Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s Creative Director Axel Torvenius discussed Indy’s worldwide voyage and revealed why one location was cut from the game.
As highlighted in our review, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a real globe-trotting adventure. Players travel to over half a dozen locations, uncover mysteries in each, and learn about their histories.
By the time the final credits roll, Indy has journeyed to The Vatican, Cairo, Sukhothai, Shanghai, and more, chasing after Emmerich Voss and attempting to uncover the hidden keys of the Great Circle before they fall into the wrong hands.
In an exclusive interview with Dexerto, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Creative Director Axel Torvenius broke down how MachineGames developed Indy’s all-encompassing journey and how they worked to construct each location, even revealing one that didn’t make the cut.
Todd Howard’s initial pitch always included multiple locations
From early in the game’s development, the team had already identified that the story would take Indy to multiple locations, keeping with the character’s ethos and legacy across the films.
“It was fairly set in the sense that we kind of locked it down very early,” revealed Torvenius when discussing the different settings for the Great Circle.
“Todd Howard had the initial idea of pitching the story and scope of having the Great Circle spanning across the globe covering a couple of locations. And then we started to look at how we could play at some of these.”
Whether the depths of the jungle or the unforgiving snow, the Great Circle has all manner of terrains to explore, each with unique challenges and environmental factors.
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One area was cut from the game during development
When asked if any locations were cut from the game, Torvenius teased that there was one area that didn’t make it into the final product.
“All the locations were locked in fairly early, but we cut one location, which I will not mention.”
The Creative Director explained how this mystery environment was removed from the game’s final version “out of scope,” thereby allowing the team to achieve “maximum pacing from a visual and creative point of view.”
While he later added that it’s not uncommon for the “first sketch” in the development process to not “hold up completely,” Torvenius admitted that the “final painting” of the Great Circle is “very close” to what Howard initially pitched to MachineGames.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is currently available on Xbox and PC, and a PlayStation 5 release is set to follow soon. Furthermore, the game will be getting a story-based DLC early in 2025.
For more Indiana Jones and the Great Circle content, check out where the game fits within the larger timeline of the franchise as well as how to complete some of the game’s early puzzles, Sacred Wounds and the Fountain of Confession.
