WolfEye Studios' Raphael Colantonio recently spoke to us in-depth about the studio's inaugural title, Weird West which is now incredibly high on our 2021 "Most Wanted" list.

Among lengthy topics covered, was the studio's sense of freedom after having lived the AAA development life for more than a decade.

“I’m lucky that I could recruit a lot of people that I’ve been working with for… two decades, really," Colantonio told us. "So it’s not like I’ve had to convince them. And so [Weird West is] more than a ‘Raf game’, it’s really all of this team. And also the main difference, frankly, between Prey, Dishonored and Weird West is the budget -- that’s really where the difference is. We had four people making the entire art of this game, which is remarkable. If you have four people versus a 100 people… that just allows us to go as deep as any of the games we’ve done before. If not deeper.

"Surprisingly, [Weird West] might be our biggest game. Our hardest game to make for sure. There’s just so much content, there’s so [many things to] interact with and so there are so many ways the game can break… it’s been really, really scary.

“[But] to me there’s no trade off in the sense that I don’t feel like we’ve [gone] smaller, we’ve actually been going bigger. You know, it doesn’t take a month and a half to make a character, in this case it’s all done by the same person and it takes a week. That’s the main difference, really. And so that allows us to be more flexible, take more risks, try more things and iterate and change our minds and it’s actually more fun, frankly.”

Click here for more from Raf and the team, and for our full thoughts on what we've seen of Weird West so far.