Acclaimed procedural stealth adventure Invisible, Inc. hits PS4 today

Hey PlayStation.Blog, Corey from Klei Entertainment to talk about our newest console game Invisible, Inc. which launched today on PS4!

We spent years developing this concept and now we’re very excited to say Invisible, Inc. is available on PS4 and includes the Contingency Plan expansion for even more agents, missions, sneaky augments and spy tools at your command.

Without a doubt, Invisible, Inc. was our toughest design challenge yet. We started with a vision of what the game would be: a tight, all killer, no filler spy thriller where every action mattered, and every decision could be your last.

For those unfamiliar, Invisible, Inc. is about leading your team of elite spies to infiltrate the world’s most secure complexes. As the Operator, your job is to pick targets of opportunity, steal from the corporations, and upgrade your agents and programs in order to prepare for the final standoff. The world is completely different every time thanks to procedural generation, and the corporations are constantly adjusting to topple your plans.

 
Out of all the features Invisible, Inc. offers, the most interesting to many will be the fact that it’s procedurally generated. Most stealth games are incredibly refined with every guard, alarm and item meticulously hand placed. This often creates a wonderful, balanced, refined stealth experience, but once you play through the game (or even a certain level) you’ll never be able to play it again for the first time. You know where the guards will be, how many there are, or where the best loot is, for example.

We decided to challenge ourselves to build a system where each level and room feels hand crafted, but gives you a new experience every time you play so that information truly becomes power. The procedural generation allows the game to renew itself every time, and we think that’s incredibly powerful in a stealth game.

As Invisible, Inc.’s design is concentrated around replayability, we also filled out the DLC with more variety of enemies and new events that can show up at any point in the campaign. But we also noted that a lot more people than we expected were playing the endless campaign and not finding the late days as challenging as they could be. A new set of enemy units were created to fill in the gap and a new flavour of enemy “Daemon” programs were created to gradually increase the difficulty; making deep endless runs the challenge they were meant to be.

With the new agents in Contingency Plan, it was important that they could drastically change how one plays the game. Normally players are trying their hardest to avoid guards, thus Draco’s special abilities encouraged engagement. Derek’s special teleportation ability allowed for completely new tricks with its own set of limitations to puzzle through. By making agents with highly unusual abilities, it also changed the value of the previous agents. Players could now look at them again in a fresh light.

We’re really excited to be able to bring Invisible, Inc. to PS4 and we hope you enjoy playing it as much as we did challenging ourselves to make it!