Kingdoms of Amalur is not the first videogame that Todd McFarlane has worked on in some capacity, but it is by far the most involved he has ever been in a game. In his capacity as Executive Art Director Todd McFarlane designed not only the characters, but he supervised the creation of a sprawling fantasy world.

In this 15 minute interview Todd McFarlane tells us exactly what his responsibilities were, the challenges he has faced when moving over to game development, and how to make, in his view, the best RPG possible.

If this hasn’t piqued your interest enough why not read our full hands on preview? A demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning will be made available on Xbox Live Marketplace and Playstation Network later today. As an added bonus, those that download and complete the demo will be rewarded with in-game content for EA’s next big game Mass Effect 3. So what’re you waiting for?

Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning will be on UK shop shelves on 10th February 2012 on Playstation 3, PC, and Xbox 360.

At a recent behind closed doors event newbreview.com’s Ian Young was fortunate enough to get some hands on time with 2k Games’ The Darkness II, sequel to 2007′s cult hit first person shooter The Darkness.

While there Ian met with Matt Roche, 2k Games’ PR Executive, to discuss the way this dark and gritty title has moved on from the original, and what they feel sets this game apart from all the other first person shooters on the market.

I’ve just finished playing the two demos and immediately the first thing that struck me was the game’s dark, visceral comic book art style. What do you think is the game’s biggest selling point? After all there are a lot of first person shooters out on the market right now.

Basically, as you touched on, it’s the graphical style. One of the things the developers really wanted to get across was the whole graphic noire (art style), which is in the comics they’ve done at Top Cow, and taking them into the game. One of the things that you may’ve seen in the demo is Quad-Weilding, which lets you use all four shoulder buttons (Left trigger, Left Bumper, Right Trigger, and Right Bumper) on an Xbox (controller). This basically means that you can dual wield but you also have two demon arms.

One of these demon arms is called Slashy, which lets you slash things, you can cut people in half, and other cool moves like that. It’s a little bit gory! The other is called Grabby, which that ability you can actually grab people or objects in the world. For example, you can grab doors, you can use them as a shield or throw them at opponents to slice them in half. You can also use (Grabby) to grab enemies and do execution moves – pull off their head, do a thing called Anaconda, where the demon arm wraps around a guy and spears him through the stomach – all kinds of nasty things!

It really is a change from more natural first person shooters, and very different from other shooters. It has also got a great story written by Paul Jenkins, the guy who actually wrote some of The Darkness comic books for Top Cow, as well as the original (video game’s) story, making it a true continuation of the story from the first game. Hopefully fans of the original will really like it, and there’s a whole mixture of things that contribute (to setting it apart) but I think those are the three main things.

Your demon limbs can be used to perform some gruesome executions

One of the things that I liked about the original game was the stealth mechanic, where you had to shoot out lights creating darkness, making you feel like a real predator. Does stealth still play a part in The Darkness II?

In the game this time around the developers felt that the lights in the first game, while they were good, didn’t make much of a difference. So what you will see this time is that when you go into the light your vision is impaired, you can’t really see anything because it is very bright, and you can’t use your darkness powers in the light. You do still have to shoot out lights, but one of the things is that The Brotherhood, a group that you encounter in the game, throw light grenades at you. These explode in a big ball of light, and basically blind you.

There is still a tactical element to the game. Later on in the game there are these guys with big light guns, they’ll point the light at you, blinding you, and you’ll have to be quite tactical about how you take them out. There are also sections where you can also play as a Darkling (one of The Darkness’ minions). If you remember there were parts of the first game where you played as a slithering demon arm, in The Darkness II you play as a Darkling instead. This leads to some cool stealth sections, creeping around, executing people. For fans of the original there is a mixture (of gameplay), but this game is more action orientated, more bad ass Jacky Estecado style action, but yes, there are stealth sections as well.

One of the most obvious changes is the shift from the dark realistic graphical style to a more cel shaded look – any thoughts on the reason behind that shift?

One of the things that Digital Extremes (The Darkness II’s developer) wanted to do was to make it look more like the comic books. They’re massive fans of the comics, and if you go to their studio they’ve got all of the source material on their desks, and they’re big comic book fans anyway. They really wanted to recreate the comic books, and their vision was to make The Darkness II seem like you were playing through a graphic novel. You can see from screenshots that the lighting effects are nice and clear, and really gets across the look of the game. It really is fantastic. It is supposed to represent the look of the comic books, the graphic noire comic book look, as opposed to look of the original game. I think it looks great, and it’s one of the main stand out points of the game, and I hope that consumers will like it.

Darklings can be used tactically during gun fights to turn the tide of battle

A lot of people liked the original game, it may not have been a massive success in terms of sales, and it has been quite a while since that was made, so can we hope for a third instalment?

(laughing) Well I personally cannot comment on that, but people really loved the first one. It was a real cult hit in some respects. Speaking to the average gamer on the street you’ll probably find that most people will have played it on their Xbox or PS3. So, for us, The Darkness II is going out there, hopefully people will like it, and then it’s all up to the powers that be if there will be a third one. It’s not up to me, but who knows.

The Darkness II is due for release in February 2012. Currently there is a promotion going on where, if you preorder the game, you are upgraded to the limited edition version of the game at no extra charge. Stay tuned to newbreview.com for our full review of The Darkness II shortly after the game’s release.

In the meantime, why not read Ian’s hands on preview with The Darkness II by clicking on the following link: Preview:- The Darkness II

I know, how/why did we make it this far?

To celebrate this landmark, Kieran is joined by newbreview.com writer (and making his podcast debut) Jose Luis Perez Zapata as well as everybody’s favorite idiot, Adam Radcliffe.

The best games release of the week, Adam thinks and a special interview with Matt Roche from 2K Games about the upcoming The Darkness 2 by returning newb, Ian Young is what’s in store!

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ANYWAY.

After somehow managing to escape from his terrible ordeal, Adam decides to put us all through a different kind of “ordeal” by rejoining podcast regular, Kieran Roycroft and show host Mr Tom Wallis.

Along with his return, Adam brings his warped thoughts and ideas, culminating into a brand new Adam thinks segment. The guys also talk games they’ve like to see unveiled at this year’s SPIKE Video Game Awards AND Tom sits down for a chat with Jess Ratcliffe, owner of GaBoom (gaboomswap.com) about the relaunch of the GaBoom service. Spoiler: it sounds VERY good.

enjoy

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As well as having experience in films and TV, Todd McFarlane has written and produced a number of Spawn tie-in videogames, and is now lending his considerable artistic talent to EA’s next big role playing game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

Many people will be familiar with you who are, but for those that don’t know you, I wondered if you could tell us a little about who you are and what you have done with this game?

My name is Todd McFarlane, and I started my career in comic books. I did a little bit of Hulk and Spider-Man, created a character called Spawn, started my own toy company, did a little bit of movies, TV, and music (video) directing, and a little bit of videogames, but never in a big way like I am with Reckoning. I’m the Executive Art Director, which basically means when Kurt Schilling, who started the company, came up with the idea he needed some people to help him get it off of the ground, to help guide some of it. He got R.A Salvatore to come in and write this long expansive story, and eventually Ken Rolston came in to bring the game questing mentality, and I was there as the visual guy, the artist. So (I said) “Kurt, I just don’t want to look over concept designs, I want to be the guy that signs off and looks over all of it”.

So that we understand what ‘art’ actually is, basically it’s everything that you see on the screen; colour, characters, models, backgrounds, buildings, sound effects, music, spell casting… you see it, if it’s there, I want to be able to have said ‘yeah, cool’ and signed off on it. Why? Because the experience of a videogame, the whole is way better than the parts, right? So if the animations are good, but the backgrounds are terrible, it’s a distraction. If the backgrounds are good and the characters are good but the music is irritating, it’s a distraction. It’s all a distraction, right? It’s not unlike making a movie, where the moment where you get people to stop and think about the movie you break the magic in it. So for me, there’s all of these elements, and at the end – if we do our jobs right – Reckoning should just be kind of cooler that some of the other RPG games. If they (players) can walk away with that experience then we did our job right.

What challenges did you face when working on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning that you hadn’t faced when working in other media?

The biggest challenge that, arguably, I’ve never had to do before when I’ve been involved with a group of people was create a world, going ‘Todd, here’s a blank canvas, go create a world!’. I mean I’ve created stories, and in movies you’ve got two hours, so you’re not globe-trotting so you keep it fairly tight. But the most daunting task in front of us is how do you create an entire world? It’s not that we can’t come up with buildings, and not that there isn’t enough variety of environments (in world) because we can come up with plenty of them. Somehow you have to come up with enough of all of these elements that need to be in a game such that, when we’re done with it, unlike my comic books, and unlike a movie, or TV show, or music video where I get total control over the story and you follow my lead – I tell it you follow. (in videogames) We build all of these components, and then we take the steering wheel and we give it to you, and we go ‘ You’re the Director, you steer it wherever you want, you go and play it in any way you see fit’. That’s the fun of videogames and RPGs. But, and here’s the difficult part, knowing that you can go anywhere, any time, any place, the way you play may be completely different from one of your (readers) may play it.

There has to be enough substance there so that you are satisfied and they are satisfied, and nobody is frustrated. We’ll soon find out if we succeeded or not, and I’m sure we’ll be stronger in some areas, and weak in a couple of others, but overall you have to be strong in all of those areas so that no matter how you want to play it, if you want to be grim and dark and gritty then go to the dark places, if you want to have some lightness in your life and some fun and humour, go to the light place. We’ve got the wide spectrum. There just has to be enough for everybody to fulfil every whatever fantasy they’re looking for in a game.

How did you manage the people that would be realising your creative vision for the game? I think people may be interested in hearing the mechanics of how that works. Were you over people’s shoulders, were there regular reports, or mission briefings?

Kind of yes to all of the above, but let me see if I can be a little more specific. I told them that my task, as I told them, was that I didn’t want anybody to draw like me and make it look like my artwork. Any hardcore Todd McFarlane fan will be completely frustrated with the look of this game, because that wasn’t the task. As I’ve said before, in a global sense, there are more fans of videogames than there are fans of Todd McFarlane, and I am way more concerned about the videogame fans than the Todd McFarlane fans. So we needed to make a good expansive game. Within the confines of videogames there is a comfort level that people have, and we needed to stay within that comfort level in terms of the look. I wasn’t going to design something that only makes sense if you know who I am, because that would be completely egotistical of me. What we wanted to do was make a hell of a RPG game.

What my rules were, the thing that I looked over the shoulder for, what I did and had conferences about – with video conferencing I can talk to any group anywhere at any time in any place – is the rules of clarity, clean art, and story telling. To me, if you’re going to build an environment that is mostly green, I understand if you want to do something that is monochromatic, but, just so that you understand, the range of monochromatic green goes from black, then to dark green, then it starts to go through all of the shades (of green), and then it goes to white. Some of the people that don’t understand that think that it goes from light green to dark green – there’s too much green in it! You have to have extremes to separate all of the degrees of green. I’m not here to say we can’t have a green environment, I’m here to say that if we’re going to have a green environment it had better be as clear to my eye as possible, so that when I turn I’m not going ‘Is that two trees or three trees? Is that a building?’ it has to be that quick, and we’ve got some of that in the game.

When you’re laying all of these pieces down, be it all green or a village, then we have the foreground, mid-ground, and the background. There needs to be a clarity to each one of those, because if you’re blurring the depth of what you’re looking at, then instead of making it look deep to the player you’re going to flatten (the image) instead of making you go ‘ Wow, that mountain range looks like it’s a hundred miles away!”. If it is the same colour as something in the foreground it’s going to come forward and squish it, so now all of a sudden you’ve got flatness, like the background of a Broadway play. All we can do is create the illusion on screen of that depth, so let’s push it as far as we can.

We had so many conversations about fogging, which is something you guys may not be interested in, but fogging is the thing that, if you’re looking at a range of mountains, the further the mountains get away the less black there is in it and it gets bluer. To our eye, because we just intuitively know that, the ones that are closer have a lot of black in them, then it’s grey, and a little bit of blue, well those are about ten miles away – we just know that because of the colour of it that they’re ten miles away. We have to apply some of the rules that are in our life to this fantasy that they’re about to play because it still has to make sense in the way that they’re moving around. We can’t just invent light, we can’t invent the way things reflect shadows, we can’t do any of that.

We’d have these goofy conversations that became Todd’s Rules – the Todd Rules are not about how an elf looks, it’s more about clarity and simplicity and easy reading with the eye, and even the way we place things in the game. I didn’t want there to be a lot of straight running, I wanted a lot of weaving because perspectives change when you do that, so all of a sudden the canopy of a tree will move, and if things are moving on screen then it seems like there’s lots of animation, so we’re always tricking the eye. If we can give you a good experience then I guess we’ll have accomplished our job and I will have accomplished mine.

How has the dynamics between yourself on art design, R.A Salvatore on story, and Ken Rolston on gameplay mechanics worked out?

If everybody does their job right and actually knows their skill set, for instance you can have your goal keep, your fore back, your midfielder, and your defence, as long as everybody knows where their skill is then we’re ok. Under no circumstances am I going to tell R.A how to write a novel, he’s not going to tell me how to draw the artwork, and I’m not going to tell Ken how to make the quest and the adventure deeper. We all knew what it was that we had to do and we just sort of passed it along to the next time until we got our “goal” to use football vernacular. It’s interesting because people thought we would have ego clashes, but it was quite the opposite. Maybe if Kurt Schilling, who founded the company, had hired four novelists or four artists, maybe there would been more, but he was very smart going ‘I need somebody in that position, that position, and that position’ he put us in different positions so there wasn’t a lot of overlap.

The fun that I have no is not saying ‘artists, be like Todd!’ it’s actually the opposite. My job is to inspire them, to get them fired up, to draw a couple of elementary ideas on the board and then watch 22 year old artists go crazy and come back with stuff that, I’ve got to tell you, I never would have designed in my own brain. I think I’m pretty good, but we have a lot of talent working on this game that makes you go ‘WOW!’. We get a lot of stuff that’s a lot better than anything I could do.

For people that are still on the fence about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, what is your favourite part of the game, what can they really look forward to?

Well, it’s an RPG, so if you’re looking for a big giant adventure, it’s here. And if within the confines of the big giant adventure you’re looking for characters of all sizes, shapes, creeds, and colours, they’re there. If you’re looking for architecture that’ll blow your mind that looks like Kings live in it, all the way down to places that burrow down to where monsters are, with different backdrops, different colour palettes, and different ways to get down there… Oh and by the way, once you discover all of these things you don’t even have to sample them all, it’s like going through a video smorgasbord.

We have built all of this visual food, you play the game and you only need to put on your plate exactly what you want. We think we’ve added on every element, there’s almost every sampling of food that you could want in this buffet, (laughing) and if you can’t find something to satisfy your appetite, that arguably isn’t our fault, it’s your fault, you just don’t know what you want, because it is in the recipe some place!

Todd, unfortunately that’s all we have time for, thank you for speaking with us.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is due to be released on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 early next year. For more on the game  be sure to read our recent hands on preview of the game, as well as our interview with the game’s creative director Ken Rolston.

How would you describe OnLive to someone that has never heard of it before?

OnLive is a cloud gaming platform, so unlike the platforms of today, where you have a bunch of kit in your living room connected to your television, what we’ve done is move all of the hardware necessary for that to a data centre. That allows us to, over any broadband connection, deliver super high end gaming experiences without any additional hardware in your home.

You’ve made the decision to partner with BT in the UK, what made you decide to go with BT over other internet providers?

As a gamer you don’t necessarily need to be a BT subscriber to work with OnLive, any ISP or broadband provider works. However, BT was a great partner for us because they obviously know an awful lot about the internet plumbing in the UK, as well as how to package up up well formed consumer offerings. And, you know, they really get gaming. You’d be surprised, for a big Tele-Company, they really are passionate about gaming, and are dedicated to providing a good experience to our mutual customers.

Once of the things you’ve been doing at the Eurogamer Expo is giving our OnLive boxes to registered customers. Do they have to have the box to get involved with OnLive?

No, if you have a PC or Macintosh connected to the internet just go to www.onlive.co.uk, download a tiny browser plug-in, which takes a few seconds, and you’ll be playing OnLive right then and there, no hardware required. It’s the same if you have a tablet, an iPad or Android Tablet, go to the App Store, download the OnLive client and you can be up browsing the experience. If you want to connect through your telly though, then you’ll actually need what we call the Micro Console, which is a tiny box that connects to your television.

OnLive can be accessed on any type of screen

Is there any difference in quality between the browser and the box? Is one faster than the other?

They’re all identical. That’s the benefits of cloud-based gaming, the game is actually running on a big server in a data centre somewhere else, in this case Luxembourg actually, streaming the game down to you quickly enough that you don’t really notice the fact that it is far away. This allows us to get exactly the same experience on every platform. So we get tablets, PCs, and laptops playing very high end games that would, obviously, never run on those types of devices natively.

How would you get people that are heavily invested in the current generation of consoles, the people that have massive gamerscores, to move over to OnLive?

Everybody has a different reason for why they try OnLive. The first reason right now is the value, which is fantastic – your first game costs £1 – so why not try it out? But what you find is that everyone has a different reason in the States as well. We have 150 games on the service, every one of them has a demo available, so you can be playing a demo of a massive portfolio of games in a matter of seconds. If you want to try something before you buy it, even for your existing console, OnLive is a great place to experiment and go play. And then what you find is that the benefits of the platform really start to sink in, and a lot of people actually stick around and start migrating off of existing platforms. At the end of the day we all have our favourite platforms to play games on, and I think we (gamers) will probably stay with them for the rest of this console generation.

It’s fairly well known that UK infrastructure is not quite as robust as the in USA. How do you combat low internet speeds over here?

Oh you’d be surprised, we have a pretty big country over in the States, and a lot of it is not that well plumbed either. What we developed the service on is the fact that the internet is an evolving medium, and it wasn’t ever originally designed to support all of these real time data systems. Today OnLive works on all systems with broadband over 3 megabits downstream, and that is the vast majority when you look at gaming households around the UK. But, with that said, that’s why we’re partnered with BT, and AT&T in the States, because they are the people that are building the massive fibre infrastructure to allow the internet to get faster and faster, both on the backbone as well as to the home.

OnLive features facebook integration, allowing you to share your gameplay videos with your friends

When the next generation of consoles comes out, will OnLive be able to keep up graphically and in terms of the size of the games?

Sure. When you think about what we are able to do with a cloud-based platform, we already have rendering power, hardware, and CPUs, that are already faster than this generation of consoles today, so your gaming experience will be better than it is on Xbox or Playstation. What we also have the ability to do is rev the hardware in our data centres. We just released version 2 of our hardware a few weeks ago, where the gaming experience in the background just keeps getting better and better. This allows us to turn on more switches and nobs, and up the fidelity of the games, and so higher performance games are coming to OnLive that are impossible in today’s console and PC world. I think rather than a step function, which is how consoles have worked in the past, every five or six years, what we’re able to do is bring a linear growth element to it. So your experience just gets better and better over time and you never have to switch out your next kit to buy your next one. I think that, as the next gen consoles come out, we’ll see what they look like, what differences they have, and the consume is going to have a choice, do they want to buy the next piece of hardware for £300 or £400, or do they just want to connect to OnLive, which is very low cost, if anything.

You have the support of a lot of the big publishers, such as THQ and Ubisoft, are there any publishers that you aren’t working with yet that you’re aiming for?

When you look at the variety of people that we have, we have about 75 different publishers, from tiny indie guys that are a two man shops in Sweden, making great software, all the way up to the big publicly traded companies, Ubisoft, Take-2, and THQ. Everyone’s experience is different in terms of how quickly they embrace the platform, but what you’re seeing now is an explosion of content on the system. We went from, when we launched in US a year ago, 18 games to now having over 150 games, and growing very rapidly. Those are the big release AAA day-in-date release content, like Deus Ex came out on OnLive at the same exact moment as it came out in retail stores. One of the benefits of having it in a cloud system is that people can start playing it at 12:01am, on the dot, and doing all the things that they like to do in terms of quick run-throughs and what not.

It seems that gaming is one of the hardest things to steam. Would you ever consider streaming music or movies as well?

The answer is that we would certainly consider it. We need to say what the real value is to the consumer. Right now we have disrupted the way games are built and delivered by taking hardware out of the equation, which was always a big expensive purchase for consumers, so that’s the biggest value right now. There are plenty of ways to get your music, Spotify does a wonderful job, and I think the same thing with LoveFilm in the movie world. I think strategically, where we can add small bits of value, we might stick our toe in the water. But in the end I think we might end up partnering with the big guys.

OnLive will be getting the latest game releases on the same day as retail stores.

How are you quantifying success with the UK launch? Is it in terms of sign ups, or the number of set top boxes?

We take an odd approach with this, but it is consumer happiness really. It is how many people come on board and have a great experience. Whether that’s a small number initially, or whether it’s a large number, we’ll see, but it seems to be going really well so far. We’re actually a little surprised by how warmly we are being embraced, which is great, it feels really good. But at the end of the day I want everybody that logs on to have a great experience, because that is how you build long term customer loyalty. Thus far we’ve had some really great reactions, one day in and we’re getting plenty of buzz on Twitter and what not, so we’ll see how it goes.

Do you think that OnLive has effectively replaced the need for a console, and in the future do you think that there won’t be any consoles at all?

I can’t necessarily say that it will definitely be OnLive, but I think that, the way the world is going, cloud-based services are here to stay. You know, you don’t want a big computer in your living room if you don’t need one. I think that it fundamentally makes sense that media is delivered over the internet on demand in real-time. We are the first, and presently only, cloud based platform, and so I think that gives us a really good position to continue to build out the market and educate people. In the end any robust market usually has multiple players, so we’ll see what it looks like in a couple of years’ time. For now we’re pretty optimistic, and we’ve got a really good opportunity right now. Again, one gamer at a time, we’re letting people see what the experience is like, and we’ll let them vote with their time and wallets every time they buy a game on our platform as opposed to others.

We also announced a really big relationship with (UK retailer) GAME at retail because, still, a big part of the gaming experience is getting some professional advice, being able to touch and hold things in your hands. And, especially in the UK market, GAME is a big part of the gaming world, and so we said ‘hey, that’s a great way to still extend the experience out into the real world’, you can pick up a Micro Console, touch it, see how it works, look at the portfolio of games available before you commit to the platform. So far it’s working out really well for us.

Every single one of these screens is a real time glimpse into a real person's gaming session

How quickly is your game’s portfolio expanding?

I think we release probably three or four games a week, and that’s growing. It’s a collection of AAA day-in-date releases, we have Saints Row the Third coming up soon as well as Batman Arkham City, which are the big AAA highly marketed titles. Then we have a huge library of smaller titles that you wouldn’t necessarily see unless they were put directly in front of you. We searched the world over for high quality indie content, like a game called Limbo that is coming out really soon, which is a fantastic title. I think it has already got a lot of publicity for an indie title, but it isn’t something that you would necessarily see in stores.

In terms of big titles, like Arkham City, are they available at the same time on OnLive as they are on consoles?

Absolutely, the same exact second in fact. But OnLive players can get on a little sooner because they don’t have to wait for retail stores to open up, or have to wait for a big eight hour download or something. We absolutely have the same titles that you would hope to have on a new platform day-and-date.

Finally, how can people get involved with OnLive?

If you want to try it out on your PC or Macintosh go to www.onlive.co.uk, download our little browser plug-in, and if you want to jump in on the telly as well the you can buy our Micro Console… or you can come here to the Eurogamer Expo and get one for free!

Need more persuasion to sign up with OnLive? Why not read our full review of OnLive by clicking here. Spoilers! We really like it.

You’ve mentioned previously that the game will feature 6 vs 6 vs 6 battles, so clearly there is this team vs team vs team aspect to the game. Will there be a guild-like superstructure that is going to sit on top of the 6 vs 6 vs 6 multiplayer?

Yeah, in our plan there absolutely is. To be quite frank the key to having a community come and stay in is “I want to come back and play with my friends”. That’s the glue that keeps people coming back, so that is something that we will have. Right now we’re looking at the concept of guilds and the concept of clans and trying to find a way to marry them because in some ways our game is very much a dynamic action first person shooter, while in other ways it is an MMORPG. So we are trying to marry these features.

Is there a lot of passion for Warhammer in the team? Do you often get out the kits and tables and play the actual games?

There’s actually a Warhammer table right next to my desk. As well as the giant Warhammer table we have a gaming room, we have painting nights… and days. To be quite frank, I really like the 40K tabletop, but I love Warhammer Fantasy Online. Almost everybody at the studio has a relationship with the tabletop in some way; we have four members of staff that used to work for Games Workshop, so we have a lot of in-house love and knowledge, and we visit Games Workshop frequently. They’re one of the most focused companies in terms of the focus, their passion, and dedication to what they do, about making miniatures, about the hobby itself. It’s inspirational, and it is very much in-line with what Bioware represents in terms of cultivating the fans and the customers and the hobby and the love: it’s about the respect for that that we are trying to keep intact.

How are Games Workshop at telling you about what they are going to do with the lore?

We have a great process by which we submit everything: art, sound, script, words, website, video, everything goes through Games Workshop. They are very good at going “that is not our IP”, or letting us know when changes need to be made – “that’s not orkish enough!”, I’ve seen that written on a note! It’s actually a process that has been going on for a while now, we’ve been working with them for six or seven years, so we’ve got it pretty much down to a science now. Obviously for really big things we’ll go out and see them. I’ve been to Mecca, and it is beautiful – I’ve seen them making the miniatures, I couldn’t take pictures but it was beautiful, let me tell you.

You’ve said previously that you are sharing assets with Warhammer Online, is that all you’ll be sharing between the games?

Warhammer subscribers will be treated like VIPs in our game because these games are so related. We’re taking a franchise view, so, like I said, assets, bugs, a lot of things can be shared in terms of development. When it comes to treating subscribers they are going to be treated as VIPs. In some ways we think this (free to play) game could be an entry level point for Warhammer Online. So when someone comes in and says “you know what, this is cool, but I want more, I want something complex, something richer” then they can become a subscriber. They will get access to Warhammer Online plus whatever we decide to give to Warhammer Online Subscribers. We haven’t finalised what it is yet, but we want to do them right because they have been loyal to us for so long, and we really value those guys. I’ve been working on Warhammer Online for about five years, so it is a huge part of my life, so it is very important to me to preserve the community and make sure that they’re happy as they can be.

Are you going to ask the community what types of heroes to include in the game through competitions, or promotions?

Wow, you’re really good, that sounds like something we would like to do, wink wink (laughs). Probably, yeah.

Free to Play has emerged as this whole new branch of EA – do you work with the guys at Need For Speed World or Battlefield Heroes and compare notes?

Absolutely. I’m on my second trip to Sweden (where Dice, makers of Battlefield, are based) this year and I went to Vancouver about a month ago. You hear people say “oh EA they’re so big, grumble grumble”, but what they don’t realise is that because it is so big there is such a wealth of resources, and such brilliant minds (to work with). I went to Sweden and I just wrote for three days because I kept finding people that wanted to tell me everything that they had experienced on Battlefield Heroes and Battlefield Play For Free. They were so willing to share what not to do and what worked really well, so that’s one of the best things about EA. As the big company we can go talk to other (game developers) and have a relationship. So Need For Speed, we’re sharing a room with them right now, and we’re constantly jostling each other. Obviously it is a big company, so not everybody is connected, but when there needs to be (a connection) I can grab my lead designer and tell him to go talk to another lead designer and make sure that they’re able to have a conversation.

Are we to expect at some stage the announcement of a HeroLog, like Need For Speed’s Autolog, which allows you to integrate with all of your friends?

(laughing) Warlog? You know I actually like the name Autolog even though it has the word auto in it. I think Autolog is one of the most tremendous features, and I would love to announce that we are using it… but we aren’t yet. It is a great feature, and we want to use Autolog. Not to pimp another game, but I don’t know if you have seen SSX, where you can vote down other people that you’re sick and tired of seeing? What a great feature to have, because you always have the one friend that is always beating you… We haven’t actually coalesced the leaderboards and social side of things yet, but because we’re able to talk to those guys we want to take the best of what they have got and make it all work together.

How can people get involved with the game?

The game is in sign ups for beta now, with the beta coming very soon. The way to sign up is go to www.wrathofheroes.com and sign up for the beta. We’ll start inviting people in to the beta within the next few weeks.

You heard the lady – if this sounds like something that might interest you, head over to the site and sign up for the beta, it is free afterall. We aim to bring you more coverage of this game over the coming months, so, as ever, keep your eyes on newbreview.com.

Along with Adam Thinks, The Best Games Release of The Week, and all the usual banterous guff, there is the debut of a brand new feature and an EXCLUSIVE interview with Ben Smith, Producer on the forthcoming Kingdoms of Avalur: Reckoning.

MISS OUT AT YOUR PERIL.

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Due to their impressive history, Atari are constantly linked with their huge back catalogue of games. So much so, that when even mentioning the name Atari, you automatically conjure up images of classics such as Centipede, Asteroids and Missile Command.

Another Atari classic is Yars Revenge, a fixed shooter in which players assumed the role of Yar, an insect like creature, who is hell bent on (yes, you guessed it) revenge. Since its initial release in the 1980s, the Atari 2600 title has been subject to quite a few remakes, spin offs and re-releases over the years. So it should come as no surprise that the game is set to remade again, this time completely revamped with lush, vibrant, anime inspired graphics, rail shooter gameplay and a fully fleshed out story featuring betrayal and revenge.

In anticipation for the game’s release, the game’s producer, Michael Fahrny, kindly took time out to sit down with us and answer a few questions about the reboot of Yars Revenge.

What made you want to revisit this particular game out of all of Atari’s classic titles from that era, and how closely does it resemble the original game?

We felt that Yar’s Revenge fit well into the overall digital strategy at Atari. Taking in the Anime direction also just seemed like the right move for the classic IP and we are excited to see what we could do with it.

Now obviously this new re-imagining of Yar’s Revenge has brought the game into the modern gaming era with some spectacular HD graphics, what other changes have been made in order to make the game more socially relevant?

The gameplay mechanics have changed pretty drastically. Moving into the Rail Shooter genre really opened up a wide variety of options for combat, level design, environments, and the list goes on…

The game itself seems incredibly stylised, the whole look the game is tremendous. The environments, the character design, it all has a definite Japanese, Animé inspired look, what was the inspiration and the thought process behind this?

Killspace, as a developer, has largely been influenced by Anime both on the art and design side of things. We planned from the very beginning to go in this direction because we thought it would do this franchise justice and help to bring it to a wider and modern audience. We are very happy with how it’s turned out in both look and feel.

Along with the highly stylised HD graphics, the original story of Yar’s Revenge has had a bit of a makeover too, can you tell us a little bit about that?

I don’t want to give too much away, but while we kept the general mutated, space faring accident base, we also wanted to update it so that it had a little more “revenge.”

Yar’s Revenge will feature 2-player local co op, how will this impact the story of Yar’s Revenge? Will the co-op mode have its own story? After all the game is centred solely around the character of Yar.

We kept this very light. The co-op is just a drop in/drop out at any time and will add a second yar to the screen. The difficulty will ramp up, but it won’t change the story.

What do you think the reaction will be from fans of the first game? And how have you tried to appeal to fans of the original game, as well as cater to new gamers that aren’t familiar with the first Yar’s Revenge?

I’m certainly hoping that both sets of fans will enjoy the game. I think there is enough homage paid to the original that those fans will appreciate it and the gameplay has been taken into such a modern direction that new fans will also find it enjoyable. We have tried very hard to make something with Yar’s that will suit both sides of the coin.

Rail shooters seem to be a bit of a forgotten genre in the video game industry, but seem to be undergoing a bit of a revival with the likes of Child of Eden and Nintendo’s Kid Icarus: Uprising for the 3DS. How are you looking to recapture the magic of those classic titles, and how does your game improve on them?

Making a rail shooter has been one of the most difficult games to make so far in my career. I have a new found respect for anyone who’s chosen to go down this path. Honestly, we didn’t look to do anything to revolutionize the formula or change how a rail shooter is perceived. We wanted to take our favourite elements of the games that inspired us to go in this direction and see if they made sense for Yar’s Revenge. Some of them did, some didn’t, but I am happy with what we’ve ended up with.

What were the main challenges you faced when developing a game on a variety of different platforms?

Timing, always timing, is extremely difficult to make sure everything lines up properly between the different platforms and keep everything on schedule.

If you were given the choice of reviving another Atari classic of your choice, which would you choose and why?

I would love to bring back Battlezone and Air Sea Battle. I spent endless hours playing both of those as a kid.

What elements of the original game have you tried to keep in the game? Have any of the original members of the team from the first game made their way into the dev team for this reboot?

I’m not going to give any secrets away, but I will say that Nolan Bushnell was involved through the making of the new Yar’s Revenge and is happy with the direction we’ve taken it.

Michael, thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

Yars Revenge is due for release later this year on Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. Stay tuned to The Newb Review for more coverage of this game in the coming weeks.

- Kieran Roycroft

Following the 2009 release of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, publisher Atari is to bring out another entry in the franchise as part of their digital distribution initiative. Unlike the last game, Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime is a top down multiplayer arcade shooter, which will be available to download from both the Xbox Live Marketplace and Playstation Network this month.

With the game’s release almost upon us, we sat down with Dave Williams, Creative Director at Behaviour Studios, to get some insight of to what to expect from the final product.

When working on an established brand, how much creativity can you have? Were there any limitations placed on you?

We were allowed a lot of creative freedom in creating this game and the licensor was very helpful in discussing these with us and offering alternate suggestions if we pushed things too far.

Of course, everyone loves Ghostbusters and we have to respect the characters and the world that has been created for them, but this isn’t a bad thing as the Ghostbusters world is so cool!

In terms of story, where does this game stand in the Ghostbusters universe?

The storyline starts just after the end of the second movie, where a familiar character, Dr. Janosz Poha , is sent to the mental hospital due to some sliming issues. Here he meets Ismael, a strange character who is trying to resurrect the demon by collecting an ancient relic.

The story flashes forward to the present day, where paranormal activity in the city is reaching critical mass and the Ghostbusters crew is getting overrun.  They decide to recruit a team of four rookies to help them out. The rookies set out to bust their first job when their paths are intertwined with Janosz’, the Relic and a very bad demon.

Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis were very much involved in the creation of the last Ghostbusters game, did they have any involvement in this title? If not who is responsible for the script?

The original cast were not involved in the creation of the story, but the original Ghostbusters crew do make an appearance as the mentors of the new rookie team.  The original game idea was developed in-house and then the story was written by Tom Waltz, the scriptwriter for the Ghostbusters comics.

Can you tell us a little about the game’s combat system? I gather that the new Ghostbusters have a variety of all new and different weapons at their disposal.

Egon’s and Ray’s studies on paranormal entities have revealed that some ghosts ectoplasmic energy resonates at different frequencies and these can be identified by their colour.   Egon has cleverly developed some new weapons, each stronger against a particular kind of enemy.  Match the color of the weapon’s beam with the color of the enemy and you’ll dispose of them much quicker.

What’s the craziest idea the team came up with that ultimately wasn’t used?

I think laser guided monkeys came up more than once.

Aside from the original Ghostbusters, will we be seeing any other familiar faces in this game, and in what capacity?

As I mentioned briefly, Dr. Janosz Poha from the second movie is one of the main characters in the story.  Slimer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow man make an appearance too.

Can you tell us a little about each of the new Ghostbusters?

First we have Gabriel, the “Egon” of the new team.  A nerdy scientist that is fascinated with the application of the scientific method to paranormal hunting. Then we have Samuel, more similar to Ray than any other. He is amazingly smart, but he is also innocent and funny. We also have Bridget, a sarcastic and egocentric Manhattan girl that is only surpassed by Peter himself. Finally there is Alan, the most silent of the team. He is an amazing buster, but he likes to keep a low profile. He is the nephew of an old acquaintance of the original crew, but he’d rather not speak about it.

What games do you and your team play in your spare time? Are there any other developers that you particularly admire?

Left for Dead and Minecraft are the lunchtime games here.  But the team play a lot of Flash puzzle and platform games.  There is so much creativity in these small games and we admire anyone who tries to do something a bit different.

How would you convince our readers to buy your game in a single sentence?

You get to blast loads of ghosts with your friends, help them out or compete against them for the highest scores, all set in the Ghostbusters world, it’s absolutely brilliant!

Dave, thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime will be released on Xbox Live Arcade, PC, and Playstation Network on March 23rd. Stay tuned to The Newb Review for our full review of Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime shortly after the game’s release.

- Luke Mears

Rather than being a boxed retail product, D&D: Daggerdale is a downloadable game, set to be released on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and PC. From what we have seen and heard D&D: Daggerdale looks to be an authentic Dungeons and Dragons role playing game experience, complete with online co-operative multiplayer.

In preparation for the game’s impending release, board game enthusiast and site writer, Campfire Burning engaged in a discussion with D&D: Daggerdale’s creative director Zandro Chan to find out more about this promising looking game.

First thing – and I always ask this when it comes to D&D games because it’s suprising how much difference it makes to the atmosphere – is there a Dungeon Master voiceover? 

Like the little cartoon dude from the 80’s?  Hahaha, no, there’s no Dungeon Master.  Actually, that’s not true, the ‘DM’ is what we call our AI system that determines the enemy type, its level, the numbers, their behavior and spawns them into the world to fight the player.  The DM will dynamically scale the difficultly based on the number of players, their character’s level and their current location. But the DM is not a character in the game.

Were any of the Daggerdale team big D&D fans or role-players before they began work on the game? Did you play it at all during the game’s development?

Many of us are fans of Dungeons and Dragons tabletop for a long time.  We started a campaign at the start of development and it is still going on.  Granted that we don’t always get to play it given our schedules.  Little known fact: Our CEO has an original copy of the D&D basic set signed by Gary Gygax. That’s gotta get us some fanboy points, no?
 

With the Daggerdale series set to span three titles in a full campaign, how much plot is there, and what kind of characters – if any- will the players encounter?

Series?  That’s not official.  We think that buzz got started since the game focuses on the Heroic Tier of the character growth system outlined in the 4th Edition rules, which is the first third.  The “internet” just took that as Daggerdale being the first of three parts. Ultimately, the fan base of Daggerdale will dictate its future releases.

As for Daggerdale, the story revolves around Rezlus, an evil Zhentarim Cleric, bent on bringing the power of the Black Lord Bane onto Daggerdale and the rest of the Dalelands.  The players are summoned by a mysterious mage, and given the task of defending their homeland.  They face a daunting journey as they scale the Tower of the Void in an effort to stop the evil Cleric.
 
How much will the players have to co-operate throughout the game? 

Working together is essential to player survival when playing in multiplayer.  Choosing which characters to build your party around is crucial, since each character’s playstyle is different. Parties with different combinations of characters offer opportunities for different strategies, such as collecting agro for stronger players, forming phalanxes (and other defense tactics), and employing support actions such as buffs and heals.  We have seen many different party combinations and the group that makes the bloodiest mess is the all-fighters team.  Those guys are just crazy.

 
What difference will playing different characters make to the game? Is there much in the way of role-playing, and are there traps for the rogue to disable, unique spell opportunities for the wizard and plenty of undead for the cleric to turn?

In Daggerdale, players can take on the role of the melee expert Human Fighter, the quick and nimble Elven Rogue, the master of the arcane arts Halfling Wizard, and the powerful divine Dwarven Cleric. Each of these characters has their own playstyle and strategies that players will need to master.  Turn undead? The Wizard can raise the dead and have them fight by his side!
 
Daggerdale is based on the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons which was itself largely influenced by computer role-playing games. What opportunities and problems has this brought up in Daggerdale’s development? How easy or difficult was it implimenting the 4e rules in a video game for the first time?

All of our core systems are built on the foundation of the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition rule set. We have been working extremely close with both Atari and Wizards of the Coast to ensure that Daggerdale is accurately representing the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. We tweak and tune the gameplay to fit with the action portion of the experience and across multiple players while maintaining the deep customization of role playing elements throughout.  As with any Action RPG out there, the toughest part is to balance the systems across the entire length of the player’s experience.
 
Aside from Dungeons and Dragons 4e, what games have influenced the development of Daggerdale? Does it draw upon the other D&D games -Baldur’s Gate, D&D Online: Eberron Unlimited, Neverwinter Nights, the arcade games, the Temple of Elemental Evil, the Dark Alliance gamesand the Gold Box titles – or have you tried to forge your own identity? 

We have definitely carved a spot for Daggerdale in the rich world of D&D.  During the development of Daggerdale, we drew inspirations from video games, film and tabletop games. We analyzed many brawling games, ones with a great feel for combat, to ensure that we have the perfect touch and feel for our action.  The biggest thing we drew from is of course the abundance of great content that makes up the (D&D) Forgotten Realms.  With such a large canvas of history, mythology and lore to draw from, we were never at a loss for great ideas. 

 
How have you made the dungeons in Daggerdale look unique from the ones in all the other dungeon crawlers out there? 

We are very proud of the visual fidelity we are able to achieve.  Each area is brimming with its own flavor, its own personality.  One main thing we have done that sets us apart is the lighting. There’s a lot of variation in the different levels. Moody, shadow-steeped caverns in the mines juxtaposed with cascading light in the higher tower levels. The detail of the environments is astounding; we have created a world that looks like it really exists. A world with a lot of character.

 
What are your favourite spells, special abilities and monsters from the game? What can you tell us about the later games in the series? In particular, how have you implimented the Heroic tier, an area of D&D commonly neglected in the video game iterations? 

Our team is torn across all four characters. Those who like solving their problems with the pointy end of a sword tend lean towards the Fighter or sometimes the Cleric (who can also heal allies). Those who prefer to point at things from afar and have it drop dead tend to favor the Rogue or Wizard (who has many area of effect spells at his disposal).  It really boils down to the player’s individual playstyle.  Some of our team members just like killing an enemy then raising him from the dead just to kill him again.  No one ever accused game developers of being sane…

There are future expansions planned of Daggerdale at this time, but we expect that players will be very happy with the long term plans for the franchise.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us Zandro.

Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale is due for release on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and on PC in the coming months. Stay tuned to The Newb Review for our continuing coverage of this game.

- Campfire Burning

Read on to see the full interview…

I think that it’s fair to say that TGC’s games are incredibly original, fun and provide a more enriching experience for gamers but I’d like to know what inspired you to begin developing videos games?

I have always been a gamer, but didn’t really think about making video games until I was at the University of Southern California Interactive Media MFA program.  Two things happened; firstly, we took a class our second semester on the history of game design throughout human history. It really awakened me to how expressive game design can be and how much hadn’t been done yet in video games. I really like taking on new challenges, so I was very drawn to the medium at that point.

Secondly, we got to go to the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Meeting the people who make video games was a wonderful experience – they are some of the smartest people I’ve met. It also made it real, knowing who makes video games and how they go about making them. I wanted in!

What are your fondest memories and experiences with a control pad?

Playing on the NES Power Pad with knees on the ground, slamming our hands on to it, instead of actually running like we were supposed to.

A fan of the good, old, Power Pad

What’s the creative process like at TGC? How much coffee does it take to keep your team running at full throttle?

The creative process at TGC is very iterative, both in implementation as well as the process itself. I see the creative process constantly evolving here, as unique challenges require unique ways of solving problems. I think that’s what makes a TGC developer stand out – they are not only talented at making games, but they are always asking themselves “could we be doing this better?” Not a lot of caffeine is consumed at thatgamecompany, however. It’s a natural high, I guess.

Do you consider yourself and your team to be trendsetters, pioneers even?

I don’t know that we consider ourselves anything in particular… we just make the games we want to make. Yes, we deliberately aim to make games that are different from what’s been made in the past, but we also don’t consider that incredibly innovative because there really hasn’t been a whole lot done in games when you look at it from an perspective of communicating emotions. Mainly, we wanted to make unique games and we wanted to make them our own way, and we couldn’t find jobs anywhere else doing it, so we made our own company.

Recently the games industry seems to have become heavily focused on motion controls i.e Nintendo Wii, Microsoft’s Kinect and Playstations’ Move. How do you see this affecting the kinds of games you make?

With new types of controls, the possibilities for new genres open up, and therefore new audiences. For our games, we aim to make experiences that are accessible, both in the type of content we choose, but also in the technology. We want to remove as many barriers to entry in the experience as possible. So we are really excited about the range of possibilities these new controls open up.

Excited by the possibility that a new generation of controllers are creating.

What’s your favourite game right now? What has been keeping your thumbs busy of late?

I’ve been playing “Auralux,” a game by a student at Dartmouth! We got connected through a friend, and he sent me his project, and I just haven’t been able to put it down – sort of a Galicon-style game, but I really like the art and audio choices.

What do you love most about being a games developer?

The people I meet. Especially in independent games – I’m really looking forward to the Independent Games Summit this year in San Francisco.

As we know, flOw, Flower and the visually stunning Journey are all exclusive to PS3. Now that your three game deal with Sony is reaching it’s climax do you think we will ever see a TGC title on other platforms within the foreseeable future?

Right now we are just focusing on getting Journey out to our fans.

Journey is slated for release this year.

Can you give us some insight into what it’s like to work in a heavily male dominated industry? Do you think that your different perspective has led to you working on more innovative and creative titles?

1. Is every option (choice you have to make in order to progress) obvious/presented clearly before you?
No. Absolutely not. Some choices will be presented in ways that the outcome will be more obvious but, a lot of choices will be more or less hidden in the challenges you face and in the narrative. Depending on how you react, later outcomes will vary. We didn’t want to make a game where all the choices are telegraphed because it makes the choice more often than not based on how you want to boost your character as opposed as being immersed in the fantasy of the game. It’s definitely more subtle than a lot of games. 
 
2.             Will we encounter books, news terminals, newspapers, ATMs; and will some even be influenced by your own actions?
You will encounter a lot of things to read like newspapers, eBooks, etc. Unfortunately, we had to cut the ATMs because we were running out of time.
 
3.             How many items will Adam be able to carry, and does this exclude weapons?
Depends on the size of your inventory. If you invest in it, you’ll carry a lot and if you don’t, you’ll have to make difficult choices on what to keep with you or not. It includes everything but “story items”.
 

4.             Regarding the Icarus Landing system: Is there any scientific research or advancement made that support the concept behind this aug? How can it be done?
The Icarus Landing System is a discreet augmentation surgically implanted in the user’s lower back, slightly above the coccyx at the base of the vertebral column. The device has an accelerative descent sensor built in; in freefall, the unit will automatically activate the patented High-Fall Safeguard System, an EMF decelerator generating a fixed-focus electromagnetic lensing field, projected downward along the plane of the drop. This field pushes against the Earth’s magnetosphere and slows the user’s descent to a manageable velocity, allowing him to fall from almost any height (within reason) to a relatively soft landing.
 
5.             Will augmentations be permanent once installed, or can players mix-and-match augs or remove them?
There are indeed permanent.
 
6.             How do augmentations like the claymore work when Adam wears his coat?
There are holes in his coat that allows for the claymore to work perfectly fine.
 
7.             How are the augmentations divided amongst the four pillars that have been mentioned?
There divided in different categories like Cranium, arms, legs, torso, etc.

 
8.             What are the augmentations that Adam starts out with?
Single Takedown, IFF, Retinal Prosthesis, basic hacking ability and the Infolink essentially.
 
9.             How does health regeneration work? What will trigger it, how fast is it going to be, will it use energy?
When you take damage your health goes down. If you have avoided being hit for “x” seconds, than it starts to regenerate somewhat slowly. It’s not as quick as games like Halo or CoD. You really need to stay out of the firing zone otherwise you won’t last long. When in trouble, you can use consumables (if you have any) to replenish it faster or to boost your health when it’s already full.
 
10.          Will there be weapon stores for purchasing ammunition and tools?
Yes, there are some hidden merchants offering different kind of weapons and items. You need to find them though.
 
11.          If players choose to play in a certain manner, they’re presumably going to be doing a lot of hacking throughout this game. Considering it sounds like the hacking minigame is quite complex (and presumably at least reasonably time consuming) what have you done to ensure that it doesn’t get incredibly tedious over time (Bioshock’s hacking minigame as a poor example)?
Every hacking session is different. Based on your level of hacking augmentations, the chances that the Sub-Routine will detect you will vary. And each time, you need to adapt to what happens. Also, there are some rewards (credits, virus programs, etc.) that can be accessed but always while managing the Sub-Routine system trying to catch you. So, it becomes a game of adaptation and  how much risks are you willing to take to get additional rewards.
 
12.          Will I be able to pick all pieces of junk and different stuff just like in DX1 and use them to distract enemies or do something else with it?
You’ll be able to use different types of boxes to distract NPCs indeed. If you’re referring to things like a pencil or a glass the answer is no. We have a very detailed and rich world to discover so we had to make some tradeoffs in terms of the scope of interactive objects in order to keep a smooth framerate.

 
13.          Why were BE cells, lockpicks and multitools removed?
We wanted to make hacking more important and deeper. And since we had so many features to develop for this game, we had to focus and lose some things like lockpicks and multitools.
 
14.          Will the earlier Deus Ex music theme return?
Maybe…
 
15.          Are we able to HOLSTER OUR WEAPON in Deus Ex Human Revolution?
Of course we are. Deus Ex is not a typical shooter when it’s all about gunning down enemies. Your journey brings you in civilized places where guns are not well appreciated. So, holstering it will make people more willing to speak to you. Who would chat with someone pointing a gun on our head?

Thanks to our friends at Square Enix for the enlightening interview which we hope has temporarily sated the impatience of any zealous Deus Ex fans out there.  The game is due for release on the PS3, PC, Xbox 360 and Onlive on March 8th 2011. Stay tuned to The Newb Review for more coverage of this game in the near future.

At this year’s Eurogamer Expo site mental Adam Radcliffe was granted a face to face audience with Ed Stern from Splash Damage, the studio that created the Quake Enemy Territory series, to discuss their upcoming multiplayer first person shooter Brink.

But first a little background information. Brink is a first person shooter that is set in a distopian future, which is nothing new. Where Brink really innovates is in the seemless blending of a single player game and online multiplayer – with a simple touch of a button you can populate your game with other human players to either aid you, or fight against you for that extra challenge.

Transcribed from Adam’s notes, written in magnolia coloured crayon, we present a very special edition of Speaking With… 

First of all, can you just tell us a little bit about the story and what makes it stand out among other games in the first person shooter genre?

Brink is a new first person shooter coming out in the first quarter of 2011, on Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. We at Splash Damage are making all three versions with the same game engine, same game assets and you can really tell it’s been made as one game rather than ported over onto all other platforms.

But that’s a really good question, there’s a lot of shooters out there and a lot of good shooters, so you’ve really got to work hard to make it stand out. So with Brink, deliberately our goals were; it’s got to be different, it’s got to look different, we can’t offer people the same thing, we have made those games ourselves, we don’t need anymore “brown games”. We wanted to offer people something they haven’t seen before, the settings have got to be unique, the visual looks have got to be completely different, so that any screenshot that you see of the game makes you say “oh yeah! that’s Brink, it doesn’t look like anything else out there”.

Brink features something uncommon in games today - a varied colour palette

What kind of things with the first person shooter genre are you trying to improve upon with Brink?

There are some things about shooters which we feel we needed to get right, things we could improve on, it’s not just about graphical fidelity anymore. There has been a problem previously with single player games, where you play them, you’re good at them, you enjoy them and then you beat them, but then you go online, everything is different. Sometimes it’s a different game engine, sometimes it’s different controls, but you get this feeling of “Hey I thought I was good at this game, but now I am terrible”. Also quite often, the level of graphical fidelity really drops when you go online, because you have to send everything over a network, singleplayer you just have to render the world from one point of view.

So one of our goals was to make sure there was absolutely no difference. Not just so we could constrain both versions, but to make it so the game is always looking fantastic, make sure it’s always better looking and more distinctive than any other game out there. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re online or off, singleplayer or multiplayer, you’re not losing any level of detail.

Brink has an impressive character customization system, can you tell me what it was like developing that?

We added a frankly ridiculous degree of character customization in the game because players love that, you can see that from MMORPG players, they love having a degree of customization, so we made a game where in 20 seconds you can customize a guy which looks totally unique, with all manner of ethnic and racial archetypes. You can choose a guy which looks absolutely hilarious if you like, that’s your choice. You can give him a tattoo, you can give him scars, you can give him face paint on top of that, then a gas mask on top of that, and come up with this amazing looking guy, that’s not just a pretty version of your character for the customization menu, that’s your in game 3rd person model. He looks as good as he can, whether your playing online or offline, singleplayer or multiplayer.

Of course there we’re reasons why we couldn’t have that same thing before because you have to send it all over networks, on consoles there is no server, its peer to peer, its hard and we’ve got a huge level of detail. The source textures alone for all these things are gigabytes big, but using the technology we’re using, we are able to get that down so we were only sending a couple dozen megabytes of video information over the network, it’s very efficient. What this means is, all those distinctions we are used to about singleplayer/multiplayer shooters suddenly just don’t matter as much.

The distinctions between single player and multiplayer are blurred in Brink

In one of our online modes one team attacks, one team defends. We have a decade of experience making online shooters, that is not coincidental. It is what we consider to be the sweet spot, you could have more players on the servers but you tend not to survive as long, so we put a lot of thought into how big we want the maps to be, “do we want to have vehicles in it?”, well actually it takes place on “The Ark” it’s isolated, it’s an island and vehicles didn’t really work for us.

It’s also not just like “we’re the red team, they’re the blue team and we fight because…that’s what we do” which is fine, as there are some wonderful arena games. But you’re not going to make someone care about those characters, because they’re not characters, they’re just there to fight.

How about “it’s a shooter and they don’t want to fight?” it’s much more compelling. In the rules of ancient Greek drama the choice between right and wrong is boring, the choice between right & right is much more interesting. So if you’re interested in the story line, Brink is going to give you characters and cinematics which follow through, you can skip those cinematics if you like and frankly if you’ve already played the game a couple of times everyone will skip them not matter how riveting they are the first time round, there’s no reason not to have that in a shooter. I used to get some odd looks from people saying “wait…you’re a writer, in a multiplayer game?” Well why not have a storyline? Why not create a world which is rich enough that people really, genuinely care whats going on?

You mentioned “The Ark” before, can you tell us about it and the environments you have been creating for the game?

“The Ark” is the main character in Brink, our actors are still pretty clunky compared to cinema, but oh my goodness can we render environments. The environment is the best narrative medium we’ve got, it’s always a bit of a fail in a game when an NPC comes up to you and says “Stop, stop playing this game you have paid for because I have to lecture you about what is going on”, that’s really an ineffective way of doing it. The environment can do that much more effectively than a character, if you just look around the environments in Brink and the various maps, you can see every type of landscape, there are nice bits, clean bits, slummy bits, just looking around gives you a sense of what has happened on “The Ark” in the last 40 years much more effectively than if we sit you down and tell you what’s been going on. Now that we have removed the logical constraints from the singleplayer and multiplayer, we can start to do some really interesting things.

Lets say you’re playing offline, storyline mode, I am on your friends list, I pop up, you set it so your friends can join you, I join your game and replace one of the A.I teammate components with me. Now suddenly it’s a co-op game, but nothing has changed, it’s still the same setting. You didn’t need to stop, you didn’t need to reset, you didn’t need to do anything different and there is no drop in graphical quality, it’s exactly the same thing, any single one of these players, 16 in total, could be A.I or human replacements in an instant, with no loss, no lag, and no drop in quality. This raises the possibility that you could have what you think of as a multiplayer game, but one of the guys in there is playing the next episode in his singleplayer campaign, but it’s still the same game, you’re buffing each other, he’s giving you health, you’re giving him ammo, that’s the class you’ve chosen, you can change to any class every time you re-spawn, if you go to a command post in game you can change class or weapon load out there. So, suddenly we’re really blurring the lines between what used to be very separate beasts.

It used to be of course, that you couldn’t have a singleplayer/multiplayer game, now there is no difference. We want to get people online because that produces the most unpredictable stuff.

From a writing perspective, what challenges have you come up against with Brink?

I am the writer of the game, I hope the game is going to be interesting, whilst the people are turning the page, they’re talking to the cast of characters because they want to know what’s been going on. But the story of the game is not the plot, the story of the game is the story of your own experiences playing the game, that always trumps everything else. Nobody has ever said “oh I was playing the game last night when the NPC said that amazing line of dialogue”, people say “AHH this thing happened because I did this when you did that”, that’s the memory because you made that part of the game yourself, that’s not something you’ve been presented with. That’s the great thing about online games, it’s a toolkit and a rule-kit to let players author their own experiences and those are always the most precious.

Another challenge before has always been that it is quite tough to get into online games, sometimes it is not a very welcoming environment, it’s confusing, you don’t know what to do. So, we’ve taken the decision making process of a really high level clan player and automated it. We have it on the objective wheel, you just press up on the D-pad and it will show you all the missions you can do based on the current status of the gameplay and what class you are. So, if you’re a really good clan player, you’ll know the map, you’ll know where to go, you’ll know what the most useful thing you can do is, whether that’s doing the main objective or supporting the guys doing the main objective. Or perhaps even “oh my goodness we don’t have anyone in the right class, I’ll have to change class”, but you need to know the map really well to do that, so we’ve made all of that automatic, you just press up on the d-pad and it will tell you to “go here”, it’ll put a waypoint on the map, you go there, it’ll give you more experience points just for being there, just for being near the objective, because you are effectively guarding it, whichever team you’re on, you’re influencing gameplay.

Working as a team delivers more XP

We will bribe you mercilessly with experience points to do things that benefit your teammates the most, so we hope players farm exp, we hope players are going to try and exploit it. We don’t give you that much exp for killing the enemy, we will smother you with exp for keeping your teammates alive and we make it as easy as possible, for example there are four classes, Soldier, Engineer, Medic and Operative, the Soldiers plant explosive charges and they can give out ammo, the Medics can heal or revive people, the Engineers can buff weapon damage, disarm bomb charges, repair things and the Operatives can hack objectives. Now if you already know how all the classes work, you know it makes sense that “I am a soldier, I am going to give you some ammo”, that’s how clans work. If you’re new to the game you might not know that, so we make it extremely easy by putting a big “PRESS X NOW AND YOU WILL BUFF THIS GUY” symbol on the game, and he will buff you back. If you spawn and someone gives you ammo you might as well think “oh I’m going to give you health”, we will give you loads of exp for doing that. Suddenly it’s much easier to do things which in the past only professional clan players would know how to do. Not coincidentally the things that give you the most exp are the things that do your team the most good.

You mentioned how the environment plays a key role in the story telling, can you just explain the S.M.A.R.T system that you have implemented? Some people may claim Brink is influenced by games like Mirror’s Edge…

Well yeah, a lot of people have said its a bit like Mirror’s Edge, but that’s not an FPS. Basically, some of the greatest graphical advances have been in first person shooters, it’s amazing how they have progressed in the last 5 years, but the movement within the game has actually lagged behind. Since Quake 3 we pretty much haven’t made any advances, we’re still a fridge on roller skates, it doesn’t matter how high quality the player model is, if you come up against a wall that’s chest high, you can’t climb over it somehow. There are lots of good reasons why you would need to do that, because if you have a particular script or action sequences, you only want the player to go a certain way, but our events aren’t scripted, they’re completely unpredictable, which is one of the reasons there’s infinite replay value, you never know how the maps going to go.

In our first game “Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory”, 7 years old, still one of the top 10 most played online games, we’ve had over half a billion games played, no two of them were the same, people keep playing it because of its unpredictability and the mod community have done amazing things with our maps. With online gaming, if you can get past those initial periods of “What the hell do I do”, that isn’t full of 12 year old, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, screaming abuse I hear…oh and by the way, VOIP defaults to off in Brink, you’re only going to hear VOIP from people in your friends list.

But yeah, there is always going to be something new to try out in Brink. One of the challenges for us making Brink was to have and retain all of that depth that will keep people playing our games years after the release, but make it accessible as possible. So ,even if you’ve never played this genre of game before, you will say “oh okay right, this is really easy, now I see what its’ about”.

Confirmed: You can climb over waist high walls in Brink.

S.M.A.R.T (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain), basically fixes that ex-mersive problem with movement in shooters, which is stuff like “Oh my god that’s amazing, look at the dust he kicks up, oh the weapons sound fantastic, oh no I cant climb over that little wall”, It kind’ve pulls you out of the game a little bit. So why can’t you do that? Technically its very clever, it’s quite complex, we’re constantly tracing the environments we have made to see if your guy can make any specific jump. It couldn’t be simpler to use, you just hold down sprint, if you’re on a console its like left shoulder button or something, and press forwards, if your guy could make that jump, then we’ll do it, the animation plays and allows you to progress more dramatically, of course you don’t have to use it, you could time the jumps yourself. It’s not an auto pilot, we just developed it so players don’t have to spend hours of time mastering our control system. During play tests if I see players looking down at the controller, we’ve failed as a designer. If you need to get somewhere you can do it quicker and stay focus on the battlefield. You can move around the environment seamlessly

What was your favorite part of the development process?

Oh it’s when you get the actors involved, because it doesn’t matter if the script works in theory, it’s weird how much changes, it always gets shorter. In the first draft everyone says everything out loud, then it gets shorter and shorter. My favorite bits are when you have a little dialogue exchange within the characters, and the relationship is so clear between them, but then you get the physical actors involved and you just think “no cut that line and that line too”, because you have already made that point just though the physicality of the actors. There we’re many points where lines didn’t need to be said because that point was already being put across just by their posture, with music emphasizing it. It’s a little more interesting when you’re playing against the energy of it. If the performance capture is any good, you can see how they feel. There is an old screen writing motto, “if your scene is actually about what the scene is supposed to be about then your in trouble”, because that means there is no sub-text. Obviously we still have a lot of points we need to make and with the cinematics you can see the characters and know exactly how they’re feeling, they don’t need to say it. So, bizarrely and kind of ironically, my favorite bits as a writer have been when I have had to strike a line.

Speaking of lines of dialogue, how many people were involved in the script writing process?

Well my creative director, Richard Hound, who was the lead designer on Fable 2, Syphon Filter back in the day, and The Sims on console god bless him, he was effectively my story editor on that. We wrote the story together, but it’s all down to the actors, we give the actors a basis and often, after trying out a scene, they may come up with better lines or better ways of saying it. If they can’t remember a line if there is something wrong with it. We we’re really fortunate to have the time to say, “okay, lets have a table read first, lets cast very carefully”, and we we’re really happy with the actors we ended up with and with how visually focal the cast was, that was the best bit, you’ve written this thing and suddenly it comes alive or they will do something which is way better than what you thought.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the two different factions in the game?

In Brink, on “The Ark”, there are two different factions. There is Security which are trying to hold things together and keep the peace, and there is Resistance who are trying to escape “The Ark”. So are you going to save “The Ark”? or escape “The Ark”? Those are you two key points. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t a good versus evil situation because that’s boring, we didn’t want it to be hero cops versus evil terrorists or rebels against evil storm.

There are no good guys or bad guys in Brink, just people with different goals

We thought about making it asymmetric, so you would play the game differently depending on your faction, similar to what we did in our last game, Quake Wars. The downside to that is that effectively players have to learn different games, which got in the way of our goal to be accessible. We wanted to make the experience of playing each side distinct.

In a FPS your gun is pretty much your character, that’s the main thing you see and even each version of all the guns on both sides do the same amount of damage, like the “Rocksteady Assault Rifle”, a single firing, high caliber, high damage but low rate of fire. But all the weapons look and feel completely different, as well as sounding different, so there is an entertaining audio mix. The Security weapons are brand new, they’re well maintained, well lubricated, a good bit of equipment. The Resistance have had to beg borrow and steal their weapons, so some of them look like they have been bolted together or have bits of wire hanging out of them, they sound looser and rustier, not as well maintained.

It definitely feels different between the two teams but we had to be careful to make sure we weren’t saying one is better than the other, we don’t want to get in the way of friends playing with each other because they were at different points in the campaign. You can play the maps in any order, also there are some maps which don’t occur in each campaign.

Thanks very much for chatting to us Ed, it looks like we are out of time.

No problem!

Brink is due for release in early 2011 on Playstation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. Stay tuned to The Newb Review as we will be bringing your more coverage on this game in the near future.

- Adam Radcliffe

This is the last of our exclusive Gamescom 2010 coverage, if you’ve missed any of the Gamescom related content that’s gone up these past few weeks and months, don’t forget to catch up by searching on the site!

With Microsoft’s “Game Feast” in full swing, our very own Kieran Roycroft managed to sit down with Alex Jones, Designer at Twisted Pixel Games, and have a chat about their brand new game, and second instalment of the “Game Feast”, Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley (which is out NOW!).

So Alex, can you firstly tell our readers a little bit about the studio?

Twisted Pixel was founded in 2006 by Michael Wilford, Josh Bear and Frank Wilson. We moved to Austin a couple of years ago to work on Splosion Man after finishing our first game The Maw. Twisted Pixel has been slowly but steadily growing over the years, adding a handful of people between each project. Currently we have been hiring a second team and have a little over 20 full time employees.

You mentioned Splosion Man, which I think it’s safe to say was a HUGE success, and a game which, I personally am a massive fan of. What was it like following on from Splosion Man and working on future projects like Comic Jumper? Were there certain pressures? Certain challenges stemming from the success Splosion Man had?

Splosion Man was a big challenge because it was created in such a short time. We had more time to work on Comic Jumper but it was a big step up from Splosion Man. There was so much more art and content that had to be made because of the various comic styles as well as all of the new stuff like cut scenes, dialog and special comic effects that took a lot of time to get right. So even if we had more time, we were doing a lot more and trying many things for the first time.

Your new game Comic Jumper looks incredibly ambitious, far more so than previous projects, was that something that the studio was committed to? Did it feel time to perhaps, work on a game that was bigger than anything the studio has worked on before?

Like you said, we really wanted to make something ambitious with higher production values, better art and more content than our previous games. Splosion Man had very simple environments because we did not have the time or artists to make them as cool as we wanted. For Comic Jumper we hired more artists to help make this possible as well as contracting many others like professional writers and voice actors. Everyone was pushed to the limit to create something big and crazy and memorable.

Comic Jumper sees the studio pushed to new heights

Actually whilst on the topic of Comic Jumper, for those who haven’t heard about it, can you tell us a little bit about it?

In Comic Jumper you play a big stupid idiot named Captain Smiley. He has these big muscles and and walks around all the time thinking he is so cool, just like my boss Josh Bear. Captain Smiley’s comic is so unpopular he has to start making appearances in other comics to pay the bills. He jumps between these comics with his sidekick Star, platforming, gunning down minions and fighting bosses. Between issues he returns to his base to upgrade his abilities, talk to his fellow heroes and villains and go through all of the cool things he has collected.

Comic Jumper is the first time the studio has drafted in voice talent to provide the voices on one of it’s projects. Who voices the main protagonists and who actually wrote the dialogue? In my oppinion the interplay between Captain Smiley and his sidekick Star creates some hilarious, memorable moments.

Chris Sabat voices Star and Captain Smiley. Other characters are voiced by other voice actors that work with Chris’s studio, Okratron 5000. Matt Entin and Ed Kuehnel wrote the dialog.

Obviously the clues in the title, but the game is VERY comic book inspired. Were there any particular comic books (or series) or even other games that inspired the making of Comic Jumper? I mean straight off the bat, the game to me seems to have a big Comix Zone vibe to it.

A wide range of comics from all over inspired Comic Jumper so I wouldn’t say any particular series was dominant. Comix Zone was an awesome game but we went in quite a different direction with Jumper.

By combining a multitude of influences, Twisted Pixel have managed to create a truly unique game, that stands on it's own merits

The game includes many different visual styles, how will these different graphical styles have an impact on the gameplay, if any?

The type of level layouts, hazards, enemies and bosses you encounter vary a great deal depending on the comic genre. Things start out innocent enough in the beginning but start to get increasingly bizarre and awesome as you travel to different comics. There are a few huge WTF moments spread throughout the game that I am really looking forward to peoples’ reactions on. You know that lolwut image with the pear that has the mouth? Weird crap like that.

Now I am a self confessed fan of Twisted Pixel, I LOVE the characters you guys create so the burning question I personally want to ask is, we saw The Maw make a cameo in Splosion Man, do The Maw and Splosion Man make any extra special appearances in Comic Jumper?

Keep your eyes open and you will see some strange things, some of which you may not be able to un-see. You’re welcome.

Comic Jumper follows in the footsteps of Splosion Man in that it’s a download only title and it is part of Microsoft’s Game Feast promotion, just has Splosion Man was part of Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade 2009. What is it like working with Microsoft? Especially as somewhat of an indie developer. I mean they gave Splosion Man and The Maw a lot of promotion, was that hugely beneficial?

Microsoft has been a huge supporter of Twisted Pixel, allowing us to make whatever crazy games we dream up, so we are thankful to them and love working with them.

Twisted Pixel and Microsoft have somewhat of a loving relationship after they supported the studios previous efforts so heavily. However it's good to know that the studio are free to pursue ANY crazy ideas they may have

Actually concerning the point about Comic Jumper continuing the studio’s tradition of downloadable games. Are there any potential plans to perhaps develop full retail games in the future?

It’s always a possibility.

On the topic of future plans too, Twisted Pixel for me is a developer that really cares for the people who play their games because you guys love to pack in extra features. The Maw had a whole host of DLC come out after release, and it’s been unveiled that Comic Jumper will come with new gamerpics, themes, avatar items and 2 brand new playable levels for Splosion Man, are there any plans for perhaps some extra post release content for Comic Jumper? After all as I stated previously, the game feels a much bigger project than previous games and the whole idea of different graphical styles for different parts of the story really lends itself well to the possibility of post launch content, or is that something which you cannot discuss?

The game definitely lends itself to the idea of DLC very well.  You could easily do a whole new comic genre, perhaps even a crossover with a comic that people recognize.  There’s a lot of potential to do something cool with it, and the game technically supports DLC in case that’s something we decide to do.  But for now, we’ve been focused on making the biggest and best game we could, so we don’t have any DLC in the works today.

And finally, if you had to persuade me to buy Comic Jumper in a single sentence, how would you do so?

Buy Comic Jumper or your family will get a taste of what I like to call “Dr. Winklemeyer.”

Thankfully "Dr Winklemeyer" is one of Captain Smiley arch nemeses (pictured on the right)........ and not a penis

Thanks for taking the time out to answer these questions Alex and I look forward to getting my hands on Comic Jumper when it comes out.

Thank you!

Comic Jumper is available NOW on the Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 MSP, Review here

However if you would also like to check out some of the studio’s earlier titles, Splosion Man is on the Xbox Live Arcade for 800 MSP (check out our review here) AND The Maw is also on the Xbox Live Arcade, ALSO priced at 800 MSP!

- Kieran Roycroft

Here at The Newb Review we don’t just give you exclusive interviews that you won’t find at any other site, we follow up on those interviews to bring you what we like to call “exclusive follow up interviews”. We got the chance to sit down again with Steve Papoutsis, Executive Producer for Dead Space 2, to talk about the recently announced multiplayer mode for Visceral’s upcoming title.

How many modes are there in multiplayer?

So Dead Space 2’s multiplayer is one mode but we have five unique objective based maps.

What customisable options will be available in multiplayer?

Dead Space 2 will definitely have upgradeable elements in the multiplayer mode. The humans will be able to upgrade their weapons and the Necromorphs will have a few different upgrades, one of which will kind of change the speed of their attack and there are some other cosmetic ones that we haven’t yet talked about.

Will there be any integrated levelling up ranking system and will Dead Space 2 have an experience level system?

Yes it will. Dead Space 2 will have a system that will hopefully encourage players to keep playing and wanting to rank up and level up and we’re also going to have leaderboards.

What weapons will feature in the multiplayer? Will they be the same as single player?

There are a variety of weapons that players will have in multiplayer coming from the single player game. So there are about six that will be either the same from the single player or slightly modified. One of the ones I like a lot is the exploding javelin, so in multiplayer when the javelin hits an enemy it has an explosion, which is different to what we’re doing in single player.

Weapons from the singleplayer, customizable options and ranking systems lays the ground for a fully formed multiplayer experience

This is the first time people can play as the Necromorphs, how will this be realised?

When you start a match you will be able to create a play group and play with your friends or you can just randomly queue up and the match will encourage you to play both sides. So you’ll play the humans for a round then you’ll play the Necromorphs for a round. The Necromorphs currently slated for the game are the Pack, the Lurker, the Puker and the Spitter. So all of them have their own unique abilities. The Pack are the little guys that run around really quick and has a very cool paired attack move, the Lurker can crawl on walls, the Puker can puke on people and damage them that way and then the Spitter has another long range attack as well as up close melee attacks. So they’ll all be pretty unique and different.

I’m looking forward to playing as the little guys.

The Pack? Yeah man, you can really slice people up.

We cannot wait to play as The Pack in multiplayer!

Why do you think Dead Space 2 need multiplayer? How does multiplayer make Dead Space 2 a better game?

When we started working on Dead Space 2 one of the highest requested features was multiplayer. A lot of people nowadays really look to multiplayer as a way to experience a game with friends. For us on the Dead Space 2 team, we thought as long as we could do a multiplayer mode that was unique, original and fit in with the Dead Space universe, it would be something we would be interested in. So in the beginning when we decided we wanted to do multiplayer we wanted to make sure it had both cooperative and competitive elements.

As a unique differentiator for our game, being about to play as the Necromorphs is something you can’t do on other games. We’ve got unique enemies, we thought let’s give people the chance to play them? Also the idea of strategically dismembering your friends was new for a multiplayer experience, so those were two of the things we really zeroed in on.

But I think as far as, you know, the first thing I talked about which is having the cooperative and competitive is really interesting and fun and if you go back to gaming when you were younger, or when I was younger certainly, we played board games. You sat in a room with your friends and played board games and there was that level of interaction that was fun and memorable. Then when computer games came on the scene; Pong and Atari and all those things, same thing – you’d sit down next to your friend and play the game and have a chat while you were playing. It was good natured fun.

I think nowadays with multiplayer it’s an opportunity for people who live far distances away from each other or if their schedules don’t meet up to still have those experiences where you get to hang out with your friend essentially online. The most fun part of these online games is the fact that when you finish playing for the night you have like a story or a memory from that experience that you can continue to relate to your friends or tell your other friends at work or at school or whatever about the next day.

I think that level of being able to tell stories is just a basic recurring theme throughout our society right? Like back in the old, old, old days when people told stories they got together and told stories and relate those experiences and that was how things progressed from there. I think multiplayer is just an extension of that. Being able to call you up and jump in a game and have fun with you and you can be over here in the UK; it’s a pretty awesome experience. Being able to let people experience Dead Space together was something we really were excited about with number 2.

The game's multiplayer sets out to create a more social aspect, creating epic moments to share with your friends

Have you thought about having any special events, like being able to play multiplayer with the devs?

I’ll certainly be playing for sure. Yeah, look for ‘leveluptime’ and that’ll be me. We’ll probably do something fun like that. Stay tuned for that. Certainly that’ll be fun but I want to make sure I don’t just get worked by everybody. [laughs] See how that goes.

What does Dead Space 2 multiplayer offer that no other multiplayer game offers?

The thing that’s really unique about Dead Space 2 multiplayer is the fact that you can strategically dismember your friends. Being able to pull off some of prepared attacks and have some of the horrific deaths that you see in a Dead Space game is pretty unique.

Mad at your friends? Why not dismember them virtually over the internet?!

What influences have you taken for Dead Space 2 from other media?

There are tonnes of great games out there that we all look at and play. You name it, there’s been so many good ones. Left 4 Dead is one that a lot of us have enjoyed. Battlefield is another one that is really fun. Uncharted 2’s multiplayer was pretty interesting and relevant for us since it is a third person game. There’s a tonne of great games out there that the guys are looking at all of them; seeing what works and what doesn’t work to make a really fun multiplayer mode.

Has the team ever thought about adding co-op to the game?

Yep. Even when we were working on Dead Space 1, at one point we had engineering turn on co-op so we had two Isaacs running around. It’s something we definitely were interested in but it didn’t make sense for Dead Space 1 and it didn’t really make sense in Dead Space 2. I think if we were going to do a cooperative mode like that in the single player game we would clearly want to make it one of our core concepts for the game. If we get the opportunity to make more Dead Space games it’s something that may come up. I think we’d evaluate that against player feedback.

With multiplayer there was a lot of concern over like “woah, what’s it gonna be? Is it gonna take away from single player etc.” Some people really think cooperative and a horror game doesn’t work because it takes away from the isolation and the tension. Other people would really like to see it in a Dead Space game. First and foremost it needs to make sense from our storytelling perspective. From there it could happen but right now we’re focused on making Dead Space 2 as good as it can be. Hopefully we’ll get an opportunity to make more Dead Space games.

Co-op is something Visceral have thought about, and is still thinking about. Perhaps an addition in future Dead Space games?

Other titles with multiplayer modes have tackled the game between two studios. Why haven’t Visceral done this with Dead Space 2?

We’re working with a variety of different people on multiplayer. We have our core team that are dedicated to multiplayer but those people are spread across multiple locations within Visceral. We have a lot of talented people on site with us and from some of our other studios that we’re able to work with. With this one we wanted to make sure we were in tight communication with everybody because we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose sight of what makes Dead Space Dead Space. There’s no easier way to do that than having one of those people sitting next to you at work and be able to look at what they’re doing and share things back and forth across single player and multiplayer. It didn’t make a lot of sense to go that route. With Dead Space 2 we’ve been fortunate as I said to have a lot of talented people that are right there on site to work with us on it. With the extensions that we have, you know, help in other locations it’s just worked out great for us.

Thank you so much for talking to us again Steve.

Dead Space 2 will be hitting stores at the end of January and will be available on PC, Playstation 3 and XBox 360.

Here at The Newb Review, we have been bringing you exclusive coverage of EA’s showcase of games.  This time Mr Tom Wallis manages to sit down and have a chat with Michael Arsers, Software Engineer on Dark Spore, to talk about EA’s brand new addition to the Spore franchise.

Can you tell us about Dark Spore and, for those of our readers who haven’t played it, Spore too?

Dark Spore is a Sci-fi Action RPG that’s online, so it focuses heavily on 4 player co-op and PvP, it’s really about playing with other people and your friends. The big thing we wanted to bring to the Action RPG genre really links back to Spore. Spore was really a game about creativity, it used a lot of great technology to let you create any creature you wanted, and that was a really great experience for our creators and for the community who were making some really cool stuff for the game. So, what we really wanted to do is take that creative technology and bring it into a more hardcore genre like an Action RPG. So we brought over our creature editor and put it in an Action RPG setting, so when you get loot in the game, instead of just putting it in a slot, you can take that loot into our creature editor and essentially put it where ever you want, allowing more the creation of diverse creatures and deeper customization in a “hardcore” setting.

So is this game something of a departure from the first one, or is it more of the same Spore we know?

The new game is a complete departure from Spore and when you play the game it’s very apparent it’s an action RPG now, and it’s really all about special abilities, faster combat and collecting loot to create a more hardcore gameplay experience, very different to the first game which was more casual, more slow paced and a lot more about exploration and creativity.

Dark Spore sees the franchise more into a more action orientated genre

How does the gameplay in Dark Spore measure up to the gameplay of the first Spore game?

Pretty different on all fronts, the game is very easy to get into but difficult to master. It’s very point and click, it’s in a third person perspective and you’re running around, shooting fireballs, finding loot, punching things, which serves as the core gameplay, but on top of that we have some new and neat things for the genre. As well as managing all the individual creatures, you’re bringing down squads of new creatures to the planet, and the time they spend on the planet gives each creature a unique set of abilities to bring to the table. So if you’re in a situation where you’ve been badly injured and need to heal, you can drop in a healing character who will focus on healing you and your party. There is a lot of variety coming from the fact we have so many different creatures.

The original Spore was known for its simple yet power creation tools, how do they feature in Dark Spore, and what role do they play?

Simple yet powerful is very much present in our creature editor, really at it’s core. We pulled over the entire creature editor into Dark Spore and then began modifying it. If you’ve played Spore and you play Dark Spore, it’s just like riding a bike, you’re familiar with it.

Obviously the creature creator allows players to create their own creatures but can you give us an idea on where the design and your artistic inspiration for the actual game came from?

Early on we wanted to make a Sci-fi game, and we wanted to take a big departure from not only Spore, but also all other action RPG’s too. So we put in a lot of hard work defining the look for Dark Spore; we wanted it to feel not as cartoony, but also give a very unique feel and give each character lots of personality, and that is where a lot of our focus has been, making the characters “pop” and stand out. But on the other side, you are going through these BIG alien worlds, and we have a bunch of different alien worlds which have a diverse visual look. The world we are showing here at Gamescom is Cryos, a big ice planet and on the show floor we have Nexus, which is a planet torn apart by a black hole, so its loads of pieces of rock connected via high tech bridges and teleporters. There are a wide variety of different looks and feels across different worlds.

Dark Spore looks set to shed the cartoon stylings of it's predecessor

Talking about the variety of levels, do you know exactly how many different levels there will be?

There are many, that’s all I’ll say right now.

Back onto the topic of artistic inspiration, did you find that you’ve taken a lot of inspiration from creatures made by the modding community for the previous game?

It’s actually been an interesting experience because a lot of the art on Spore was trying to set it up so that we enabled other people to make more really cool stuff, and I think it has kind of been a breath of fresh air for our artists because we’re letting them go crazy. We wanted to use their abilities and their creativity to make really cool looking stuff, as almost like the basis for the game, we then threw that out to the players to encourage them to make creatures, gobble up all the loot, and really make their guys look the way they want them to by using the loot they collect in the game.

Now, we’ve spoken a lot about Spore and how Dark Spore differs from it, but can any of the content from the original Spore be transferred over in anyway to the new game?

Not directly, but what we are trying to do, we have a very active creative community in Spore, and in order to engage them we have put out some contests. We started them before the game development even started so we are calling them template challenges, we had the base creature we wanted as an NPC in the game and then we sent that out to the community and said “do whatever you want”, make some cool things of this base, and we had a ton of entries from these contests, we then looked through the best of the best, validated which ones would work with our animation and developed a process where you can import them into the game, and even now we have player created content showing up in Dark Spore.

Whilst created content from the previous Spore cannot be transferred, Dark Spore already has a creative community supporting the game before it's release

You mentioned at the start of the interview that Dark Spore will feature PvP, will the PvP Arena have a ranking system?

I am not allowed to talk about the PvP yet, but I do think it would be kind of lame to have PVP without ranking.

Are their any plans for a release on consoles?

P.C only.

Is Dark Spore still set release in February 2011?

Correct. They keep reminding us of that! (laughter)

Are you going to be supporting Dark Spore with any post release DLC?

Nothing specific is planned yet, we are just focusing on the core game right now.

Well Michael, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Spore is slated for release in February 2011, keep checking the site at newbreview.com for more exclusive news, reviews and interviews.

Our very own Tom Wallis got the chance to sit down with Greg Goodrich, Executive Producer on Medal of Honor, for a few words on his take of the controversy surrounding the upcoming Medal of Honour title and grill him on the reboot of the popular franchise…

OK so, tell us a bit about what we’ve just been shown.

Yeah so, in the last 6 to 8 months, we’ve been talking about the Tier 1 Operator, the surgical precision instrument of the U.S arsenal: their sort of “scalpel”, and we’ve have also talked about the Sledgehammer, the US Army Ranger side of our story in this new Medal of Honor. At Gamescom we’re showing a whole other side; the Apache Attack Helicopter Squadron, that you’re able to play and assume the role of an Apache Gunner named Hawk, in the front seat of an attack helicopter, supporting the guys on the ground, and working with them to eliminate threats in the Sheikh Valley of Afghanistan. They also represent the Sledgehammer side of our narrative, and it’s been great, people love it, we have had hands on behind closed doors.

You mentioned earlier the importance of being authentic, can you talk a bit about how you’ve managed to stay authentic?

Absolutely. As you know, we’ve talked a lot about our consultants and the guys we’ve been working with, we’ve been working closely with the U.S Military, as well as the Tier 1 Operators, but we have also spent time with the actual gun fighter Apache squadron down in California. They let us come out and record their the audio of their aircraft while they hovered on the tarmac, we took photos and really spent a lot of time with the pilots, getting into their mind and what they think about, and the types of training they go through, and the dialogue in the mission that we showed here at Gamescom was actually written by the pilots. So when we strive for authenticity, everything you see, hear and experience in that level is as real as we could possibly make it because we walk so closely with those pilots.

Working hand in hand with actual Apache pilots helps give the game a more authentic feel

On the topic of authenticity, it’s been mentioned that Medal of Honor is a work of “Historical Fiction”, can you elaborate on that?

Well, all of our characters and storylines are inspired by real people and actual events, but it is a fictional story in the sense that the narrative is told though the lens of fictional characters, but they’re in a historical event, much like a film like Saving Private Ryan, but we tell it authentically. It’s always about telling the soldier’s story; honouring the soldier and really talking about the brotherhood and the camaraderie that the soldiers experience in these sorts of conflicts. That’s what we’re focusing on and the war is a backdrop to that, but it is historical fiction.

You mentioned Saving Private Ryan, have you taken a lot of influence from films and other media to draw into the game?

Actually our biggest influence comes from the guys, the consultants and the operators that we have met and listening to their stories. Looking at their photographs, and the footage they have filmed and the constant feedback process with them has been very strong. But we do take things from the films that we love or TV series like Band of Brothers, Black Hawk Down, the look and feel, the type of mood and tone you want to set for a game, you pull from all sorts of experiences and part of that is film.

The game feels quite cinematic, will there ever be a chance of a Medal of Honor movie?

Gee I don’t know, I’m not a movie maker but if someone wanted to make the movie, I think it would make a good movie; again, because it’s a character story. There’s great moments of high action and intense combat, but there’s also moments of humour, and the human side of things: the guys, what they do and how they keep each other in check, and the banter that goes back and forth. It’s a good story, that tells of the journey that these guys go through.

You talk a lot about the game being character driven, in the promo pictures for Medal of Honor have featured a character called Dusty, and a lot of people have been asking; are you Dusty?

Hahaha, no I’m clearly not, I’m not that manly, no. Dusty is Dusty, and he is great. We actually started growing these beards because we were going to Afghanistan to visit the troops in the spring, but unfortunately for one reason or another the trip got canceled. But we were having fun growing them so we kept them, then the Marketing Director, Craig Owens, came up with the idea of having a beard-a-thon. So now we are being paid and sponsored to grow our beards every week. We go out and people give us money every week to not shave our beards, and then on October 12th in North America when the game ships, if we still have our beards, all that money which we have raised will be matched by EA and given to the Navy Seal Warrior Fund (sealfund.org). It’s a very great charitable organization that gives back to the families of U.S Navy Seals who have been injured in combat. It’s a lot of fun and my wife keeps saying “When are you going to shave you beard and get rid of that thing?” and I keep saying you know, “honey it’s for charity, I’m doing it for a good cause”.

It's official, Gregg Goodrich is not the man on all of the Medal of Honor promotional materials!

Of all the characters in the game, do you have a favourite?

Oh goodness, yes I do. Probably Dusty because he is so closely based on one of our operators, he’s a great character, he’s got a great southern accent. Voodoo is another one of my favourites just because he is the pitbull of the group. He’s always chomping on the bit, pulling on the leash, wanting to go and he’s got a good sense of humor. But he gets “his” from the other guys as well. There is a wonderful moment late in the game where “Mother”, the team leader of AFO Neptune, gives Voodoo his final ribbing because he’s been dishing it out the whole time and it’s really funny. Actually the first time I experienced it in game I couldn’t help but laugh out load, it was really REALLY cool.

Has there been a lot of backlash due to the current use of the warzones?

Recently there has been a bit of talk about that, but I think for the most part, once people see what we’re doing and understand what we’re doing, and understand what Medal of Honor is about, they will see it’s about the guys, the soldiers; who they are, and what they are going through right now. Then I think people will step back and say “oh this is not a game about war or politics, this is not a game about anything other than the guys on the ground and what they’re going through”. The war is a backdrop and I think once people understand that, they get it. But the first initial reaction people have is “why are you doing this? There’s too much insensitivity”, but for example Saving Private Ryan was not a story about World War 2, it was a story about that group of characters and their mission to save that individual and everything else is a backdrop. So our story is similar in that respect. I don’t want to give too much away but initially when you begin the game there is a certain goal, a certain objective and a certain reason why they are there. But then something happens, an event happens that changes everything, everyone who’s involved in the storyline gets wrapped up in a common goal and it becomes the soul focus of everybody on the ground and it’s very different from why they originally went there. But like I said, it’s just about honouring those guys, supporting that community of individuals and then bringing them home.

Another game that caught a lot of attention for it’s use of realistic themes is Modern Warfare 2. Now there’s obviously a lot of comparisons being draw between Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, how do you try to disassociate from them?

Well if people want to compare us to Call of Duty, thank you, they are very good games and our competitors are very VERY good at what they do, and I am a fan of that series, I play that series, so obviously comparisons can be made but we are different in that we focus on authenticity and plausibility; telling the soldier’s story in an authentic way, and that means that the game’s tone is a little bit different and that’s what we offer, something different.

Danger Close want to stand alone in the FPS genre by providing a more authentic shooter experience

Getting back to what we’ve seen today, you showed off the Apache Gun mission, how prominent are vehicles going to be in the game?

In single player we have shown the Apache, we have also shown the ATV in trailers but we’ve not shown the whole mission yet, but we’ve shown some of the gameplay in trailers we’ve put out. The Apache is a rail shooter, but on the ATV you do actually get to drive, but for the most part vehicles in our game are just a way to get to objectives, whether you’re riding on them or driving. After all this is a FPS first and foremost, the majority of our game is you and your gun, and your squadmates doing their thing. we are focusing on the core shooter gameplay.

Apache won't be the only vehicle featured in the game...

Are you allowed to talk about how many hours of gameplay there will be in the game?

There’s been a lot of talk about that recently, I think Craig must of said something about it, I hate being quoted on hours of gameplay because no matter what you say, somebody else could end up finishing the game quicker, or take longer. I’ve seen 8-10 hours being posted but i don’t like to quote on hours because you’re never right. But the great thing about having 2 teams, one focused entirely on single player and the other on multiplayer is you have the opportunity to build a fully fleshed out single player experience because you don’t have to worry about the multiplayer and vice-versa, but what we strive for is that every minute in the game is a good minute and not really worry about some arbitrary clock, but it’s a good length game and it feels right. It feels like I have taken a journey and experienced a great game.

How many classes and weapons will be in the final version of the game?

Oh goodness, well we haven’t announced that yet but we have shown two modes in multiplayer. We’ve shown Combat Mission which is the team/objective based multiplayer as well as the Assault map in the Cobble City ruins, which is more of a straight up deathmatch. We are also showing a new map at Gamescom in the mountain region of Afghanistan, it’s a deathmatch map and people are having a lot of fun, but there’s much more to come, including more modes, more maps but we haven’t announced those yet.

What motivated the decision to split up into two teams and use two different development teams to work on singleplayer and multiplayer?

The decision was made so that we could ensure the Medal of Honor fan got the best of both worlds, you have two teams focusing on what they do best and what they are passionate about we felt we could deliver a better game, it wasn’t the most economical way to do it, but it shows that EA is committed to the product and they care about the product.

The folks that brought you Battlefield Bad Company 2 are working on the multiplayer side of the game

Are you using two different engines?

Yes.

Did you have any problems with that in terms of compatibility?

Well singleplayer is on the Unreal engine and multiplayer is on the Frostbite engine, but we made the decision early on to accept and embrace the differences and not worry about making them look or sound the same, we didn’t want to fool the game into thinking we were trying to pawn them off as the same game when they are clearly not, we just concentrated on making a great game. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter, two great taste that go together.

On the topic of multiplayer, you recently ran a open beta for the games multiplayer, How well did the beta test go and what was the feedback like?

The feedback was really good, in the beta we went through some rough patches especially with the launch on the Xbox, it came out a bit later than the others, but that’s the wonderful thing about betas, broken things are found quite frequently and that’s good, that’s what you want, we want the things that go wrong to be exposed so we can improve upon the product and ship a well polished, finely oiled machine when it’s time to ship the actual game. But like I said, we got a lot of really great feedback and I think here at Gamescom people can really see the improvements which are largely based on the feedback we got back from the beta.

When game finally comes out, the PS3 is getting an exclusive edition of the game, are there any plans for the Xbox 360 or P.C?

There will be a limited addition of the game available or all 3 platforms, it includes an exclusive invite to the Battlefield 3 beta, but as far as our big exclusive edition for the PS3 that comes with Medal of Honor: Frontline, that’s only for the PS3, and that was a game that was launched on the Playstation platform, prior to that the first Medal of Honor was on the Playstation, so we’ve taken that product and we have improved the resolution of the graphics it and done lots of pretty cool things with it for the Playstation community. But we’re doing some other things, some other limited editions and depending on where you pre-order or who you pre-order from, there’s going to be some other things coming down the line as well, but those are the ones we’ve talked about so far.

No Tier 1 editions for 360 or P.C i'm afraid

Will the final game come with a “VIP club” style bonus, like we’ve seen in Battlefield Bad Company 2?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what they have planned, there’s so many different editions right now. That would be a question for our Marketing Director, Craig but truthfully I don’t know.

And finally are there any plans to expand the new Medal of Honor franchise beyond this game? Will there be sequels to this etc?

I hope so, if EA allows us to and if the gamers love the game then we’ll certainly keep making them so long as they keep wanting them. It’s been a really cool experience to be able to re-boot the franchise and take it out of World War 2 into modern times and we will see how it goes. Hopefully people will respond well and if they do; then we will keep making em as long as they keep wanting them.

Mr Greg Goodrich, thank you for your time..

Thank you

Stay glued to newbreview.com for more great exclusive coverage of the top titles in the coming weeks.

What is the size of the play area?
Matt: Put simply it’s around 4 x Bigger than Burnout Paradise, for cars to be able to usefully reach 260 miles an hour. So well over 100 miles of tarmac road & 30-40% more off-road & shortcut areas, we’ve opened a lot of that space up for race & chase as you are playing online versus human cops, at night time you can just turn your lights off and hide behind a bush, something that isn’t really achievable with AI, when you include elevation changes its a chunk of room so for anyone familiar with Burnout it’s about 4 times larger.

How does  the new “autolog” work & will it allow friends to drop in and out of games?
Matt: It’s kind of more important than just drop in and outs, that’s pretty straight forward, we all know it’s hard enough to get a few people down the pub togetherlet alone get online at the same time, so autolog’s main purpose is to facilitate “a-synchronous play”, so I can play against you even if I we’re not online at the same time because both our performances are being sent to the server, crossing in the post, if you like, it’s really important because direct online play can be a really scary place.

The online world is a scary place, you heard it here first!

I’m a seasoned online gamer and it’s not always a welcoming or pleasant place in many games, we know we can do that, so you get to play online 8 player races, but it’s the other part we think is more important because friends can compete against each other even when they’re not online at the same time, and what facilitates that is that the system is always listening for things that are going on the network and when it gets new info it’s doing hundreds of thousands of comparisons, and then sending you personalised info back, so if I beat your time it will tell you “Matt just beat your time on this event” and “your now 3 seconds behind”, “he used this car”,etc,  and if I’ve caused a change to what we call a “Speed Wall”, a friends leader board, by going up the ranking in that event, pushing friends down, it will send them all personalised recommendations based on my performance and similarly when they play it will effect everyone else in their network, so it really is joining up this comparison play and doing it so players don’t have to think about it.

Computers are really good at automatically comparing numbers so it’s very smart system and it’s all there to encourage social competition amongst friends. So for example my ranking on a particular FPS is something like 11,807,000 which is totally meaningless, but knowing I’m second in a speed war and knowing I’ve got you two seconds ahead of me, there’s nothing stronger, nothing better than beating a mate, so rather than a meaningless number, knowing how close your friends are to you and how many times they’ve done something, or how far you are from them is really, really powerful.

How many heat levels are there and what does the highest heat level have to offer?
Matt: Ok, that’s from a bit earlier in development, we’re not really calling that “heat” anymore, we might use it to describe how difficult an event is, but in  terms of the gameplay progression there’s a number of different ranks on both the Cop & Racer sides, I can play as a Cop or Racer, it’s not an either or choice, and I earn bounty for everything I do, whether I play online or offline it’s the same progression system, bounty fills my bounty bar, as it were, and drives my ranking and as I rank up I unlock more cars & capabilities, we’re not really talking about specific numbers of ranks, but as we get closer to launch we’ll start unveiling what some of them might be so people can start getting used to it.

Higher Bounties = more attention

How many players can join for multiplayer racing?
Matt: 8, so we can have 8 player races or if you’re in cop vs. racer type events you can have 4 v 4, 7 v 1, 1 v 7, or any other variation of that number, we found that anything more than 8 is perhaps too chaotic, but 8 is a really good number, it’s great for close racing, and we always have really cool close races but for the other events that involve cars vs. cars it can all get a bit too chaotic, so 8 is a great number for us.

When we saw the lighting in the car and the weather systems our jaws were on the floor! We thought it was just amazing, how much work has gone into creating that system and is it going to define the new standard for racing games from now on?
Matt: That’s always our aim, part of our trade is to be perfectionists, and some people see that as quite insular, but we really strive to be the absolute best that we can be, Burnout Paradise was good, and we learnt a lot from it, especially after launch when we started adding things to it, but this time we’re dealing with real cars, we learnt a lot from Burnout Paradise, actually that world was not particularly well designed for fast driving, it was quite impressive technically, but this is a brand new graphical engine for us, and we had to do that for particular reasons, firstly we wanted incredible looking exotic cars, so we had to spend an enormous amount of processing power to make those cars look good, it’s an image base lighting system, so the cars had an environment map which allowed them to look like they’re reflecting the world around them, but our cars are actually being lit by the environment as well, so in the desert when you see the blue sky coming across a black car it just looks amazing or if the dirt or sand reflects against a white car it just looks perfect.

The cars look stylish yet authentic

So the cars had to look right, but for the environment itself we wanted to evoke the sort of visual cues that you see when manufactures shoot these cars, when they’re in a beautiful place, whether it’s a mountain or a salt flat, or wherever, let’s take all the kinds of places that they film car commercials at and create the greatest road network you’ve ever seen in your life built for cars that do between 150 & 260 mph, and compress it all into this space to give a ton of variety and make it look amazing, so it’s a brand new engine for that Secondly we wanted to do wet weather and night time because there’s nothing like police lights strobing off a cliff face at night and those are the things we wanted so it had to be brand new. Luckily we’ve got a bunch of very smart guys. Also, our art director is Henry LaBounta, the academy award nominated art director for ILM, for Minority Report, he’s lit the world and he’s also a total perfectionist, and then we’ve got the guys at DICE, so, we created the world, the road ribbons, how the network works together and then the guys at DICE created these incredible environments to map round that based on Henry’s direction.

In terms of research, did you get to test any exotic cars out?
Matt: Well we’ve got a Lamborghini coming down next week after I badgered & badgered & badgered them to bring a car down! Alex was out for a while he took a Gallardo out in Vegas. Burnout’s know as being very pick up and play, anyone should be able to have fun with the car and that’s in Criterions DNA, but in this game we’ve got real cars for the first time so it was great fun to get to play with those, what a lot of people don’t realise is that you need a really, really good physical simulation engine to put arcade handling on top of, so we got to plug in all these values we got from manufacturers, and we have a great physics simulation going on, we have over 40 values just for each tyre, there’s actually a really fun story about the setup of the handling; For the McLaren SLR 722, which is supposed to do 227 miles per hour, when we put the numbers into the simulation it was always coming out at 204, and we were checking the numbers, double checking the numbers, but couldn’t figure out what was going on, so we were looking for bugs in the system, which is obviously very complicated, and then we realised that the diameter of the wheels was 2mm out, so we increased that by 2mm and then 227mph! The reason that’s important, is that we want people to have fun, to be able to slide a car at 155mph round a corner, with a big smile on their face, because that’s how you think you should be able to drive a car, whereas in reality, if I took a Murcielago out, I’d probably stall it and then dink into something and then it would overheat, you know what I mean, so to enable that fantasy you have to do all the complicated stuff to make something simple and then weave your magic on top of it which is the fun part of dealing with real cars.

In terms of the Cops vs. Racers, do you have a particular side you go for?
Matt: It flips and changes, there’s certain people you don’t expect but they’re stone straight for the cops, it’s the same as asking are you dark side or light side of the force? Are you going to be the cop of the racer? Some people get a kick out of being a cop, must be the authoritarian side coming out! Essentially they’re two side of the same coin, a pursuit is just like a moving race, its just that the person in front is choosing the end point. As a cop you can call in road blocks, spikes, helicopters, blast them with EMPs, but as a racer you can use the spike strips against the cops too, so this very simple premise of race & chase, because of its simplicity, is very compelling, I think people will just decide; “Hey I’m in a cop kind of mood, it’s a Thursday, it’s cop Thursday”.

You may not be able to answer this question, as its multiplayer, but have you considered a co-op mode where cops can use tactics to stop the racers?
Matt: Well, you can do that, players can choose to co-ordinate, it’s something we’d encourage, so currently the game knows that if we’re both cops and you hit a racer, but I then make an arrest, that you were involved, so you’ll get an assist.

Ok, so what you’re favourite car?

Matt: Well in the game, it changes, the Zonda F a $2million car, or the Lamborghini Reventon, of which there were only 20 made, it’s designed after the stealth bomber, it even looks like a cross between a stealth bomber and a UFO, another one we’re showing here is the Pagani Zonda Cinque, there’s only 5 of those in the world, and they were made because 5 millionaires badgered Horatio Zonda to make the Zonda R, the race only version, into a road legal car, and so that’s also $2million!

Great, thank you, it’s been great talking to you!
Matt: And you! Keep a look out for more info soon and enjoy the game!

In a few short months the sequel to the critically acclaimed and award winning Dead Space will be upon us. For those unaware of Visceral Games’ extremely atmospheric survival horror title; firstly, you should definitely check it out and secondly, you can read our review of the fabulous Wii game in the franchise; Dead Space Extraction.

The teaser trailers and recent EA conference at GamesCom in Cologne has certainly left many with questions about Dead Space 2. Lucky then that our very own roving reporter, Tom Wallis, managed to sit down with the Executive Producer on Dead Space 2, the enigmatic Steve Papoutsis.

Steve, can you tell us in what ways Dead Space 2 is different from the previous game?

Sure, so Dead Space 2 takes place three years after the original Dead Space. The premise is Isaac fights to destroy a government plot to resurrect the Marker. This story is focused around Isaac and his experience, and that’s kinda the set up for the game. In terms of what has changed between Dead Space 1 and Dead Space 2 there has been a lot of enhancements. One thing I want to be clear about is that we got the chance to make Dead Space 2 because a lot of people enjoyed and were vocal about Dead Space 1, so we want to make sure that we aren’t doing anything that takes away from what those people enjoyed about the first game.

With that in mind we had to make sure that Dead Space 2 was actually better than the last game; we had to do a variety of things to enhance the game. Those things start with the controller and move their way out, right? The most important thing about a game, as a game developer, is what’s going on with the player when they’re interacting and playing the game. So we wanted to make sure that the controls were very natural and were responsive.

When people, whether they are new players or returning players, pick up the controller it felt really good in their hands, they were able to jump in, kick ass, and start basting off Necromorph limbs. To that end we’ve sped up Isaac in general, from his locomotion speed, we’ve enhanced his melee attacks, the stomp, we’ve made Kinesis more responsive, so you can use it more often in combat; in the previous games, one of the personal complaints I had was that if I wanted to use Kinesis in the middle of a fight it was very clunky and hard to line up a shot. So we really made that much more responsive, so you can quickly pick something up and fire it back at an enemy just like the last game but we’ve added some other touches to that such as impalement.

In the previous game, sure you could grab an object or a Necromorph limb and shoot it at bad guy, it would knock them back. In this game if you actually grab a discarded Necromorph limb or a pointy object in the environment you’ll actually impale them to a surface, defeating them. So that is very different. We’ve done some experimentation around Stasis and the way that’s going to work. Those are just a few things right off the bat with the general controls.

Zero gravity sections have been completely reworked.

The next evolution has been our zero gravity sequences where we’ve given Isaac free 360 degree range of motion. In the previous game you had point to point jumping, so you’d pick a place to go, you’d jump, you weren’t able to shoot, you weren’t able to do anything until you landed. In dead Space 2 you’re actually able to move in 360 degree range of motion freedom and also have combat during those set ups.

Also we’ve really focused on the pacing of the game, so it is really important to a horror game that you have good pacing. The previous game, very tense, people were on the edge of their seat the whole time, but it was kind of a slow burner, it was like that the whole way through. I think that at points people felt it got kind of predictable ‘OK something is going to jump out at me… Boo!’. With Dead Space 2 we’re really trying to mix it up a bit, so there’s moments where you are extremely tense, and then there’s moments of epic release like we showed in that halo jump sequence, where Isaac is doing something epic, and very different, very out of the blue to what he is doing the majority of the time. The idea behind that is to vary the pacing, mix it up, so that players have, as I said, really tense moments and these moments of ‘What the fuck? This is cool! What am I doing?’ and then you’re right back in to the scary stuff, right back in to the tension building to the next big release point. So that’s kind of, in a nutshell, that’s a bunch of different things that we’ve done with Dead Space 2.

What are you guys demoing today? Can people get their hands on the game?

In terms of what they can get their hands on… we have our E3 demo and we’re also showing what we showed at the press conference at the press conference yesterday, and a little bit more. That’s not hands on, but the E3 demo is playable.

If someone is new to the franchise, is it easy to get in to the game and pick up and play without playing the first game?

In terms of story? For sure. We’re really sensitive to that as well. We’re hoping to attract a lot of new players. When the game comes out and the story kicks off from the get go I think it is going to make sense to players, or at least give an idea of what has been happening. From that point forward I think it is going to make sense to people.

One of the big reveals you had was the reveal of Isaac’s face. How do you think that went down?

I think, in terms of showing his face, some people didn’t realise that we showed it in the first game; like at the very beginning you could see his face, you just had to move the camera. So that was there, and I don’t want to spoil, but there is another point in the game where you can see his face. But when we showed Isaac in Dead Space 2, with the helmet coming off and all that, I think people got excited and liked that; it’s a cool animation. Again, just trying to let people connect more with Isaac. I think one of the more interesting things we’ve done, and one of the things we hear a vocal reaction to, is his voice. In the previous game he didn’t talk at all, he was a mute, and that made sense because a lot of the time he was by himself, so what do you expect, he’s going to walk around speaking to himself? That’d be nonsense.

Isaac's face will be shown on more than one occasion this time.

In Dead Space 2 there are going to be other characters that he is going to meet across the game, and it only makes sense to give him a voice so that he can voice his opinion, have conversations with other people, and actually relate some of the things that are going on in his head at times, because this story revolves around him,

Are you not worried by the fact that this increased communication may take away from the atmosphere? Because in the first game Isaac was mostly alone, so if you’ve got people speaking to you does that not affect the atmosphere?

I think people could assume that, but that’d be a bad assumption. First of all Isaac is not going to be walking down a corridor talking to himself, again that’d be nonsense, right? I don’t particularly go walking around talking to myself, I dunno about you. Now if he is in a situation, just like we are, it would be silly if he didn’t respond to people talking to him. I think the fear is, in a lot of other video games people tend to go over the top with the chatter, where they’re just commenting about ‘oh that pretzel looks awesome!’. That’s just ridiculous, who cares? It has nothing to do with the game or the story, it is just filler. We are not going to do that, that is not in Dead Space 2.

"Oh, that Pretzel is Awesome!"

What is in Dead Space 2 is a story that is something we’ve worked really hard to create and that we want to deliver, and it wouldn’t make sense if Isaac didn’t speak. People are going to have to play the game to see what I am talking about, but if anyone is concerned Isaac is not going to be walking down corridors, snapping off corny one liners, you know ‘oh I just blasted that Necromorph!’. That is not happening in the game, so if you guys can get the word out there, please do, because that that’s not what we’re doing here.

Who have you got to voice Isaac?

The actor’s name is Gunner Wright, he’s never been in a game before.

With plans for a new novel/manga/comic book tie in are there any plans to bring the game to the big screen?

That would be super cool; we have an animated feature coming out as well – our second one – but as far as a full feature film, we don’t have anything locked in for that.

Do you have any plans to release a demo to the public on Playstation Network, or Xbox Live?

We don’t have any plans for a demo, but we do have another game that acts as a kind of prologue to Dead Space 2 called Dead Space Ignition, which is coming out on Xbox 360 and PS3, that is a fun little thing that we are doing that’s actually a combination between an animated comic that has branching paths, so you’re actually able to pick different options as you go through the story. So imagine a motion comic where you can actually determine the outcome of what’s going on and then interspersed throughout those decision points are actual mini games that you’ll be playing- you’ll be hacking and doing some of those things – and that game dovetails nicely in to Dead Space 2.

Does the downloadable game bridge the gap between the first game and the second game, or is it a completely separate entity?

Dead Space Ignition is more of a prologue to Dead Space 2.

Isaac takes a page from Dante's book by shooting horrible babies.

Will there be a Dante unlockable skin in the game, as there was an unlockable Isaac skin in Dante’s Inferno?

Yeah, well I can’t really say, sorry. That’s a good question though.

How about the multiplayer?

We are going to have multiplayer and we’ll be talking about that really soon in more detail. Today all I can say is that you will be able to strategically dismember your friends.

How does the new weapon system improve upon the original?

So one thing that we’ve done, again trying to enhance everything about the game, we’ve gone back and put a lot of effort in to asking people what they thought of the original weapons. It’s kind of different in Dead Space, we had a ton of weapons and many people just used the plasma cutter. Each weapon had an alternate fire, so if you think about it we had about 16 weapons if we count those alternate fires, which is an immense number of weapons. People picked their favourite weapons, they used that weapon, they focused on that, and did some rig upgrades.

What we’re trying to do with the second game is give players more motivation to use an experiment with the other weapons, and that is going to come across in the upgrade trees that we have in the game. We’re still going to have the work bench, so you’ll be able to go in there and modify your weapons and enhance things like rate of fire, damage, etcetera. But we’re also playing around with the idea of letting players re-spec their weapons, so if they invest a lot of effort in to one weapon and they decide ‘you know, I don’t like that’ they’ll be able to modify that.

We’re doing a lot of things there, and another piece we’re looking at the weapons that people didn’t use a lot – and I’ve been asking a lot of questions about this on my twitter feed about this stuff – and getting feedback on which weapons you didn’t like, and then we’ve gone back and enhanced those. So, for instance, people thought the flame thrower looked really cool, but they felt like it wasn’t useful in the game. So we’ve gone back and made some modifications to that as well as a variety of the other weapons.

Is there a release date for Dead Space 2 yet?

Yeah, in Europe it is January 28^th 2011, and in North America it is the 25^th.

Are there any new exciting enemies that you can talk about?

Well, we definitely have a bunch of new enemies. So far we’ve talked about the Puker, an enemy that actually pukes on you. It has projectile vomit attack, you can actually use that against enemies so if you’re clever you can get other enemies to stand in the way so that it’ll damage them. He also has a snare ability which will, if successful in hitting Isaac, will actually slow Isaac down, which will modify the pace of combat. So when you see him you’re going to want to take him down quickly because if he slows you down the other enemies could get to you. We haven’t really talked about that, so that’s some new news.

The Necromorphs are as grotesque as ever.

We’ve also shown off the Stalker, and we’ve shown the Pack, and the Nest which we showed off in the Gamescom demo, that bulbous sack with the lady that comes out, the Crawlers, and the Cysts. Those are just a few that we’ve talked about so far.

When you’re coming up with new enemies who is it that comes up with them? Are they a bit missed up?

(laughter) Well that’s one of the cool things about the Dead Space team is that there’s just an immense number of very talented and creative people. We’re really focused on collaborating with one and other, it isn’t just one person that comes up with these things. We’ll have meetings and talk about ideas, and then our production designer Ben will actually then work with the art director to create the look of the enemies. It comes from a different directions; sometimes it is motivated by what the designers want from a gameplay perspective like the idea of Puker and the snare, that was originally motivated by the design need. Other times it comes from the artistic perspective, and the designers work around that constraint, and come up with interesting dismembering points and things around the enemy. There’s a lot of different people that work and contribute on that. As far as them being twisted, well yes, everybody on the team is pretty twisted.

Have you made an effort to make the game more gory, more visually visceral, than the original?

We’re definitely trying to enhance the visuals of the game, for sure. But one of the things that makes horror work, in my opinion, it isn’t just about buckets of blood and gore – that is interesting and gets a reaction – but what is really important about horror is it being relatable. When you look at the Necromorphs, I think what works with them is that they’re humanoid, they’re twisted, the fact that the slashers are missing their jaws, its the traumatic things on a relatable level. So you look at it and go ‘wow that would suck to have my jaw ripped apart’, so you immediately have a connection, whether you like it or dislike it, or are disgusted, horrified by it, whatever. That’s how you’re going to get a response from people, it’s not just having tons of blood or things splattering, that stuff’s cool but you want to use it tastefully.

We don’t go in to the game thinking ‘we’re going to have more blood than ever before!’, that’s not what we’re about. The other piece of the horror component is not only within the enemies, but also the environment. With science fiction you can get kind of touchy, there’s high fantasy science fiction like a Star Wars, where there’s magical powers, lightsabers, things like that. With Dead Space we want to make it more believable, again that’s because if you’re walking around an environment that you’re familiar with, say a school or a shopping mall or something like that, there’s something in your head that goes ‘Hey OK, I know what this is’ and when something happens on that spot it’s scary. If you put a person in to Fantasy Space Land then its like ‘OK,I don’t know what to expect’ so you don’t have that connection, and you can’t scare a person as easily, or it comes off as not scary.

In terms of environments is there going to be quite a big variation in it, what with the first game taking place primarily on the ship?

Yes, the Sprawl is a big City, so there’s a lot of different locations throughout the game. Again, focusing on that idea of relatable spaces, there’s going to be a lot of different spaces to see. So far we’ve shown the Church of Unitology in our E3 demo; today in the GamesCom room we’ve shown the Solar Aray, which is a futuristic almost lighthouse set up. Those are just a couple of different locations, and the end of the GamesCom footage also shows the transport hub through the Sprawl, the place where you catch the train to go to different places.

In terms of length how long do you anticipate it will take to finish?

Oh, probably about 10 minutes. (laughs) No, Five months? No, that’s how long we have to finish the game. I don’t know; so far it is definitely as long as the last game, although it might actually be a little longer.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us Steve.

Stay tuned to The Newb Review for more exclusive interviews over the coming weeks, and a full review of Dead Space 2 before release.

- Tom Wallis

Following their recent launch of We Sing Encore, we sat down with Nordic Games’ Managing Director, Pelle Lundborg, and Sales & Marketing Director, Nik Blower, to find out more about them and what they have in store for us.

Thanks for agreeing to talk to us, why don’t we start with a bit of a back history of Nordic Games?
Pelle: Well, we’re a very young company, having only started out in 2008. We’re based in Karlstad, Sweden and our goal is to create great games at great prices. We’re probably best known for our Wii Karaoke franchise “We Sing”. We’ve been delighted with it’s huge success, particularly in PAL territories, and so we’ve been busy working on We Sing Encore, along side our other family of games, Dance Party, and other products which will be coming out soon, ever since!

As you said, We Sing was a huge success, why do you think it did so much better than it’s rivals in the space?
Nik: Well I guess it comes down to a couple of factors. The main ones being the pioneering ability to use & track 4 separate microphones simultaneously, the quality of the song selection we’ve got and the accuracy & speed of performance tracking. It’s also just a fun game that’s easy to use, and so a lot of people recommended it to their friends and that really built momentum quickly!

We Sing Encore

So, with it’s predecessor being such a success, how did you bring the game forward for the new “Encore” version?
Pelle: A key change we’ve made is using “localised” content, so every version of We Sing Encore, worldwide, has 30 tracks in common: the big international hits we all know and love; but in each region we’ve also added 10 tracks specific to that region. So in Australia for instance, the game features additional songs by Rolf Harris, like “Waltzing Matilda”, a real party favourite there. Also, for the German release, which is a very big market for us, we’ve bought in some specific German acts to give local audiences an opportunity to join in with songs in their own language, & inspired by their own national style.
Nik: We’ve also been involved with the community a lot: getting feedback on which tracks people wanted, what was popular at the moment, and deciding which “classics” we were going to put on there, as well as using this feedback to tweak and refine the user experience as much as possible.

Talking about feedback from the community, can you guys expand on the topic of downloadable content, a frequent community request?
Nik: Yes, that does come up a lot. As concerns downloadable songs for We Sing & We Sing Encore we are definitely pursuing this as we speak. Although the Wii offers many amazing usability features, DLC isn’t a huge strength of the Wii platform. Specifically, storage has always been an issue. Nintendo have obviously moved to improve this & we believe they are going to continue to do so, but in the meantime the amount of storage the average user has on their Wii does not really engender DLC at the moment. But we’re on it, and we’ll keep everyone posted!

So, other than DLC, were there any other particular technical challenges you faced this time round?
Pelle: Yes, we did have a few issues we wanted to address, particularly around console performance and video size / compression. When you have a title that is constantly playing video and sound whilst also having to analyse the performance of 4 different singers on the fly, you start to really push the hardware. But we’ve got some very clever people working with us, including Nintendo, so we’ve ended up with a game that makes it all look so easy!
Nik: Another hurdle we had to overcome was video & audio codec issues, I won’t bore you too much with detail, but suffice to say that we’ve made big improvements, which is partially why we can get 40 tracks onto a Wii disc instead of 30!
Pelle: Nik makes a good point, we had initially been working with Bink, but as great a codec as that is, we couldn’t quite get what we needed from it for this project, so we switched to Mobiclip on Nintendo’s recommendation, and that’s really worked for us.

Seems likes you’ve been busy! You mentioned working with Nintendo, how has this been for you guys?
Pelle: Amazing! We couldn’t have asked for anymore from Nintendo, they really facilitated the whole process, were very positive about it all and bought a lot of very useful expertise to the table.

We Sing Robbie Williams

Good news. So now that We Sing Encore is out there, what next for Nordic Games?
Nik: Well we have a Robbie Williams exclusive We Sing coming out in October this year, with 25 of the greatest hits from his solo career on there. Robbie is so popular globally that we are confident it’s going to appeal to lots of people out there. Pretty exciting project, he’s a huge star and he’s behind it all the way.
Pelle: Yes, that was quite a scoop we secured there, thanks to EMI! When you add that to the 3 driving games we are delivering to the Wii, and all the Dance Party work we’re doing, we really are quite busy!

As you’ve clearly got a lot going on at the moment, can you let slip any accidental scoops?
Pelle: I can’t tell you anything specific right now, but let’s just say that we are exploring other avenues when it comes to music games, who knows what we might bring out next?
Nik: Yeah, keep ‘um peeled music fans!

Thanks guys, and all the best with We Sing Encore, Robbie, Dance Party and your trio of driving games!
Nik: Thank you, we hope you enjoy the games, and give us plenty of feedback!
Pelle: Yes, if you enjoy them as much as we do you’ll have a blast!

Developed by Bioware, the makers of Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the game takes place in a dark fantasy world of witchcraft and sorcery. Due for release in March 2011, this is a hotly anticipated multiformat title.

Tom managed to catch up with Mike at Gamescom to get the low down on this hotly anticipated sequel. Below, we present a transcription of their conversation.

Can you tell us a little bit about where we pick up with Dragon Age II and how it leads on from Dragon Age Origins?

Sure. Dragon Age II is a new entry point into the series if people haven’t played Dragon Age Origins. But it also works well for people who have, simply because of where it starts. We begin our story in the outskirts of Lothering, the city that was destroyed in the course of Dragon Age Origins, during the game. Then from there we progress forward and cover an entire decade of history, following the exploits of one character, named Hawke.

Could you tell us a bit about the art style? It seems quite different to Dragon Age Origins.

I think so. It hasn’t drastically changed but it has more compositional elements to it. One of the big problems we saw in [Dragon Age] Origins is that it felt like the environments were fighting with the story. You would see people that were under siege by the un-dead, and they should be running for their lives but apparently had taken the time out to bake a stack of blueberry pies. That seemed a little odd. It was a much more cluttered environment and certainly very lived in and I think it worked well for Ferelden but for the Freemarches, which is where the game [Dragon Age II] takes place, we wanted to go with a darker more astir visual style. The end result is that we have environments that act as a real framing device for the characters. Dragon Age II, if nothing else, is a much more personal story than the story we were telling where you gathering an army and the story of the warden. So, with a more personal story it would seem like environments that give us really good framing, really astir places to shoot the characters against just adds to mood and style.

How has the combat changed in Dragon Age II?

Combat’s taken a pretty significant overhaul. We’ve kind of had this mantra, we jokingly use, which is; I still want to be able to think like a general but want to be able to fight like a Spartan. So that has two sides to it. Being able to issue orders, control a team of 4 and execute strategies was a huge part of Origins and we didn’t want to lose that. However the thing that I saw in Origins is if you tried to execute some strategies, they would fail simply because of the responsiveness. You would shield bash a guy and by the time he got back up you could get off another half a swing. That was not the intent of the shield bash. Similarly, if you tried to intercept someone that was moving in, you couldn’t actually cut them off, you would follow and awkwardly try and swing your sword. So we said; what if we could make it very simple. You press a button and something immediate and awesome happens? So the combat team ran with that and said we’ll start adding some closing moves and add that when you fire a critical shot the bullet is released immediately. We don’t have
that lingering sense of delay. And the end result is that we have combat that is much more up to the moment. Even if you are playing very tactically, you pause the game and issue orders, when you un-pause everybody goes “WHAM” and gets right in there, so you know with confidence they are going to act the way you need them to.

WHAM!

In the demo you showed that you’re now telling a framed narrative; the story is being told by someone else. How does that affect the narrative?

It lets us do two things. You have two characters; Casandra and Varric, who are kind of digging into the history of your character. It means that we can jump to the most important moments in this characters life. Not that we’re yanking you every time into “and now he fights the mumbears!” It’s much more like; here’s the context around it and here’s the major event that caused this kind of political shift. And again, over the decade there’s been a number of these shifts, and Hawke always seems to get involved. So these characters will dig in, try to uncover the rationale, what’s happening and the story that they’re telling as a result then changes based on the actions you take.

What enemies are in the game? Are there going to be more varied and different enemies?

We’re in a new part of the world, so you’ll definitely see some new faces and also see some old faces; Dan will be back, Dark Spawn for sure. They are a major part of the world. The big thing for me is not so much the enemy types but the enemy behaviours, and this has been a big focus for us; to try to make the enemies fight smarter, so they aren’t just swarming you. Instead we’ve got these architects that will be Assassin, a Commander etc and they have different behaviours that require you to deal with them in different ways.

You brushed briefly on the locations. Are there going to be quite a few different locations and is it going to be different to Dragon Age Origins?

Yes. Origins was set in the country of Ferelden, which is south of where we are now. We’re moving up north into Free Marches. It’s more of a rough and tumble city/state coalition rather than one kingdom united. As a result, it’s a bit more of a frontier feel, a little bit less settled, less explored so there’s a lot of wild out there. As well, the city of Kopola was formerly a slaver compound so it’s full of this grim imagery. It’s freed itself since, but it’s not the nicest of places. They used to call it the city of chains.

Combat is suitably bloody

Dragon Age Origins had a lot of DLC. What kind of DLC support are you going to give Dragon Age II?

I think you’ll be looking at something similar. We really enjoyed making the DLC, it really feels like it adds to the texture of the game. We saw very good downloads, good attach rates so people were obviously digging what we were adding. But now there are some lessons to be learned. I think there’s better ways to deliver it, there’s probably some better ways to integrate it and we’re still exploring that. But I think you’ll see a significant chunk being added into DA:2.

One thing we haven’t talked about is the new choices and emotion wheel that you put into the game. Can you explain what that is and what it allows you to do?

Sure. We’ve given the player a voice, which is the key to adding in the wheel. So it’s similar to the Mass Effect system where you have paraphrases that you pick and your character speaks in turn. One thing we wanted to be very clear is that the player needs to know what the intent belying is, as well as generally what they are saying. So adding icons in the middle means that you know that you are going to be; paying a guy or flirting or being diplomatic or sarcastic etc. And at a glance, you can tell by the colour of the line as well as the overall result that might occur. If you are going to attack someone, most people want to know that up front so that’s what the icon gives us. At a glance you can see that you are about to stab somebody and so on.

So the 3 options that we saw at the moment were; peaceful, aggressive and jokey. What kind of other options are there going to be?

Some of them are attached on flirting, pain, attacking, investigating, learning more and one other one you would have noticed would be the option to let the follower take control. Each of the followers has a certain something they bring to the table, be it political or skills. If they happen to be there when you run into a situation, you can let them come in and take the baton and run for a little while. The end result is almost always positive.

This beast did not respond well to the 'flirting' response.

How long is it going to be, compared to Dragon Age Origins?

We’re still adding content, working through the final cut. We’re estimating it’s somewhere about the time people spent with Mass Effect 2. It’s hard to say for sure because there are a lot of side quests to explore so it will vary a lot by player. You could charge through the game, you’d be missing out but if you wish, that’s a way you can do it.

Lastly, and this is more for me; are you going to do a Warden’s Quest 2?

I’m not sure. It’s certainly on the realm of possibility. I’m still not sure I was making sense by hour 23 but that’s fine. It’s a maybe at this point so we’ll have to see how things shape up. It’s possible and I think it would be really cool.

Thank you very much for your time and enjoy the rest of your week in Cologne!

Stay tuned to The Newb Review for more coverage on the games we saw at Gamescom over the coming weeks.

-Tom Wallis

In our second edition of Speaking With… we begin to develop something of a pattern by continuing to interview the people behind of some of the best looking downloadable titles of the year. Last time we spoke with Jamie Cheng about fabulous looking cartoony brawler Shank, while this time we speak with Rob Hewson, Senior Creative Designer at Dark Energy Digital.

Dark Energy Digital’s latest title, Hydrophobia, is an ambitious title that pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a downloadable title. Hydrophpobia is the first in a series of games that more resemble a full retail released game than your typical downloadable title. Featuring unparalleled water physics, thanks to their own HydroEngine, and a thought provoking storyline revolving around global overpopulation, Hydrophobia won several awards at E3 2010, including best downloadable title from Gametrailers.com.

The story revolves around two opposing real world ideologies, Malthusian and Cornucopian. The Malthusians believe that there is only a set number of people that can possibly live on the planet before we exhaust our resources and damn everyone else; in the game the Malthusians spread their propaganda with the message ‘Save the World, Kill Yourself’. Conversely the Cornucopians believe that science and technological advancement can help get the most out of our resources and sustain any growth in population that we experience. Got it?

Now we hand over to Rob to hear more about this great looking game.

First of all can you tell us a little about Dark Energy Digital and your role in the company?

Dark Energy believes as a company that digital distribution is the future, and is committed to pushing back the boundaries of download gaming. We’re a technology driven company and want to explore new types of gameplay by introducing revolutionary tech like HydroEngine.

My role as Senior Creative Designer involves working with the wider design team on the gameplay mechanics and levels, and specifically working with the narrative team to develop the script and collectables, direct motion capture sessions and push the big picture vision of the project. I also spend a lot of time with the press and consumers promoting the game.

As a developer working in Britain how do you feel about the new Government dropping the proposed tax breaks for the UK Games Industry?

Fortunately I don’t have the burden of the financial side on my shoulders personally, but I do think it’s a shame that Britain is losing so many studios. However there’s no point in complaining about it, you have to adapt and be creative and push on regardless; there’s no better way to prove the value of the industry to the UK Government than by being successful.

On to a slightly more cheerful subject, what games have you been playing recently, and which developers do you admire?

Up until about a week ago we’ve been in serious crunch mode for Hydrophobia, and I’ve been travelling a lot to promote the game. So at the moment I’m into bite sized gaming that I can dip in and out of. I’ve completed Braid and Portal for the second time, I’m doing the Portal: Still Alive challenge maps, a bit of Peggle here and there and working through Super Mario Galaxy 2. Oh and I’ve just recently downloaded Limbo which I’ve almost completed.

Developers I admire… Valve certainly, Nintendo of course, and I’m very enthusiastic about the newer starts-ups and indies like Media Molecule en all. I think development in general is the healthiest it has been in years, if not financially then certainly in creativity terms.

As the title suggests, water plays a big part in Hydrophobia

Your latest title Hydrophobia will soon be available to download on Xbox Live Arcade. Can you provide us with a bit of background on the setting of the game?

We wanted we what call a ‘tangible future’ – a story setting based on the trends and forecasts for near future politics, science and technology. We also wanted to sidestep a lot of clichés and create something original and compelling.

The game is set in the mid 21st century when (according to UN projections) over 9 billion people will inhabit the earth and not enough resources will be available to sustain them. The result is conflict erupting over the most precious resource of all – water, and the existing ideologies of Malthusianism versus Cornucopianism are pushed to the fore.

It takes place onboard the Queen of the World; which is the largest ship ever built and the last refuge of the wealthy elite of the old capitalist world. Onboard the Five Founding Fathers, who are of the Cornucopian persuasion, pursue science and technology as a means to solving the ‘global population flood’. On the eve of the 10th Anniversary celebrations, one of the five – a nanotechnology company called NanoCell, is about to announce a breakthrough in their research into purifying seawater at the molecular level to make the desserts bloom.

At this moment Neo Malthusian terrorists attack and our reluctant heroine is caught on the flooding lower decks of the ship with only one goal – survival.

And in terms of gameplay, how would you describe it?

It’s a full on 3rd person action adventure – something which has never been done on XBLA before, and revolves around the key element of HydroEngine; the worlds first true fluid dynamics engine for games, which models flowing water as a physics simulation which behaves completely realistically.

This results in gameplay unlike anything you have played before where you can manipulate the water itself in what we call ‘flow combat’. It’s entirely dynamic, never the same twice and results in huge amount of emergent gameplay. You can use the environment to take down enemies with floating oil fires, electricity, drowning and even underwater combat if you elect to flood an area entirely.

It has been widely reported that Hydrophobia originally started life as a mutliplatform boxed retail product, what led to the decision to make it a downloadable title, and why is it currently an Xbox exclusive?

Our goal from the outset was to develop a AAA action game with a modest budget and small team. We built our own engine and editor InfiniteWorlds following a unique procedural approach, which allowed us to implement the Immediate-Edit-Play feature and Simultaneous Multi-user Editing. This was crucial for the experimentation and iterative design required to work with real water for the first time – we had lots of ideas but we had to figure out what worked in practice.

This unique approach gave us another benefit – the procedural technology resulted in a vastly reduced file size, and XBLA as a platform had evolved to the point where we realised we could deliver this as an XBLA title and redefine the boundaries for download games. Microsoft were incredibly excited about the prospect and the rest, as they say, is history.

How long has Hydrophobia been in development and in what other ways has it changed along the way?

On and off, it must be almost 5 years. I know this because I still have the original design document from September 2005. It’s changed massively – we had to let it evolve organically because in truth nobody knew what the implication of HydroEngine would be. We had to experiment and tweak and adjust – cut back on things which didn’t work and enhance the things which did. Simultaneously we kept on developing the narrative to create this deep, rich universe which is closely coupled to the gameplay and mechanics.

One good example is the characters reactions to the water. At first we implemented it completely realistically, so the character would respond to every wave and it was a struggle wade through the environments. However we discovered that this was actually very frustrating; all of the players attention was consumed simply by moving around. There was a big debate, and it was actually quite controversial in the team but we decided to tone it down for the sake of the fun factor – which always has to be priority. You can still feel all the forces acting on the character correctly, but it has been considerably dampened to allow the game to be, well, a game.

Hydrophobia is unlike any other downloadable game we've ever seen

How many episodes do you currently plan on releasing?

We don’t like the term episode – it’s doesn’t quite capture the scope of what we are doing. Hydrophobia should be thought of as a trilogy, with plenty of scope to expand deeper into the universe beyond that.

Will each instalment be a complete stand alone experience or is downloading every instalment a necessity?

Every instalment is a complete stand alone game, but you wouldn’t watch The Empire Strikes Back on its own – you need the other instalments to enjoy it to the fullest. You can certainly purchase and enjoy each individually, but there’s a wider context and bigger story arc across the whole trilogy.

What were some of the major influences on the development of Hydrophobia?

Protagonist wise we wanted to avoid the usual gaming cliché of a ‘beautiful but deadly’ female lead and have a flawed, reluctant hero who has to grow and evolve. If Ripley and John McClane had a daughter who suffered a childhood tragedy and had an engineering degree, then she’d be a lot like Kate Wilson.

In terms of games, we were probably most influenced by the atmosphere of Dead Space, the narrative elements of Half Life 2 and Bio Shock, the action of Uncharted 2… but Hydrophobia is really it’s own game. Nothing else plays like it and nothing else feels like it. We worked very hard to create a completely original experience in every sense.

Female lead characters  aren’t all that common in games, barring a few obvious examples such as Lara Croft or Faith from Mirror’s Edge, in what ways does Kate differentiate herself from the standard heroine?

Again it’s this idea of having a flawed, reluctant hero – not a kick ass sex Goddess back flipping her way through wave after wave of enemies. At the start of the game she’s just out to survive and she’s no match for the Malthusians – there’s a real sense of vulnerability about her. However she begins to realise that to survive she has to fight back and to an extent fight her own demons. The Malthusians have blocked every exit; the only routes left open are those they are using for their own objectives – which are obviously heavily guarded. So there’s inevitability about the way Kate is drawn into the fight, the politics and the responsibility of becoming the hero.

The water never behaves in the same way twice

Does the game feature a mutliplayer component? If not what have you done to increase replayability in the game?

We wanted to focus purely on a single player experience but you’re right – it has to be massively replayable. Firstly this comes naturally from HydroEngine because you never get the same battle twice – flowing water means the gameplay space is in constant flux at the whim of Sir Isaac Newton.

There’s also about 200 collectables to find, including nearly 50 medals, plus items, documents, emails and even real quotes from Malthus. There are also characters which you may have failed to save the first time, and saving them unlocks more collectables and medals, and there are areas which you might have tackled in a stealthy manor before which you can go back and flood to see how they play in underwater combat.

On top of all that we give you a challenge room when you complete the game with an entirely new, awe-inspiring mechanic – the ability to directly manipulate the water itself to launch enemies and objects, combining elements to get the most creative kills for a higher score on the leaderboards. Oh, and there are also leaderboards throughout the main campaign too.

It seems every other game these days takes place in a nuclear wasteland, after a natural disaster, or during some sort of zombie outbreak. Why do you think so many games these days are set in dystopian futures? Do you game developers know something the rest of us don’t?

Conflict = drama and destruction = gameplay (most of the time) so those kind of settings lend themselves to a game naturally. However clichés are tiresome, which is one of the reasons we went for this tangible future. We’re not imagining a dystopia; we’re dealing with the real, palpable one which is just around the corner.

If I wasn’t already convinced to buy Hydrophobia how would you persuade me to buy it in one sentence?

Hydrophobia is the beginning of a mammoth new IP, the debut of the world’s first true fluid dynamics engine which results in spectacular gameplay unlike anything you have played before, and is the most ambitious download title to date.

And finally, come clean; which side are you one – Malthusian or Cornucopian?

The reality is that both points of view are credible. Yes we should be optimistic and believe that we can solve the world’s problems through innovation and technology, but we also need to accept the fact population growth needs to be controlled. As with most things in life the rational stance resides somewhere within the blurry intersection of the two opposing viewpoints.

Before signing off do you have any sites/facebook groups/twitter feeds that you want to share with our readers?

Yes indeed! @DarkEnergyD on Twitter and Dark Energy Digital on Facebook. We always try to respond to everybody and believe that the most valuable feedback comes from the gamers themselves, so please get in touch.

Rob, thank you for your time.

Hydrophobia will be available to download on Xbox Live Arcade towards the end of September. Stay tuned to The Newb Review for our review of the game around launch time.

-Luke Mears

In this inaugural edition of Speaking With…, Luke Mears contacted Klei Entertainment to talk about their soon to be released game, Shank. Shank is a downloadable game that will be available on both Xbox Live and Playstation Network at the end of August. It features a fantastically unique visual style, over the top blood and violence, two player co-op, and a script by Marianne Krawczyk, the writer of the first God of War.

Jamie Cheng, Co-founder of Klei Entertainment, kindly took the time out of his day to respond to our queries and we present the text from our interview below.

What led to the formation of Klei Entertainment?
We had been working on a hobby project, Eets, for several years, and it finally seemed to be getting to the point where we could show fellow developers and friends. The feedback was great. Overall, people really enjoyed our work which worked out perfectly because at the time I was at a cross-road for where I wanted to take my career next — I had been working as an AI programmer at Relic Entertainment for a few years by then.

So, with nothing really to lose except the few bucks I saved during my tenure, I started Klei in a rented basement with a couple friends. That was five years ago.

How many people work with you in Klei Entertainment?
We’ve grown to about 15 full-time developers in the studio – and they’re the reason I enjoy going to work every day.

Some of our readers may not be aware of this, but you operate out of Vancouver, British Columbia. How vital to your company’s survival are the Canadian Government’s tax breaks for game developers?
There are a lot of factors involved when keeping an indie studio going. Even things like the USD/CAD exchange rate can make a huge difference, since our biggest market is in the US.

In terms of tax breaks, they’ve been immensely helpful, especially in our earlier years. Telefilm was instrumental in getting Eets out the door, and they again helped during the development of N+. Does that mean we’d have gone out of business if we weren’t in Canada? I don’t know, but I do know that we’ve been both very lucky and very resourceful.

Shank has a wonderful visual style

One attraction to working in a small development company is that you have control to make the kind of games that you want. Have you found this to be the case or have you had to make some compromises?
We’ve retained the most important thing to us, and that’s being able to choose projects that we really believe in as well as keep the creative control. It’s actually been quite a hard road to follow, and there have been a few close calls, but everyday we’re glad that we’ve been adamant on that. Why else would you start your own studio if you can’t work on the projects you love?

With the release of Shank you are teaming up with Electronic Arts as an EA Partner, can you explain to our readers what this means, and why it is that you decided to sign up with Electronic Arts?
EA Partners is a division of EA that works specifically with third party developers to publish and help them distribute their titles. We chose to work with them because they trusted our vision for the game, and allowed us to make the decisions we needed without compromise. They’ve also been hugely helpful in distribution — I don’t believe we’d be on both the PSN and XBLA without them, and that’s ultimately a better deal for the players.

Another game you have in development is Sugar Rush. Can you tell us a little about the game, and when we can expect it to be coming out?
That title was dropped by our then-publisher back in early 2009, and although we own the IP, we’ve pretty much been focused on Shank since then.

Shank is gloriously violent

I personally admire Bioware and Valve, for their unwavering commitment to quality – and especially Valve for their independent spirit and policy toward developers.

One of the first things that struck me when first seeing Shank for the first time was its unique visual style. What inspired the art design? I know the creative team is lead by Jeffrey Agala, who worked with Disney and is an accomplished animator, but Shank is incredibly violent, and about as far away from Disney as you can get.
Jeff always mentions Graphic Novels and Golden Age comics as his main artistic influences. When you look at it from that angle, the violence makes a lot more sense

Hiring Marianne Krawczyk, writer of God of War, to write the game’s story shows a clear dedication to the narrative, which is fairly uncommon in most downloadable titles. What does Marianne bring to the table that made you want to work with her?
Story seems to be a mostly unloved aspect of downloadable titles — we wanted Shank to push boundaries of what is possible in a $15 title, so we paid a lot of attention to the story from the beginning. Marianne and I had both lamented previously that we wanted to work on a project where we could be completely creatively free, and Shank fit the bill nicely. Once Marianne started working with us early in the project, the depth of our characters immediately jumped a few notches and suddenly the entire narrative felt more grounded.

The co-op game fills in the back story to the main game.

What made you decide to make a separate story for the co-op mode, when most people probably would have been satisfied with simply being able to play the single player mode with their friends?
We did struggle with this one for quite some time. We recently wrote an article on the Playstation Blog about this exact thing. In the end, I think having a separate campaign that focuses on the co-op play, and being to make the experience deeper because of it, was the right call.

A great feature of the game is local multiplayer, which so many developers tend to leave out in this day and age; however the game features no online multiplayer. Why is that?
It was already such a huge undertaking to create two separate campaigns for Shank, and adding online would’ve ultimately hurt the rest of our game, as we’d have to dedicate a huge amount of time to that feature instead of the overall experience of the game. We decided that it was more important to polish the experience than to add an additional feature, and I hope players understand that decision.

One of the more controversial subjects in console based gaming at the moment is Sony and Microsoft’s push towards motion controls. What do you make of Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect? Do you anticipate making any games that support these devices in the future?
From a technological point of view, these controls are pretty awesome. I was able to get a really good look at the specs for Kinect, specifically, and once you understand how it really works you can certainly think up some pretty fun uses for it. But practically speaking, I have no real opinions on how well they’ll do, and internally, we haven’t made plans to build games supporting these devices.

Now that the release of Shank is almost upon us, how long until you start working on your next project?
We’re always tinkering with projects that we’re interested in, and we’re definitely working on improving the engine that built Shank. Right now we’re also working to get the PC version of Shank out the door.

The co-op action looks suitibly challenging

Without being too specific, how many ideas do you have kicking around for your next project(s)?
We have a ton of ideas, but only limited bandwidth to make them happen. We’ve got maybe 2 or 3 ideas floating around that sound really fun, and a few of us are working on prototyping some mechanics.

Looking to the future, do you see yourselves making the jump from creating downloadable titles to boxed retail games?
Honestly, I’m not sure. We’ve tried very hard to be platform agnostic, and instead focus on the game first. If it turns out that it warrants a retail scale, then it might happen, but in the meantime I’ve been really enjoying the freedom that the smaller scale has afforded us.

And finally, if you had to persuade me to buy Shank in a single sentence, how would you do so?
Shank: the only game that let’s you stuff a grenade down your enemy’s mouth.

Sold! Jamie, thank you for your time.

If you enjoyed this interview, have questions, or want more info about the game then please check out the official site at www.shankgame.com as well as the official facebook page.

Shank will be available to download on Playstation Network on the 24th August, Xbox LIVE on the 25th August,  and on PC later this year.

Stay tuned to The Newb Review for our review of the full game later this month, and future Speaking With… articles.

- Luke Mears

Mode 7 Games are a small indie developer based in Oxfordshire, and are currently working on their latest game, Frozen Synapse. I caught up with the guys to find out what it’s like to develop games in the UK, and how their current game is shaping up.

LavalampBamboo: Your first game was Determinance, a third person sword-fighting game.  What inspired you to create this and what did you learn from making it?
IAN: I love games and I wanted to make one.  I’d always liked the idea of a freeform fighting game and then I fell in love with Tribes 2 so I added flying to the mix.  I can’t even begin to list the things I learnt making it… that’s like asking me what I learnt at University.  It’s not just the standard stuff – the specifics of coding and managing – but it’s also growing as a person. Determinance was a second undergraduate degree for me.
PAUL: I had never been involved with making a game before, or even with any kind of software development project, so I learned exactly what needs to happen to create something! As I have production role, it’s good that I now have a basic handle on what the hell is happening.
More importantly, I learned some absolutely vital lessons about game marketing – specifically that you need to actually do some!

LavalampBamboo:  As an indie developer working in the UK, how would describe your experience within the games industry?
PAUL: We’re very much on the fringes of the games industry proper in this country: if I go to Develop it’s not like I know 80% of the people there. I like the fact that as an indie, it doesn’t really matter where you’re based – everything is determined simply by the strengths of your game and your marketing.

I have to say, I think we’ve had better experiences with the gaming UK press than we have with other members of the UK industry itself.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some amazing and brilliantly nice people out there who have been very helpful to us, but there are also a lot of boring self-interested types too: that’s the nature of any media or entertainment industry.

IAN: Yeah, I spend very little time thinking about “our place in the industry”. Being an indie is about making your game and hoping lots of people like it. Industry events seem to be more about working in a large company than they do about games. I don’t work in a large company, so it all goes above my head. Or below my feet. One of those.
LavalampBamboo:  Some readers might not be aware of Frozen Synapse, so let’s imagine I’m not either. Tell me about the game.
PAUL: Frozen Synapse is a sci-fi strategy game, which is comprised of short matches that can be played very quickly. You can move your units anywhere, coordinate attacks and use cover: it focuses on raw tactics rather than unit management.

You know that bit in the movie where a SWAT team storm a building and there’s a guy outside in a truck looking at a tactical display and giving them orders? We want you to feel like that guy. Except you’re not in a truck. There are no trucks. Trucks are not in the remit.
It’s the indie game which will see us make our first real mark on gaming. It’s aesthetically very strong: we’ve been having great comments about our graphics from an early stage, and people seem to be excited about it, which is very gratifying.

IAN: Frozen Synapse is about having the most fascinating mental battle between two people you can imagine. It’s about being different every single time you play. It’s about taking as long or as little a time as you feel like playing a game for.
LavalampBamboo: You describe FS as “the ultimate strategy game”, with games being both “bite-size” and “hardcore”. How did this unique take on the genre evolve?

IAN: It started by me and a mate playing a lot of Laser Squad Nemesis on holiday in France. I loved the core concept of “Simultaneous Turn Based”, but hated how long games would take; how an early mistake could ruin the entire game; and how the games always started in the same way.  Then I played a lot of the STB mode of Chaos League, which was fast and interesting but wasn’t, in the end, all that deep. Those two games kind of created an idea for a game in me, which grew over years, and finally became Frozen Synapse.

PAUL: Again, we wanted there to be modes where you can play super-quickly. There’s a genius mode that Ian came up with called Secure, where you basically bid on defending an area of territory. Matches are over quickly but can still have really interesting twists, and as soon as you’ve played one, you want to play another.

LavalampBamboo: FS uses an interesting art style throughout. Can you talk about how this came about, and what or who influenced it?

PAUL: I did the art direction for this game, but we used some very talented freelance artists to get the look we have now. Originally, the game was going to be from a “side-top” perspective (Canner Fodder-style!), but as things developed we knew it had to be top-down. Top-down looks rubbish with anything other than very abstract graphics, so we set about trying to find an “interface-style” look which would be acceptable.

I was influenced by the film and TV graphics work of Mark Coleran, who used to do almost all of the computer interfaces you see in the background of movies. Aside from that, things like Tron and Ghost in the Shell. Actually, the Mission Impossible movies got mentioned a lot – there’s bits in all of them where you see an interface with guys moving through a building, so that was something that came up.

At the moment, I’m looking around at other games to see what they’re doing with things like lighting and explosion effects – there’s some really creative stuff out there. It’s old hat now, but I still love the way Geometry Wars looks, so don’t be surprised if you see some coloured wireframe type stuff creeping in later down the road.

LavalampBamboo: FS is a PC title, but did you ever consider any other platforms for the game, either consoles or handhelds?

PAUL: We actually started out with Frozen Synapse as a Nintendo DS title, but we realised that it definitely needed to be developed on PC first, just from a creative standpoint. It would have been an XBLA Indie Game too, but that’s now completely unviable because of the pricing structure. Once the game is ready to demo to publishers I will definitely be looking for options on all the other platforms: it would still work VERY well as a handheld game.

LavalampBamboo:  Of what I’ve heard so far, the music in the game is very fitting, and sounds great. Could you describe the creative process behind the music, as well as how you make it suit the game?

PAUL:  Thank you! I started out by playing the game and working on a palette of sounds I thought would be appropriate: we wanted a very polished sound, but I also wanted to try and avoid film soundtrack-style cliches.

My concept was “high-tech meets low-tech”, so I have things like very complex layered synthesizer patches rubbing up against really nasty, dirty samples I recorded with a Gameboy using LSDJ and a GBA running Nanoloop. I also wanted to get a bit of glitchy stuff in there, so there’s lots of lo-fi samples of me slamming doors, hitting pots and pans: all the “found sound” stereotypes! I love the idea of the musicality of data and computers – I’ve always found that very romantic – so, I always go for quite emotive melodies combined with very obviously digital sounds.

It’s really, really, really important to me that I can prove you don’t need a million dollars and a huge library of custom-recorded string articulations to create an amazing soundtrack. For those guys doing that, that’s brilliant, but I want to show that, while you need compositional and sound engineering abilities, it’s really all about the effort you’re able to put in.
In terms of making it work with the game, I’m ready to do anything that needs to happen – we’re still working on it.
LavalampBamboo:  What kind of promotion will you be doing for the game? Any upcoming events?

PAUL: We already do a weekly podcast called Visiting the Village, which is a discussion of the week’s weirder gaming news, and also looks at indie games quite a lot. That’s ongoing and is helping to bring people to our site – http://www.visitingthevillage.com . Anyone interested in us should check that out. There’s also bi-weekly blogs on our ModDB page http://www.moddb.com/games/frozen-synapse/.

We’ll be kicking off our marketing proper with a big event at Gamecity in Nottingham at the end of this month: we’ve set up an event to challenge the general public to beat us at the game, and we’ve got some immense prizes to give away. There should hopefully be videos, podcasts and blogs from that, so people who aren’t going will get a flavour of it. It’s on Friday 30th, 10am-5pm in the Market Square, if you’re in the area.

After that, we’ll be working towards our first proper trailer and I’ll be hitting up every single news site I can possibly find with that.

That should start to build a community around the game, and from there we’ll continue putting out updates as we work towards release. I’ll be instituting a big PR campaign to get previews as widely as we can, then possibly a beta (we’re still undecided about that) and onwards through the organisational nightmare that is the review phase.

Finally, we do plan to advertise the game online when it’s ready to release – we’re taking advice about that from other indies and planning out our strategy right now.  I want to get a lot of video content up there for this game – we’d really love to have a feature which allows you to export game clips to YouTube (I’m only making this public so that I can pressure Ian into actually coding it)!

As I mentioned before, we didn’t put the marketing effort in ourselves for Determinance for a variety of reasons. This game will be different: I want it to be one of the best-promoted indie games of all time

LavalampBamboo:  When will Synapse be released, and how will we be able to get our hands on it?

PAUL: I’m not going to make a commitment on this yet: we hope early-ish next year. You will definitely be able to buy it from us direct via http://www.frozensynapse.com . We’re also going to be talking to all the major online distributors if we can bend their ears! As far as retail goes, it’s something we’re looking at: if it’s viable I would love to get the game to worldwide retail, but for a small indie studio that’s all about finding reliable partners.
–
You can find out more about Frozen Synapse at www.mode7games.com, or alternatively visit http://www.moddb.com/games/frozen-synapse

You can also tune into “Visiting The Village”, Paul and Ian’s weekly show which looks at some of the quirkier game news stories, and also how the game development is coming along. Check it out at www.visitingthevillage.com .

Joefeesh: Can you briefly explain what LostWinds is about for the readers who haven‘t played the first game?

Frontier: LostWinds is a game that was designed specifically to take advantage of the Wii’s controller and offer fresh new gameplay ideas.

With the Nunchuck you control Toku, a young buy who is relatively powerless. With the Wii Remote you play Enril, a once powerful Wind Spirit who needs Toku’s help to gather back her amazing powers in order to save the magical land of Mistralis Balasar, one of Enril’s fellow Spirits who has decided he wants to rule the whole lot for himself.

It feels very natural to play as two characters – as Enril you have to power Toku’s jumps and glides through Mistralis, and bash enemies. Although the Wind Spirit has all the power, she needs the physical presence of the young boy Toku in order to be carried around and interact with the physical world. So the symbiosis works very well for them both.

Joefeesh: At Newbreview we aim to cater for every audience, assuming nothing about the readers inside gaming knowledge. How does LostWinds appeal to the expanding and more varied games market?

Frontier: At Frontier we don’t see there is any difference between a good casual game and a good ‘hardcore’ game – they are both good games, and that is what people really want – a good game. We’ve had a ton of experience with very high selling games aimed at a family audience (RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Thrillville to name two) and in our opinion the trick is to make sure the game is *accessible*, so it can be enjoyed by all.

So we hope LostWinds is regarded as a very high quality game, which has some innovative ideas and looks beautiful, has enchanting characters, a magical game world and is able to be enjoyed by a wide range of people.

Joefeesh: Are there any particular stories or mythology that inspired the world of Mistralis and it’s spirits?

Frontier: The game idea came from Steven Burgess, one of Frontier’s designers, who was watching the trees and leaves from the window on a windy day. He remembers thinking about how many ways the wind shapes and manipulates different things within the world, and if only there was some way to become the wind in game. He then applied this train of thought to the Wii controller.

Joefeesh: Enril is the spirit of the wind. In the story of LostWinds Enril says “we” tried to seal Balasar in a stone and there is artwork of other elements in the battle. Can we expect to see more spirits in Lost Winds 2?

Frontier: Yes! In Winter of the Melodias Toku and Enril meet Sonte, Spirit of Seasons. She gives them the power to change betweens Summer and Winter at will, in order to help them in their quest to save Toku’s mother, Magdi.

Joefeesh: The environments in LostWinds are beautiful. From the media released it looks like you are expanding to a snowy landscape for the second game. Will this weather change be built into the gameplay at all?

Frontier: Absolutely. We have tried with Winter of the Melodias to have just as many gameplay innovations as we had in the the first LostWinds game rather than just churn out more levels – the ability to switch between Summer and Winter is a key new feature, and it is completely integrated into the gameplay (ie you won’t be able to solve some puzzles without using it) . Whether it’s summer or winter also alters how some powers work, too – for example in Winter if you draw a vortex in the air you can form a snowball to throw at enemies, and in summer all the ice turns to pools of water in which you can swim. You can change seasons as many times as you like, to experiment with puzzle solutions.

Joefeesh: As Enril, the wind spirit, you could use your power to help Toku solve puzzles in the environment by floating, moving and throwing rocks, spreading fire etc. Will there be more powers and ways of solving puzzles in part 2?

Frontier: Definitely. One of the major new wind powers is cyclone, which can be used in a number of different ways in both Summer and Winter. You can transport Toku to otherwise inaccessible areas, battle enemies, move water around the landscape in the form of clouds, make it rain, and even drill through the rock around you!

As well as that you can freeze enemies in Winter by gusting wind at them (like wind chill!), and there are many other new things to enjoy. Plus you still have all the powers from the first game, so the game is bursting with great ways to put the power of the wind in the palm of your hand!

Joefeesh: The sound in LostWinds play a massive part in making the player (me) fall in love with the game and really empathize. Was it planned to make the sounds of the game a real focus?

Frontier: Thank you! We have a talented audio team at Frontier and we like them to push and excel just as much as the artists, animators, programmers and designers. I suspect that in common with the rest of the team they find the world of Mistralis inspires them to be creative.

Joefeesh: Wind instruments were an obvious choice but what were the inspirations for the music of LostWinds?

Frontier: In common with the rest of the art direction, we took our themes from ‘high altitude’ cultures who live with the wind as fact of their lives on a day to day basis, so Tibetan, Andean and even some Greek influences are in there.

The music is constructed using a combination of midi instruments and recordings of real musicians playing a variety of ethnic instruments.

What makes the compositional style so very different from a lot of games’ music is that Quantisation was banned completely. Quantisation is a process by which midi notes that have been played into sequencing software (usually via a midi keyboard) are ‘forced’ to play back in perfect timing. This is actually very unnatural and quite unlike how human beings actually play. Furthermore, the LostWinds music deliberately speeds up and slows down. This gives the compositional style a sense of ‘breathing’ in much the same way that orchestral pieces work.

So by putting all the above together we were able to use recordings of real world musical instrumentalists, around which we then embroidered with midi instrumentation, made sure we did not use any quantisation to keep it ‘human’ ,and allowed the tempo of the music to ebb and flow.

Joefeesh: Have you thought of releasing a LostWinds relaxation album? I would at least love some of the sounds available as a ring tone. Any chance of the music/samples being made available to download?

Frontier: You can download the theme tune from our website in MP3 format.

Joefeesh: There seems to be a large push to market this game, more than most have had on the Nintendo Wii-ware platform. I had a newsletter from Nintendo featuring LostWinds. Do you feel that LostWinds can be a showcase for how good Wii-ware can be?

Frontier: I certainly think that it matches the very best Wii disc games for quality, so it both shows how good the Wii can be and illustrates that the distribution mechanism is just that – a mechanism for getting the game onto your console – and there should be no difference between the quality of a disc or downloaded game.

Joefeesh: I used to have a LostWinds background on my laptop. I think the artwork is great. Will there be more backgrounds and artwork available from your website?

Frontier: Yes, definitely – keep checking http://lostwinds.frontier.co.uk/ !

Joefeesh: Finally, will there be a part 3 to LostWinds. I sincerely hope there will.

Frontier: After the first game, the team went to work on different projects in Frontier and it took us longer than we’d have liked to get them back together again. There is HUGE enthusiasm within Frontier for the game and certainly no shortage of ideas, so when Winter of the Melodias is safely launched, we’ll be keeping the team together and sit down to prioritize the many opportunities we have to continue telling stories from the enchanting world of Mistralis.

Joefeesh: Thanks so much for the answers and I wish you all the success with the release of LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias.

Frontier: Its been a pleasure, thanks for the opportunity to communicate with your readers – we appreciate your kind wishes, and hope people have as much fun playing Winter of the Melodias as we have had making it!

Joefeesh: Thanks again. Hope to hear from you soon.

About LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias

LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias had its European Release Set on Friday 9th October 2009 and became the 100th game released for WiiWare by Nintendo of Europe.

Developed by Frontier Developments Ltd. (‘Frontier’) David Braben, Frontier’s Chairman and Founder, said:

“We launched the original LostWinds game on WiiWare with much anticipation, as it was such an exciting and new way to access games. We are now thrilled to be able to mark the 100th game launch on WiiWare with LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias.”

The eagerly awaited follow-up to last year’s best selling, award-winning WiiWare launch title once again puts the power of the wind in the palm of your hand, as you experience Toku and Enril’s new adventure to save Toku’s mother, lift an ancient curse and thwart the evil Balasar. The elemental powers of Enril the Wind Spirit are used to protect and guide the young boy Toku – power his jumps and glides, suspend and smash new enemies, and explore all-new expanses of the stunningly presented, magical land of Mistralis.

Players can instantly transform Mistralis between Summer and Winter, harnessing the brilliance of nature: frozen Winter ponds and waterfalls become deep, teeming Summer pools and chambers in which to dive and unlock secrets, enemies can be frozen or doused, and the very air itself used to form snowballs or moisture-laden clouds. Other amazing new abilities include the cyclone, which can be used to transport Toku, smash powerful enemies and even drill through the rock of Mistralis’ diverse, richly interactive Chilling Peaks and Melodia City areas.

With production values to match the very best Wii disc titles, LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias will be available to download directly to the living rooms of millions of families in Europe exclusively via Nintendo’s WiiWare service at a price of 1000 Wii Points. See http://lostwinds.frontier.co.uk for more details including video footage, screenshots and registration for priority information on the game’s launch and exclusive content