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After the Silent Hill 2 remake's success – one hardened fans of the original game weren't so sure about initially – Bloober Team grew far more confident in its abilities.
Speaking to PC Gamer in a recent interview, Bloober Team game director and producer Jacek Zięba explains how the stellar reception that the horror game remake received boosted developers' confidence and made them feel as though they "proved people wrong" in the end. "We are starting to stop feeling like underdogs all the time after Silent Hill," says the lead. "The Silent Hill era wasn't so easy in the eyes of the public."
Zięba recalls fans' initial uncertainty surrounding the new Silent Hill 2. "There were a lot of voices: 'Oh no, Bloober is doing this. They will destroy that.' It was very tough for the whole company to stick to our guns and put all our heart into that thing, even if most people don't want it," admits the dev, who is now working on directing Cronos: The New Dawn – another survival horror game. "We proved people wrong, so that's nice."
Now that Silent Hill 2, which currently boasts an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating overall on Steam, has been met with nothing but love, Zięba states Bloober Team is in a "different position" than before – there is a solid community of dedicated fans who are genuinely looking forward to what the studio puts out next, like Cronos: The New Dawn.
"I think we're riding the wave of people being intrigued, and we need to deliver," Zięba says. "We know we need to deliver. We put our hearts into all our games, and we do whatever we can to make it the best." There's room for improvement, too, as lead writer Grzegorz Like adds. With every release, developers "learn" and "then you change, you evolve." Bloober Team is now undergoing that very type of evolution.
"I swear to god, we want to be better – even after Silent Hill," Like continues. "People were like, 'This is perfection!' This is not perfection."
Zięba concludes by saying that, regardless of whether the Silent Hill 2 remake is indeed "perfection," it's not the same as the team's future releases, and that's OK. Like pizzas, albeit with different toppings. "Even if we created one perfect one, maybe now we can show you a different one."
As a fan of the Silent Hill 2 remake myself, I like the pizza analogy – and honestly, I can't wait to see what sort of new flavors Bloober Team's upcoming games have to offer.
