Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy arrives on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Game Pass on August 27, and lead producer Eric Chort has used the Official Xbox Podcast to explain how Asobo Studio turned a stealth series into a melee action game.
The new game follows Sophia, the supporting character from 2022's A Plague Tale: Requiem who sailed Amicia and Hugo to the island at the centre of that story and survived it. Chort said the choice was immediate once the team decided it wanted combat and did not want to return to Requiem's leads.
As soon as we think about not Hugo and Amicia again, but still Plague and more dynamic and combat, Sophia was a no brainer for us.
Combat answers ideas the team could not fit into the earlier games. “Amicia was not the good character to use a sword and have melee combat,” Chort said. “So definitely with Resonance, it was a good opportunity to make melee combat.”
The design brief was reactivity and agility. Sophia fights with dual blades and is built to face crowds — “the idea of one against an army was really appealing for us,” Chort said. To keep that dangerous, she is fragile: roughly three hits and the run ends. Health comes back by killing, which pushes the player forward rather than into a defensive crouch.
It was a way to really push the player not to just stay blocking. You can stay blocking as much as you want. There’s no endurance. But to push you attack, to push you to the dynamic and the agility that we wanted.
Around that core sit tools for an outnumbered fighter — a grappling hook, throwable bottles and a dagger — plus a skill tree spent with Resonance points. Host Jeff Rubenstein, who played the opening chapters, took a node granting an invincibility frame on a charged critical hit.
This is Asobo's first combat game, and Chort said the team studied other titles and GDC talks before iterating with playtests supported by publisher Focus Entertainment. “So in the best reference we have, probably Ghost of Tsushima is one of the best with the type of gameplay we wanted,” he said.
The setting shifts too. Where Innocence and Requiem were oppressive throughout, Resonance opens in Venice and moves toward the Greek isles, drawing on the myth of the minotaur and the labyrinth — the maze is in the game's logo. Chort said the team took the historical plague in France as a base and twisted it with Asobo's own lore, and that the sunlight is a deliberate setup.
The contrast is more on, okay, this beautiful landscape, sunny Mediterranean, the water, the blue water, et cetera. But when you go deeper in the island, you see that it’s darker than you thought.
Chort said the title arrived late in production, when the team already had both meanings in mind: the emotional one, which he would not spoil, and a literal one tied to sound in the dark heart of the island. “It fits with everything,” he said.