Many years after the original announcement of No More Room in Hell 2, the game is finally about to launch in early access, having recently confirmed the October 22 date – just in time for Halloween. Chivalry studio Torn Banner acquired Lever Games and is bringing the project to completion at last.
At Gamescom 2024, I chatted with Kenneth Bourgon, Marketing Manager at Torn Banner Studio, about how the developer became interested in No More Room in Hell 2. Bourgon also outlined the current and future content plans.
Talk to me about No More Room in Hell 2. I know Torn Banner didn’t make the first one, right? Why did you think of this game?
Yeah, the first one was created by Lever Games in 2009. It was the first ever Half-Life 2 Source mod, a pure passion project. It was like 10 to 20 developers that worked on it, and then 9 million players played the game. Later on, when they started working on the second one, their dynamics all changed for the most part, like the amount of time that they had to invest out of university on the first game just wasn’t the same on the second.
At the same time, Matt ‘Maxx’ Khazan, who led the project, was working his day job at Torn Banner, so he started talking to our CEO, Steve Piggott. What happened was they started realizing that the original Chivalry also started as a Source mod, and they felt like there was a real shared heritage between the two. What ended up happening is that most of the people working on the Lever Games project for No More Room in Hell 2 came to Torn Banner. So a lot of the people that were working on the original are with us now, still working on the second game, and it just felt right. It felt right that it was a studio in Toronto, a bunch of developers who knew and loved the game, and a genre that we were really interested in going in.
This sequel is a bit different from the first one, right? It’s an open world, after all.
Yeah, there’s a few differences. First, we want the same feel as the first game, so it is a slower, methodical, strategic zombie game. But it is open world, and there are a couple of changes. In the first game, it was all linear levels, and you’re always trying to escape the zombie apocalypse.
In No More Room in Hell 2, we kind of flip that around. It’s an open world, and as a player, what you’re doing is at the center of this map, there’s a power plant that’s going down. What you’re trying to do is get to it and turn it back on. It’s an 8-player co-op game. One of the really interesting parts is that you’re going to start out by yourself on the exterior of the map, all by yourself in the dark, with a flashlight, a small weapon, and a dream. You’re going to make your way towards the center of the map, and as you do, there’s many of what we call places of interest around the map.
Each of these has a similar objective of turning the power back on. It’s all done via puzzle-like objectives, so you have to decide who’s doing the puzzles and who’s defending against the zombies. As the power comes back on, you’re going to create a beacon for players who haven’t found anyone yet. They’re going to see that this place has its lights on, there’s people there, it’s safety and they’re going to make their way towards it.
Will there be an in-game map?
There is, I believe, going to be an in-game map, but we really wanted to keep the user interface as small and as little as possible. The first game was really well-known for its realism, and with this one, we’re trying to keep the UI and us to an absolute minimum and have players use their tools around the map. We’re going to have proximity chat, and then we’ll have a buddy-up system, where if you do meet some players, you can buddy up with them.
We really want people playing the game with the headphones if possible, as the experience is meant to be scary and then slowly build up into something that’s maybe a bit more fast-paced.
No More Room in Hell 2 certainly sounds different from the usual zombie game. For instance, I recently played Killing Floor 3, which is round-based and highly fast-paced.
Yeah, the idea behind this really is your slower burn zombie game. The first game was made purely as a love letter to video games, zombie games, and Romero movies. Our goal for this game is to really make the player feel like they can go into their very own zombie movie from the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and for us, the most important part was pacing.
As I mentioned, you start out slower and alone, maybe with more fear, and then as you make your way to the center of the map, the game should change, and by the end of it, when you’re 8 players in the power plants, it should build up to be a lot more fast-paced, but we really do want pacing that makes this game always feel like you’re moving on to the next thing. In the 30-minute session, you actually get quite a bit.
I suppose that once you get to the power plant, you will fight off a horde of zombies while waiting to be extracted with a helicopter or something like that.
Yeah. At the power plant especially, you’re hoping you have as many players as possible because it has a similar kind of puzzle-like objective where you’re trying to get that power plant back on, but the power plant is so large, you’re going from kind of building to building doing these puzzles. You do have to wait for a helicopter to come and pick you guys up. I think that, again, it goes back to the pacing of the game and making sure that you get a little bit of everything as you play this game and you leave with that intensity that I think as Torn Banner we feel really good at.
Is there an element of stealth in No More Room in Hell 2? Can you sneak behind zombies to take them out if you want?
Yes. Our goal with this game is to create a sandbox-ish scenario. What I mean by that is that you should have multiple ways of solving the problems. For each of our main objectives, there should be multiple different ways of going in and doing what you want to do. So, we want to give our players as many tools as possible. Stealth is definitely going to be an aspect of that. Players should be able to decide how they want to move around, especially at the beginning, when you’re alone alone with next to nothing, stealth is probably your best choice, and then things change throughout.
Is noise a factor, too, in that you may risk attracting a lot of zombies?
Yeah, we also have a zombie type in our game that is there to cause a lot of noise, which is a lot of fun. That is something that is definitely going to throw a bit of a shake to people’s plans. And yes, overall, we have cars with alarms we have. You’re going to have to be very careful about how you go through the map.
Can you use it to your own advantage sometimes with environmental traps?
That’s exactly what we’re hoping for. These things have two sides of a coin, where if you’re not planning it, it’s probably a bad thing. But you do see how siphoning zombies in certain locations and driving them away from others could be useful. We really want players to have a lot of options in how they deal with the situation.
Do you plan to also have a text chat in the game?
Text chat, lobbies, friends. A lot of this stuff we’ve done in the past banner with Chivalry.
Can you start a session of No More Room in Hell 2 with a full group of friends if you have enough of them?
You start the game with 8 people, so it will always get filled to 8 people. The game is supposed to be quite difficult. The idea behind it is it’s not easy to survive. Our game also has permadeath, which we’re very excited about. We think a zombie apocalypse game and permadeath should go really hand in hand, so playing the game with anything less than 8 people to start would feel extremely tough, if not impossible, to finish.
Do you have bots filling the group whenever there aren’t enough players to start a match?
No, no, no. We think with 8 players, we should be fairly good. We have a lot of excitement around the game, which is awesome. So, there will be no bots in the game; it should just be humans.
I’m guessing you pick your character before entering the game, correct? How do they differ from each other?
Yes, it’s very different, actually, from the first game. With permadeath, we also have a roguelike character system. When you get into the game for the first time, you’re going to choose one of three characters, and those characters have special abilities. There are a ton of other characters; you’re just going to see three options at first. As you go from round to round, if you level up after a game, you will have a roguelike mechanics where you can choose which direction you want to go with your character. As they grow, they’re going to get better and stronger and faster, and then they’re probably eventually going to die. I think internally, we’re looking for characters that last three to five rounds.
We want to normalize the death of characters. This is an apocalyptic game. What’s really going to be fun is you could go back to the start and pick a brand new direction or character and then build out that one. It’s very unique for our game.
With permadeath, players also want some kind of persistent progression to offset that constant loss of character progression.
We have character progression and account progression. We’re not talking a lot about account progression just yet, but yes, we don’t want players to feel burned at the end of a character dying, right? You don’t want them to feel like they’ve just lost everything. So we have the two. As your account progresses, you’re going to get really interesting things from that. We’re just not ready to talk about the specifics just yet.
Did you announce the premium business model? Can you talk about the price point?
We’re looking at a roughly $30 price point for the game. It’ll follow the business model of Chivalry, where we will be dropping more content throughout. It won’t be dropped as DLC, it’ll be dropped as just content to keep people coming back into the game. It’s very important to us.
It’s different from the first game, but we see a really strong value point in early access, around $30. The price would probably increase slightly from then to 1.0, but roughly $10 more.
Do you have an estimate on how long it will take from early access to 1.0?
We don’t want to spend more than a year in early access, so that would be the maximum amount of time. We plan on dropping a fair bit of content in that year. Gameplay features, weapons, zombie types, and maybe a map. We really want that early access period to be a period of content.
What about console plans for No More Room in Hell 2?
Nothing to announce on consoles just yet, but we want the game to be in as many hands as possible. For early access, it’s all streamlined towards PC, but thanks to Chivalry, we have a really great relationship with companies like Xbox. It’s something that we’re not announcing officially, we don’t have a date for anything, we don’t officially know if it’s going to happen, but getting the game in as many hands as possible is extremely important to us.
Are you using Unreal Engine 5?
Yeah. We’re really lucky, I think. In our group of developers, we have a lot of very, very technical people who go deep into what they can do with UE5, whether that’s Nanite or the different lighting tools. There’s just a lot of technical wizards who are making the most out of the engine.
Unreal Engine 5 games tend to be very beautiful, but they can also be quite demanding in terms of performance.
We’re working a lot on that currently. Optimization is starting to be the team’s main focus, so it’s definitely at the forefront of our minds. We want this game to run as smoothly as possible for everybody.
Are you going to do some kind of beta test before early access?
We really wanted to. We wanted to do a demo here, but we thought about how much bandwidth and team cost it would take to invest in that. What we really want to do is make sure that our early access build is the best it can be, so the investment’s going entirely to that.
You mentioned post-launch updates. What kind of content additions can people expect?
A little bit of everything. Gameplay features. We have a couple that we can’t talk about, but we’re very, very excited about, the kind of core gameplay features that should have a really strong effect on how people play the game. The maps, weapons, zombie types, a little bit of everything. Cosmetics, eventually. The early access build doesn’t have a cosmetic system, but that will be a part of the game later. Of course, nothing that you can purchase will be attached to gameplay.
How long has No More Room in Hell 2 been in development?
Well, it’s been in development for a very long time. The Lever Game studio technically started working on this game in 2014, so 10 years of development, but it’s been at Torn Banner now for just about two years. The game took a huge growth spurt when Torn Banner purchased it. It went from a bunch of people working on the game on their side time to a studio of 150 developers, mostly currently working on No More Room in Hell 2. It’s been two years of production at Torn Banner, during which the game had this huge growth.
I guess that means Chivalry 2 is no longer getting new content in the future.
We announced that the last update was our last content update. We want the game to last as long as possible, so we will have patch updates and bug fixes. But other than that, Chivalry 2 is currently in a sort of soft sunset.
Chivalry 2 launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive on PC, but the same won’t apply to No More Room in Hell 2. Can you talk about this difference?
I think the Epic Games Store decision worked well for Chivalry 2, but with maybe the added context of the amount of players that play No More Room in Hell 1 and the amount of people that are waiting for this game, I think for us it was crucial to get this into as many hands as we can as possible from early access.
Since the first game was basically a mod, will you support mods for this one?
Not at the early access launch, as we’re really focusing on the base game. It’s not something that’s in production currently. That is not to say that it would never happen, but nothing’s on the plans just yet.
Thank you for your time.
