In 2024 developer MachineGames in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, along with Bethesda Softworks, published the multi award-winning Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™. A fan-favorite, this first-person single-player adventure enabled players to uncover one of history’s greatest mysteries. Based in 1937, sinister forces scour the globe for the secret to an ancient power connected to the Great Circle, and only one person can stop them - Indiana Jones™.
This month, players can extend their experience with the popular base game through Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants, a story-based DLC now available on Luna and free to play for Prime Members. To go beyond a simple game description, we sat down with some of MachineGames’ Lead Designers to ask them more about the game, the DLC and the journey to adventure.
After a big year for Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, what story gap or creative opportunity did The Order of Giants let you explore that wasn’t possible in the base game?
“For a lot of the base game’s development, MachineGames was in a place of careful exploration,” Zeke Virant, Lead Game Designer responded. “It was a completely new title in a new engine with a lot of new team members coming onboard. We needed to build the frameworks and tools and refine all the designs that would allow us to create puzzles and set up combat encounters. There was also the challenge of collaborating with each other remotely during COVID, so there was a lot of experimentation, and some ideas weren’t fully explored. Developing the DLC, on the other hand, was an opportunity to start fresh, work quickly, and collaborate together in-person from the very beginning. It was exciting to watch individuals try new things and push themselves to make good on that puzzle they had in the back of their head all these years. Our tech and tools teams do such amazing work – both the base game and DLC are a testament to what our in-house engine, Motor, can do.
What does The Order of Giants do differently from the base game?
“We are very proud of the base game!”, Zeke began. “The positive reception was in many ways overwhelming. A lot of the feedback told us we just needed to continue delivering at the same quality across the board (design, cinematics, narrative originality, fresh puzzles) and with the same goal: to make an authentic Indiana Jones experience where you get to be Indy.
For the DLC, we’ve created a strong hybrid of our sandbox and linear levels. Exploration is more focused, and the puzzles, traversals, and stealth combat are at their most ambitious yet. We want players to feel welcomed back to the game they love: more sprawling, larger-than-life puzzles, more ferocious (and comedic) hand-to-hand combat, and of course, more Indiana Jones with all his grumpy, fun, and action-packed charisma.”
Was there anything about the player reception to The Order of Giants that surprised the team?
“Personally, every playthrough of the base game and DLC still surprises me. I still love watching people jump into the game for the first time. Some people seem to be awestruck with the environments and the art: carefully looking at every corner, reading signs, and on a slow hunt for discovery. Then others rush through looking for brawls and trying to blast the main story right open.”
The Order of Giants delves deeper into the Nephilim Order from the base game. What made you want to expand on that, and how does the DLC inform what players learned in the main story?
“While the story of the Nephilim Order is woven into the base game’s main story, we always wanted to go deeper and give more context to their cohabitation of the Vatican,” offered Zeke. “The setting felt perfect and an organic extension to the base game: Rome’s ancient history ticks all the boxes in terms of a layered and ambiguous mystery. It’s familiar and immediately impressive, but it also has that feeling that you could stumble upon a new discovery around any corner – a perfect place for Indy to explore ancient cults and giants.”
You've introduced Father Ricci as Indy's guide through this mystery. How did you develop his character and make the dynamic different from Indy's relationships with others in the base game?
“When it comes to obsessing over a mystery, Indy and Father Ricci are two sides of the same coin,” said Zeke. “They both seem to overflow with curiosity, intellect, and a penchant for upsetting the wrong people. And it’s always interesting to see how far away their obsessions will lead them while they search for answers to ancient myths. In this way, Indy’s collaboration with Father Ricci has a unique tension: they should both be keenly aware of how quickly collaborators can be competitors.”
The DLC takes players from the Colosseum down through ancient sewers to crypts below. How did you use verticality and these layered environments to create a sense of discovery and danger?
“The DLC was a great opportunity for the level design team to take all of our learnings from the base game and apply them in a more focused experience,” answered Andrew Yoder, Lead Level Designer. “Verticality was one of these areas that we could really push, creating opportunities to move around 3D environments with a really nice mix of whip-swings, climbs, and jumps.
We’re always looking for opportunities to do more with each space, and this often means layers. Traversal can often be about exploration and worldbuilding, and as you climb across the architectural history of ancient Rome, you’ll get to see all those layers of history, along with the other mysterious forces at play in the DLC, up close.”
The description mentions "intricate puzzles designed by emperors." As our last question, can you talk about your approach to puzzle design in this DLC?
“For the DLC, the level design team started out by exploring the idea of puzzle chambers,” said Andrew. “These were self-contained environments dense with interactivity, puzzling, and traps. From our experience in the base game, we saw that some of our best puzzles have a rhythm of different interactions where you need to explore the space, use all of your tools, and think like Indy.
But puzzle design isn’t all abstraction; the puzzles in the DLC all started from the story that the team wanted to tell. With The Order of Giants, there is a deep historical conspiracy about the Nephilim, the cult of Mithra, and it's all somehow tied to the history of the Vatican and ancient Rome. This was a great opportunity for us to use the puzzles as a way of telling the story and uncovering the conspiracy piece by piece.”
Now available on Amazon Luna, The Order of Giants isn’t just an add-on—it’s a key extension to the world of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. With rich puzzles, focused exploration, and a story that meaningfully expands the Nephilim mythology, this DLC invites players to step back into Indiana Jones’ boots and rediscover the thrill of curiosity, danger, and discovery—proving there are still plenty of secrets left to unearth beneath the surface.
