I think it is the enhancement of the experience that you get through having that really rich, character-driven narrative; the fact that as you are playing through the game you really start to care about these characters. You really are concerned for their well being. You recognize that although you are the hero, you are fallible and you could fail. The outcome isn't predetermined. You really feel like Drake has got to try hard and you as the player controlling Drake have to put in your best effort in order to succeed.
"You really feel like Drake has got to try hard and you really have to put in your best effort in order to succeed." |
Often times when people say that, they are not really talking about a visceral, spectacle level of big explosions that might hit you in your gut. They aren't hitting you in your heart or your head. I think it is tapping into that that's going to leave the biggest impression on people.
A lot of the response to the first game was after you guys released the demo and people had a chance to get their hands on it. Are you guys planning to do a demo with this game?
We haven't announced any plans for a demo. I think the first game's demo was good, but I am again talking with 20/20 hindsight; I don't know that we did infuse that demo with enough of that character-driven narrative that we could have. I think people who might have played the demo and been turned off by it, after being encouraged by their friends to actually play it, went back and said, "Oh my gosh. The game is so much better than the demo."
It is something that is hard to capture in a 10- or 15-minute slice of a game. I think we are going to have to really work on making sure that people understand what the overall experience is without trying to get them to understand it through a 10-minute demo.
One of the criticisms against the first game was its length. Some people were finishing it in six to ten hours. Have you guys made an effort to make this one seem like a longer game play?
Yes. The overall experience is going to be longer, just from sitting down and playing the game. There will also be more reasons to go in there and play it a second, third, or tenth time. Some people played the first one that many times.
We really do want to give the player more value for their gaming dollar.
Is there still a selectable difficulty when you start the game?
Yes. We intend on putting in an even easier mode this time, although as a developer who played the game everyday, we thought the game was easy enough.
"The overall experience is going to be longer, just from sitting down and playing the game." |
It is interesting for a spectator to watch it. You get drawn into the story just as much watching somebody else play the game as you do playing it yourself. Rather than just having those people who might not be gamers only be able to watch it, we want to also allow them the opportunity to play it.
What do you think the biggest thing you guys learned from the first game was?
Certainly rewriting the engine from scratch and rewriting the tools from scratch was something that I never really want to repeat again.
How far were you guys into development when that happened?
We were right at the very beginning. We were put in an interesting situation. Coming from the PS2, we had developed our own programming language and our own development environment that was based off the programming language LISP, which is very popular at MIT and some A.I. circles.
We felt that going to the PS3 we really wanted to be able to embrace more of the first-party Sony developer community and be able to share stuff more freely. If we were working in our own unique way, we couldn't do that, so we had to adopt to C++ and basically the way everybody else was doing things.
Basically, what that meant was flushing all of our history of PS2 stuff down the drain and restarting. It was difficult to deal with, but in some ways it was good that we went through it, because I think we are in a stronger position now that we have. It was sort of like hitting the reset button and doing things with some good hindsight. You maybe get roped into doing things a certain way just because of inertia. We really got to start things fresh.
I wouldn't do it again. But I think we are better off for it.
How long did that process take? Are you talking about months?
It was actually about a year of a pretty difficult struggle. Then even after that we did have one reboot of our tools, even though we had started from scratch. You would think that you could do it right not having inherited any legacy code. We made some pretty big mistakes with our tools. All the artists couldn't really work in the system because they weren't stable.
"We made some pretty big mistakes with our tools." |
It turns out that although we can create visuals that create that impression, the way in which doing it hasn't changed that radically, and you don't really need that big of a paradigm shift in your development process.
