saying, I've done this before. When you're working on a game that is in development, the game has to be the dog and the graphic novel is the tail, and the tail does not get to wag the dog. But the wonderful thing about it is that when these guys brought me in, they said, "We have this idea for this thing. We want you to come up with a pitch for it. How do you want to do it?”

They had some rough ideas about what they wanted, so we came up with basically what was going to be a prequel for the game. Setting up the setting for everything else, but the main thing about it was that a lot of the details didn't matter. It was more about the characters that we had come up with and the story that we had come up with.

If the name of this clan over here changed, or the type of disease that was propelling everything, the cause behind it all changed, those were really window dressings from the sense of the story. A couple of different times, they said, "Hey, by the way, we've changed this." I'm like, "Well, that's okay. It's not that big a deal. We can manage this.”

I've had this happen lots of times working on different - I've worked on novels for Guild Wars when it was in development for Guild Wars during inception. We had lots of different times happen where you're like, "Well, you've just got to say okay." Again, the game itself is the most important thing. Fortunately, writing a graphic novel, that's the easiest thing to change. They were really good about making sure that the story I come up with fit well with what they wanted to do, so it wasn't a huge burden upon me to make these changes.

They matched me up with this wonderful artist, Daniel, who really just brought the whole thing to life. It was just gorgeous paintings, essentially, that he came up with that I think really captured the tone of the world of Behemoth, as opposed to if we had done something that was four color and super hero-ish - which, as much as I love those things, you don't really want the hero of this world to be dancing around with four color spandex.

Shawn Kittelsen: Stylistically, it feels like an artifact from the world, the painterly style.

Matt Forbeck: Exactly.

Shawn Kittelsen: In particular, because of the ancient fantasy setting that we have, a lot of the storytelling that you get in the environment is through paintings on walls, and tapestries, and stuff, so having that style come to the book felt very natural. We definitely got A-plus talent to come in and service this, and to Matt's point, no matter what was changing in the game, we never wanted to orphan the graphic novel.

It was never far from our minds. The same people that were writing the story for the game were the same people that were regularly in touch with Matt and reading drafts and giving notes. All the consistency is there no matter how many changes we had, because we wanted it to be.

How do you feel like the graphic novel has allowed you to explore ideas from the game and give the players an overall better picture of the world in a way that you couldn't in the title itself?

Shawn Kittelsen: Well, to me, the title itself really drops you into the middle of an adventure and gives you enough information to understand who you are and why you're there and where you're going, but it does take you from zero to 60 pretty quickly. The graphic novel gives you a chance to get to know the world and have a view on it, and how the Behemoths work and how dangerous they are, before you jump right in and you're already fighting and killing and hunting your way to a Behemoth.

I think it's that background. It gives it a sense of place in history, and that's something that we worked so hard in the game to realize through all of the environments and all of the lore objects that you can find. Then, of course, all of the cinematics and character scenes that we have. I think Matt gives us the: here's some history from this place that will make you think a little differently about what you're seeing and what you're experiencing in the campaign.

Matt Forbeck: I agree. It's more about being able to illuminate some of the things that our main character of the game finds and why they mean something to the - can I say the name of the main bad guy?

Shawn Kittelsen: Sure.

Matt Forbeck: The Trapper is the main bad guy, the main character you interact with in the game, and it gives a lot more illumination to him and why you're interacting with him throughout the game, what his motivations are. You would've had to stop and read little tiny bits of lore on the screen, which is hard to do in a VR game to create than a regular game, and in this, you get to actually have that a lot more emotional connection.

Shawn Kittelsen: I think the sense of history and legacy that's there is: you're not the first person to try to hunt Behemoths. Throughout the game itself, one of the collectibles that you'll find are these skulls - you find the skull, you crush it in your hand, and you get some voiceover and you hear a character, sort of at their last diary entry kind of thing.

In many ways, this graphic novel is like being able to be there for some of those moments for a whole new set of characters that we get to meet, which is great. It expands the world, it teaches you a lot about where things have come from.

I feel like we're taking advantage of VR's ability to portray incredibly massive scale in a way that the only way you can get as compelling - outside a headset - is to go to an 8K dome or a 3D IMAX theater. - Shawn Kittelsen

A two-part question for you about the VR aspect of the game. First of all, I'm curious to hear from your perspective about how the game really is taking advantage of the latest generation of VR options that you have available. Then, sort of going off that, did knowing that players were going to be seeing the world from that VR perspective change in any way how you wanted to do the graphic novel, perspective-wise?

Shawn Kittelsen: How we wanted to tackle the graphic novel perspective-wise, my philosophy has always been: if you're making a game, you're making a game, and if you're making a graphic novel, you're making a graphic novel. You can get the authenticity and canonical lore consistency that you need without trying to turn games into comics and comics into games - let's play to the best strengths. I don't think we tried not to give any like, "Why don't you show this shot in the first-person perspective, show us just some hands reaching up out of the frame." I'm sure there's probably a shot or two in there, but it certainly wasn't dictated by us.

Then, for the game taking advantage of the latest VR technology: every platform that we're using, we're benefiting from all the advancements that have been made in VR over the last several years. The PSVR2, for example, we're able to take advantage of foveated gaze-based rendering. It basically is tracking your eyes and rendering at the highest level of detail where you're looking at, and then de-resing everything around it so that it's not drawing all that performance from your U and your GPU.

That buys us all this overhead to work with to make the PSVR2 version look amazing and competitive to really high-end PC hardware that is well above the price point of a PS5. Then on the Quest, especially in a Quest 3, you just had Meta making so many improvements to the Horizon operating system, to all of their rendering technology, and our ability to push things on Quest 3 with in of extra effects, shadows and better lighting, is really improving.

I do feel like although there's still a gap between mobile and non-standalone hardware like a desktop and all that, or a PS5, you actually see that gap closing quite a bit. That's why we're able to deliver on every single platform a native frame rate experience of - we're not doing re-projection, for example, where you up-res from 45 frames or 60 frames, to 72 or 90 frames.

We're all native rendered, and that means that your connection to your hand and the way you feel when you swing, it's really one-to-one. That lack of lag makes such a difference in making VR feel real for people. It's one of the hallmarks of motion sickness: I don't feel this connection between my hands, my motion doesn't match up and it's making a dissonant feeling in my balance center.

That's a lot of deep nerd answers for that question, but we're - on a tech level - taking advantage. Then, from a creative level, I feel like we're taking advantage of VR's ability to portray incredibly massive scale in a way that the only way you can get as compelling outside a headset is to go to an 8K dome or a 3D IMAX theater or something like that. It is incredible to fight something the size of a skyscraper and be able to look up and experience that scale for yourself.

You mentioned the really big scale of this world. When translating that to a graphic novel, what is that process like to make sure you're keeping that same sort of epic feeling that players are going to be experiencing in VR and translate it to the page?

Shawn Kittelsen: Well, I know we provided Matt with all our concept art, so where did that take you?

Matt Forbeck: There was a lot of great concept art, it was fantastic. One of the great things though, is Daniel, our artist - I go, "What do you like to draw?" Because you want to make sure the artist is really on board with it, because he's taking the words that you come up with and putting them on a page. He says, "I love splash pages." I'm like, "This is going to be great." Splash pages are one or two pages where you have the entire image just covers the whole page.

I'm like, "Perfect," because we want this to be this big wide screen world that you feel like you're immersed in the whole time. He really captured that fantastically well. That meant I got to play with a lot of like, "Here's some dialogue, here's some lead up," then you turn the page, and then boom, you're suddenly inside this massive world. I thought really worked well, it was amazing to be able to play with that.

The Artistry Behind Skydance’s Behemoth

Where The Team Drew Inspiration & Excitement For The Future

There's so much about this world and the protagonists that haven't really been revealed yet. Can you give any sort of insight into the nature of what this graphic novel is going to be revealing about the Forsaken Lands and the Behemoths and that sort of core stuff?

Matt Forbeck: We wind up with a group of people who are trying to kill a Behemoth who are just like, "We could just get one," and their numbers are dwindling and they're all dying. As you get toward the end of the story, there's very, very few of them left. It's a very desperate group of people.

You get to see a couple of them pretty close up, and then I'm told that this will actually be reflected in the summary of the game itself or some of the wounds that are actually crafted onto the monsters from the battles that will show up in the game, so it relates very closely to what's going to be happening there.

You get a little bit of the history behind why people are in this and, "If I'm the hero, what are these other people around? Why are they not doing anything about this? What is their philosophy?" We just got a glance of that because we're really playing with main characters, and it's kind of this last chance to redeem yourself and everybody around you and maybe save the world, which - I don't want to spoil anything - but they failed because that's why you come in as a hero and it's your job to do it after the graphic novel happens.

Shawn Kittelsen: There's a lot of seeds in the graphic novel that play out on a larger scale in the game about the curse that plagues the Forsaken Lands, and that is intimately connected with the Behemoths in so many ways, so it gives just the sense of creeping doom at all times. It is a grim, dark fantasy world, so there is a sense of like, "Oh, this is not going to end well. It feels like the walls are closing in." But that's the fun part, that's the roller coaster ride of it.

Matt Forbeck: Yeah, for me, it's fun because I've read a lot of stuff that's heroic - the hero triumphs in the end, right? This one, I didn't have to worry about that, though the hero comes into it.

You mentioned landing on a specific form of aesthetic where you're having the full splash pages and stuff like that. Aesthetically in general, where did you guys found yourselves taking the most inspiration from? Whether it's other comics or other forms of media when you were just coming up with the look of this game and the feel of it, and by extension, the way it translated to the novel.

Shawn Kittelsen: Yeah, for the game, it's a pretty wide, I would say - broad palette of influences. It's such a large team that worked on it, so many ideas just came from everyone in the team. That's the thing about a game like Behemoth, as it is a team effort, so I'm really proud of that, and I think that's why they look so cool. They don't all look the same, and they've all been filtered through a common vision and lens, but they all have different sources. Matt, for you, what was your takeaway of the Behemoths the first time you saw them?

Matt Forbeck: I was like, "Man, I want to climb that thing." It gave me echoes of Shadow of the Colossus, where you're fighting these gigantic things. In that game, to actually think that you would be inside that world and trying to climb up and how dizzying and wild that would be, that's part of what I wanted to capture. It's just the sheer impossibility of how desperate and screwed in the head you have to be to want to take on one of these things as humans - it's such a ridiculous idea. How nuts do you have to be to want to go up against Godzilla, these Kaijus, hand to hand? For me, that was really a lot of it.

The style, I think really that was up to Daniel as far as the art style, but it really smacks me more of like an Ashley Wood. Very scratchy, impressive, impressionistic, but really dangerous artwork. Certainly - again - not that polished, four color, everybody's looking perfectly green in every angle - [it's] raw, rough and dirty and dangerous, like 30 Days of Night type of stuff.

Shawn Kittelsen: Yeah. There's a little Sienkiewicz in the book, that danger in every brush stroke. And for sure, Shadow of the Colossus, I think is a primary source of inspiration for a lot of things in the game, and then all the different Kaiju movies, like you mentioned; the legendary Monsterverse stuff that's more recent certainly informed it. I think even going further back to old Ray Harryhausen designs and stuff like that: as big and magnificent as they are, the Behemoths need to feel grounded.

We wanted them to feel like they came out of the environment and the world, and they weren't injected into it by CG. The feeling of making them real and coming up with a lot more rules around how they worked and how they would look. I think when you see it in the book, it's very consistent with what's in the game. The experience of hunting them, the experience of your close encounters with them, and then when you finally get into a real pitched battle with a Behemoth, the graphic novel gives you a great sense of what that's going to feel like in the game.

Is there a particular part of the story that the book tells that you're especially proud of or especially excited for players to see when they get their hands on it?

Shawn Kittelsen: I think it's meeting the Trapper and having a story with the Trapper. I think the Trapper character that you get to know in the book will color your impressions of the character that you meet in the game. If you don't read the book, you may have a completely different impression of that character for a little while, so you can have two different experiences depending on what your knowledge of the background is.

Matt Forbeck: I just like coming up with the characters, and you have the back story that came with it, and enjoying the different emotions that they brought with each other and the betrayals. There's a couple of scenes that Daniel does where I'm just like, "This is awesome." People leaping off cliffs to try to get at the creatures - it's just a lot of fun.

Shawn Kittelsen: There are moments and s from the book that you can find in the game as proof they happened, that the environment team felt it was important to go and address things to make it consistent. Every now and again, that's something I would definitely look forward to people seeing, is having read the book, go in the game and say, "Wait a minute, is that...oh my gosh."

Skydance's Behemoth currently has no set release date. The new accompanying graphic novel can be found on the game's website.