Tag Archive: interview


Developer Chat: NBA Live 15 executive producer Sean O’Brien

Filed under: EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly), Written — Leave a comment
August 9, 2014

EA Sports has the reputation of an unstoppable giant when it comes to football, soccer, and hockey. With the juggernauts of Madden, FIFA, and NHL, you’d expect them to dominate every sport they touch. But as the tumultuous history of NBA Live has shown, it’s not a simple matter of EA simply showing up and expecting to be crowned champion.

After getting humbled by NBA 2K for several years, the folks behind NBA Live knew they had to go back to the drawing board in 2010. After handing development to EA Tiburon, taking a three-year hiatus from the franchise, and finally relaunching last year, the series might finally be headed for a turnaround. We had a chance to chat with executive producer Sean O’Brien and get an inside look at how EA Tiburon has gone about rebuilding the two-decade-old franchise from the ground up.

EGM: There was a three-year period there between NBA Live titles, so NBA 2K really got a monopoly on basketball video games in that time. Can you tell us about finally coming back to the market with NBA Live 14 and the difficulties you faced that first year back in trying to reclaim a piece of the market share?

Sean O’Brien: It’s definitely hard, and I think that, even outside of the brand, probably the biggest challenge was building NBA Live 14 on what we had. The game didn’t ship in those previous years for a reason, and that was because it simply wasn’t good enough. That, on its own, is challenging, but to complicate matters, our base wasn’t what Madden or FIFA or NBA 2K was, so we were trying to build up the quality while also bringing it onto the next generation of hardware at the same time.

I think part of that, too, was building the team that could actually do that. We had a bit of a broken, fractured team beforehand that I inherited, so we had to ask ourselves if we even had the right people to pull this off. Then came the decisions regarding what our direction was, what our identity was, and where we were going to go—and all that’s a work in progress.

I think, after those 11 months where we built the game and we launched with next-gen, it allowed us to come together as a team. Then we got reviewed, and it was so bad, and our scores were so low, and that could’ve been a point where the team just turtled and said, “Why are we doing this?” and given up. And, for a couple of days, there were definitely some doubters. What was really cool for me, though, was come that next Monday, almost a full week after we launched, I saw a lot of people start to rally. Asking what we could do to make this better, shouting that we weren’t done yet, wanting to prove to people that this wasn’t our best. To see the team rally, I understood then that the make-up of this team—sure, we had some holes to fill talent-wise—but the core team had the gumption to make it happen.

That’s part of it. You need the right people, the right talent to make a good product in anything—not just games—and I think we’re showing with NBA Live 15 that this is more in line with what people expect from the NBA Live brand. We’re ready to take on the fight. We have a different identity and are not creating a “me too” basketball game that copies 2K, not creating the same feature set or mechanics. We’re creating an identity around our own connected feature set that focuses more on control when you’re playing the game itself, the simplicity of the game itself so that you’re always feeling like the game is responsive when you play.

So, it’s just a question of bringing people in on a journey that’s steadily improving. Our goal is to prove that we’re constantly making the game better. And given that we’re shipping NBA Live 15 ten and a half months after we shipped Live 14, after we put out numerous updates to make 14 better, being able to put out something like 15 is going to reinforce the fact that everyone at EA is taking this very seriously. There’s a big investment around it. NBA Live 14 was not our best effort and was just a small step forward in the direction we’re going.

EGM: You mentioned how low the review scores were and that NBA Live 14 wasn’t your best effort. What advantages were there in releasing a product that might not have been your best foot forward and not nixing it like NBA Live 13 in the hopes of coming back stronger this year?

O’Brien: From a development standpoint, as you finalize a game—especially an annual title—you learn something about your team, and you also establish guidelines on what “good” looks like, how to achieve that, and then how to finish. In any game development, you have your pre-production, which is your ideas and early design. Then you have your production, which is how good are you at actually implementing those things. Then you have your finalizing process, which is how you pull it all together.

How you pull it all together and have it compliant by Microsoft and Sony standards and actually ship a game under the rigid and strict timelines in sports games is a huge learning opportunity for a team, and it can bring them together. So, for better or for worse, we set a bar for where we were, both inside and outside the company. But also, with all the stuff we did after launch, it allowed us to come together as a team and engage our fans. It helped us key players in on what we’re doing here.

We have different strategies across the board, and one of those is talking with the people managing our social channels and having them engage people 1-on-1 and making sure that, even if it was just some guy saying “this game sucks,” we made sure they got a response. Asking them about their experience with the game, having them explain their issues to us, seeing if they had any questions—and it’s really interesting to see the surprise from people when someone actually responds to them and shows that we’re paying attention to them. This helps build a bit of a transparency and an honest, listening relationship with players that I think they really want.

We see it a lot in a variety of games. You see it in the indie-game scene a lot more, where you ask people to get on this journey with you and pick their brains about what they want to see from it. And that’s what we’re trying to do, whether it’s with old Live fans and you miss things about the series, or you play 2K and you’re frustrated about some things with their series. We want to know the game players want made.

We put that out there—establish a baseline with what we did with NBA Live 14 and then show and build confidence in people based on what we do and deliver against it. As we learned this past year, we learned it in a good way, that we promised a bunch of things. We said that this wasn’t our best effort and asked people to bear with us and that we’re going to prove to them on this journey that we’ll make the game better. It easy to say that, of course, and it’s harder to do it, but I’d put up what we did post-launch with 14 against what any other sports game has ever done post-launch in the history of sports gaming.

That’s how much of an investment we put into showing players just where we’re going and then with our next release, NBA Live 15, having the game look and play as it does now is a huge transformation. And so, having people along on that journey to experience that, I think, is advantageous as well. And it gets the feeling some people might have when they contribute to a Kickstarter. You want to get in early or help shape something, or hop on board as it goes because it’s cool and you want to be a part of what’s next. It’s not about what’s there right now, and that’s sort of the philosophy we’re taking with the athletes we work with, the musicians we work with. It’s not about what’s cool right now, but if you want to be a part of something that will be cool, then that’s where we are.

EGM: You said there were some holes on the team. Can you specify where those holes were and how you’ve filled them since then?

O’Brien: Without getting into names or anything, I think we lacked a bit of creative leadership. We did fill those holes, though, as I brought down some guys that I used to work with previously, which made me feel better. I brought in some guys from EA Canada that I worked with on [the series] before. Connor Dougan runs our gameplay team, which is a very big team; he worked with me on NBA and NCAA basketball and was a line producer on SSX and was doing some work on UFC before we moved him down to [EA Tiburon]. Same with [senior designer] Ryan Santos, I worked with him on NBA Live and NBA Street. He’s a real lifestyle basketball guy, so we wanted him to insert some of the lifestyle of the sport that is so important, fusing the culture of the sport through music and footwear and apparel into the backbone of what NBA Live is, similar to what we did with NBA Live 10. We’re trying to reinvent it again on new-gen hardware. And a few other guys, too, to just really round out the experience level on making a basketball game, as well as to bolster what I felt was not enough creative leadership.

So, the designers and producers making the game, we really just needed more of them. And since then we’ve hired a number of engineers, a number of artists and animators, but what I was most happy with was the team that was there was actually a lot better than I thought. And what we produced was better than 13, because I played 13, it was better than what that looked and played like. And what we’re doing now is better than what 14 was. There are some really talented guys there, and I felt they just needed better direction, better leadership, and a better understanding of how to come together.

The coolest thing is that there’s some really strong talent there, so that’s why I feel even better about this year. For example, Paul Kashuk, our art director, who’s been at EA Tiburon for maybe eight years in a central role, worked on PGA Tour a few years back and is a former Disney guy. Giving him the opportunity to do this, he’ll be the first to tell you that his overall plan was a three-year plan. I believe we’ve achieved the vast majority of it in two years, but because of the way the art was built for 13, we couldn’t do as much as we wanted in that short timeframe for 14. But this was his plan all along. We built a scanner that was mobile and portable enough to go scan the athletes, and he had this strategy that we had to pick certain things we could in 14, knowing we could do more in 15 and even have the creative direction set already for 16, knowing where we could then take the franchise in the future as well.

EGM: Does the yearly iteration and near-constant work cycle due to the franchise’s annual nature make it easier then to implement long-term plans and follow through on them? Does the unending cycle become daunting at times, even with plans in place?

O’Brien: That’s one of the most challenging things. Knowing that we have a list of work can, at times, be overwhelming. But you got to stick to the plan, because I’d love to just snap my fingers and hand you the game I’ve got in my head. Obviously, I can’t do that, so it’s both the frustrating and challenging thing about being in sports-game development.

From the team’s standpoint, what we’re trying to figure out now is take what we proved internally with our post-launch support and expand on it. We’ve helped streamline this with new technology. Like for example, when LeBron James broke his nose last year, we have this live content update system now. Normally, when we want to update something, we’ll have to go through a submission process with Microsoft and Sony, and it becomes a patch, and they update your kit. So, we do the work, send it to them, they take about two weeks to review it, approve it, send it through the proper logistics channels of making it happen, and it finally gets to the player’s game. So, it takes a good chunk of time.

And so, when we’re living in a time when LeBron breaks his nose, you read about it, write about it, or see it on SportsCenter, and then you see him bring out that black mask/nose guard that the NBA didn’t want him to wear, and there was all this conversation about it. But when I went and played Live or 2K, he’s not wearing it. So, there’s a disconnect from reality. We could turn that around in three days now, though, with our new tech, so on the third day, LeBron in our game was wearing the black mask.

It’s a little thing, but maintaining relevancy is extremely important and one of the things that we’re going to hang our hat on. So, it’s the ability to support our games post-release and create this experience that doesn’t die. And at the same time of doing that, also executing for the next year’s game. That’s just the challenge of bringing our resources together and making sure we use them appropriately to ensure that the player who has the game now gets what they’re expecting and that we really fulfill the promise of that live service. Then, it’s making sure we have enough people and enough time to really innovate and build the new features that same player wants in next year’s game as well.

So, in regards to visuals, we made the game look better through one of our updates to 14, so if visuals were at a five out of 10 before, maybe the update bumped them up to a six. It was better, but it wasn’t what we’re doing for 15, because we took our new tech and went out and rescanned every player in the game, had to build a pipeline, and we had to actually re-author with new lighting to make the game take the step forward we needed to take.

It’s not something we could just update 14 with because we’re just getting to the point where we’re almost done now, and that’s something we were very honest about. I’ll tell you exactly what we can do; we’re not holding anything back. If we could’ve done this in 14, we would have. Sometimes, it’s just not possible, and I think that’s the challenge we’re taking on to make sure people can be a part of our journey and the trajectory to where we’ll be good—and, at the same time, understand why, have a stake in it, and give their feedback and have an opinion on where we’re going and then use our abilities to course correct as best we can along the way while supporting the live service of the current game and building toward the next one.

So, it’s challenging, but it’s also kind of fun, because sports games don’t traditionally do a good job of that. We’ll do roster updates and the little things, and Ultimate Team helps keep games a lot more relevant from a fantasy perspective, but in terms of giving you content and new things that you can engage with, it’s cool, but our challenge now is primarily to do everything we did with 14 for 15, and then with 16 and moving forward, people really buy into it and get what’s happening. That’s a differentiator to me.

EGM: When you guys invite the NBA players to have them scanned into the game, what’s their response? Are they excited just because it’s a videogame, or are they disappointed it’s not NBA 2K? What’s the feeling from the players around the league about NBA Live?

O’Brien: It’s interesting because, just to use a hypothetical here, a guy like [No. 1 pick in the 2014 NBA Draft] Andrew Wiggins, who’s only 19, doesn’t really remember Live unless he had an older brother or someone who played Live. But the older guys all know Live and grew up with it and love it and want to see it make a comeback. Most of the guys who play, though, now say they play 2K, or there’s a small minority of guys who played both last year. But they’re all very interested. I’ll exaggerate slightly and say they’re all interested, but most of the guys are more interested in what we’re doing. How we’re doing it, where Live is in its development, how we’re going to make it as good as 2K, and they talk about this as they sit down and scan with us.

Most of the environments we do in the scans in are a hotel ballroom or meeting room, and we’ll have the scanner set up, the game on the screen, and then the PR departments bring the players through, the coaches through, and most of the guys just sit around and play. They talk and make fun of each other because we get them to do screams and stuff to get different emotional performances from them. So, they talk and make fun of each other, and then they ask questions. And there’s usually three or four guys who are really interested in software development and what we’re doing, and they’ll ask these questions, and the other guys start listening.

It’s pretty cool, because it’s a different generation. Fifteen years ago, guys wouldn’t care about this, and now they all want to know what their ratings are, if their hair is right—like, we’ve had guys not want to get scanned and ask us if we could come back the next day because they’re getting a haircut. It’s all really important to them. So, the engagement on the players is extremely high, and then what we did throughout the course of the year, when we actually did some scans and ran them through the pipeline and showed them the graphical differences between last year and this year, we were getting the “Holy s***!” reactions to how good it looked, which is pretty rewarding. Anytime you can show players how good they look in a game, it’s kind of cool.

EGM: Have you made enough advancements between NBA Live 14 and 15 to completely narrow the gap with NBA 2K?

O’Brien: It’s hard to know for sure without knowing what 2K has done this year. Taking that into consideration, at the very least, visually, I can say yes. I think when we put our two games up side by side, we’ll absolutely be in the ballpark. I think there’s a different style between the two—like, if you look at a 2K game, I think there’s only two different body types. 2K tends to go for more of a heroic look, big feet and big shoes. They use their shaders a bit differently, so it’s a little more of a different artistic style, whereas we go for more of a photorealistic EA Sports style. So, that’ll be a plus or minus depending on your own personal preference.

I think that, from the gameplay side of things, we’re going to offer something different. Their animation is so strong and looks so good. That’s the one area where I’m curious to see how we stack up this year, but I do think that unless they’ve completely changed their approach, I think our game will be more responsive. What I mean by that is, I think you’ll feel more in control of what’s happening. The action, the input on your controller, what your expectation is, we feel that’s a point of differentiation that we can take advantage of.

What we’re trying to do is really give you the control that you expect. So, I think that’ll be an opportunity for us, and we’re going to hang our hat on responsiveness and control, so I’m curious to see if 2K has done anything to address that. That’s an unknown for me. They took a different approach last year with their virtual currency and how they’re doing online teamplay and online play in general. They had some server problems that everyone either experienced or read about, so I’m curious to see how much they’ve cleaned up there. It’s something we do extremely well at EA in general. Except for Battlefield. [Laughs]

But speaking for sports, the Ignite engine and our online experience is really buttoned up and really solid, and we rarely have server issues or challenges—if ever. The connected experience and what we provide, our relationship with [real-time stats company] Synergy Sports, it provides new data and tendencies on an ongoing basis based on what’s happening in the real world and changing your experience.

Maintaining the relevancy is something else we’ll hang our hat on and continuing to invest in. I think that’s where we’re best in class in sports games. And I think once our game looks better and plays better, that’ll get a little more recognition—because now, who cares? If it doesn’t play good or look good, then the rest of the stuff doesn’t matter and isn’t really meaningful. And then, looking forward, seeing how we invest in online teamplay, what that experience looks like, as well as how Ultimate Team ends up looking like as well and evolving that, I think that’s where we’ll continue to form our identity and differentiate.

So, I’d say we’ve definitely caught up in a lot of areas. I think the gap last year was quite significant. I think we’ve done an incredible job within 10 and a half months of closing that gap significantly in a lot of different areas. Overall, they’re an 85-plus-rated game, so it’s still going to take us some time to actually really catch up, but I think we do offer something different, and I think that’s important.

EGM: It really seems there’s been a culture shift within EA’s halls. I don’t think a few years ago you guys would’ve been talking about three-year plans. Do you think this could’ve been done a few years ago, or have things changed?

O’Brien: Things are changing. A lot of it is around [EA CEO] Andrew Wilson and [executive vice president of EA Studios] Patrick Soderland’s approach to quality and the emphasis on quality, not around headcount or your business plan. It’s about having the right people to make a great game. We’ll figure out the logistics, but that’s the most important thing now, and it’s what Andrew wants to hang his hat on and all of our hats on as a company.

So, it’s a really cool thing for me, just as a side note, how Andrew is giving me build feedback. The CEO of our company is talking about animation blending and AI states, and it’s cool and empowering in a way, because I can go back to my team and be like, “This is what Andrew thinks of our game.” Patrick is the same exact way, where they’re honed in on making a great game, making sure we’re focused on quality.

And then, even the tough decisions—which Andrew says are tough but aren’t really tough, like [pushing the release date back for] games like Hardline out and Dragon Age: Inquisition. EA, as a company, would’ve never made those decisions before. We were so quarter-by-quarter focused, and he pushed Battlefield: Hardline out of a quarter, which is enormous revenue, but he knows it’s the right thing to do. The game’s not ready, and they want to make 9s. We’re done with making 7s and 8s, and sometimes, that’s what it takes. So, it’s pretty cool to have the support of all these guys who believe in what we’re trying to do, understand the challenge, are giving us the resources to make leaps and bounds, recognizing those leaps and bounds, and then continuing to push us to be even better. It’s a pretty cool—and I’d say new—take on what EA’s all about, and it’s a lot of fun.

EGM: From an outsider’s perspective, the announcement of NBA Live 15 signified a change to me, because—sorry to bring up the bad review scores again—the EA of old, I think, would’ve never moved forward with NBA Live 15 after how poorly 14 was received.

O’Brien: I agree with you completely. When I came back to EA—and Andrew’s the guy who actually wanted me to come back before he got promoted to his big-boy job—I was just grilling Andrew on what the expectations were, what the support would be like, and I told him if he expected us to turn this around instantly, it wasn’t going to happen. I wanted to make sure there was the support internally, as a company, that they believed in this category, and they did.

It’s a huge opportunity, globally, on a number of different platforms. The NBA is an amazing partner with us, and they support us still, even with all the crap we’ve gone through over the past five years. It’s really important to me to feel like a part of something that the company sees a value in. If you think about it, in terms of games, what other genre can you say there’s an established $350 million category annually that EA’s had a huge presence in before? We’re really good at all the other sports, so if we came back and can take half of that, we’re in a good place—aiming for more, of course.

When we talk about creating new IPs and opening up new markets and new genres, yeah, this is an established market with an established genre and an established competitor, which makes it admittedly really challenging, but it gives you a court to play on. And I think that’s where Andrew’s vision is. For us, for the studio team, it’s just about making sure we can show the progress that he’s expecting and the company’s expecting to honor that commitment and keep that commitment alive. If we were a complete bust and had no plan and no idea what we were doing, it’d probably be a different conversation right now, but I think that’s part of the story we’re trying to tell. There’s more to what you saw in the package that was NBA Live 14. There are reasons why it was what it was. And it’s not a question of making excuses or being defensive; it’s just that there’s reality, and we just want to share some reality for those who are interested. And when you look at last year versus this year, you can see the differences. There’s a lot of good things happening, and it’s just a matter that some of them take time, and we’ll share as much as we can along the way. But believe in us, because we’re going to do it.

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Developer Chat: The Walking Dead Writer Pierre Shorette, Designer Sean Ainsworth

Filed under: EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly), Written — Leave a comment
December 23, 2013

I am Clementine

With the new season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead now underway, I was able to pick the brains of Game Designer Sean Ainsworth and Writer Pierre Shorette about the changes this season brings to the series and some specific elements we saw in Episode One: “All That Remains.”

EGM: Clementine isn’t your typical video game protagonist and she’s a drastic shift from when you play as Lee. How do you strike a balance between making her a character all kinds of players would want to play, yet still maintain the vulnerability she naturally has being a little girl?

Sean Ainsworth: It was really difficult for us to figure out what that balance is. You don’t want people running over her with a bunch of adults telling her what to do, but you also can’t have her speak up and take charge of things because she’s 11 and that just wouldn’t happen. It’d be ridiculous. So, coming up with ways for her to have agency in the world and to feel like you have things to do with her is quite a challenge. But it feels like it’s worth that effort. It’s so different from being a big, burly, black guy now. You just can’t intimidate somebody and I think it factors more now into the group dynamics. We had to figure out ways around that and that was really cool.

Pierre Shorette: I think in Season One that you’re so enamored with protecting Clementine that it’s an interesting approach now where you have to go through a season where you’re protecting her literally, but then you’re also trying to role-play. I think it’s almost like striking a balance that’s realistic, but also allowing players to express themselves and get out of each situation what they really want. The last thing we’d want is for this to feel like some 90s kid-friendly movie and they’re running around, taking charge, driving cars around, and handling every situation. But it’s the first stumbling block we have to overcome in every scene, trying to figure out how to make her important in it.

EGM: You mentioned that Clem can’t really intimidate people, but through her dialogue choices, she can have a bit of an attitude to her depending on how you wish to play her. She can be antagonistic. She can rile the group up. She can make enemies. Is this just the natural evolution of Clem after everything she’s been through?

SA: Yeah, I think so. Living in this zombie-infested world, she’s had to grow up a little quickly to survive. That’s definitely part of it. Part of making her a little older now is that she’s had some experiences since last season. She’s still speaking straight from her heart, though.

PS: Of course, you don’t have to say anything at all. You can often choose to remain silent.

SA: Right, but she at least knows enough now to know what to say because she’s talking from experience.  And depending on how you’re playing, you can extrapolate that there may be repercussions for what you say.

PS: I think it’s interesting because depending on the scenario, I’m sure some people would be like “Clementine would never say that”, but sometimes when you’re in the moment and you’re role-playing as the character, some of those one liners are just too shiny a nugget to pass up and not see what happens next. They want to see what happens and the drama of the moment is what’s so compelling. People just want to know how it would play out. If you’re that into the role, then it can take you in a different direction and then it’s the decision you live with and it becomes the reality you’ve chosen.

SA: Yeah, it’s weird because you’re now playing as someone who was an NPC in Season One. So it’s interesting what direction you can take this NPC now as the player-character. We were a little worried actually when we started talking about making Clementine the main character, if there would be a disconnect, but when you’re playing it you just get into it and really, that’s our goal. That you get into it enough that you forget all of that.

PS: Can we ask you, now that you’ve beaten it, how did you play it? Did you go in with the goal of just protecting Clementine? Were your decisions affected by that? Or did you role play?

EGM: I went into wanting to make the best decisions possible to continue protecting Clem all I could. That was my main goal. But after the first couple of sequences and seeing what choices I had to make, I really started to play as if I was Clem and not some ethereal protector. The best way for me to protect Clem was to be Clem.

PS: Right. You began to identify yourself as her. That’s cool. I’m glad that happened with you because like Sean said, there was a fear people would be removed from the story and make everything black and white in their minds and just play god and control Clem’s existence but be detached from it. But I’m glad that you got into it.

EGM: In the group of people Clem meets, there’s a father/daughter dynamic there that reminded me a lot of Clem/Lee from Season One. The girl is a bit naïve and the father is protective of her, and its interesting that Clem is now on the outside looking in on a relationship like that. Was that parallel an intentional addition on your part?

PS: I think it just sort of emerged naturally. The opportunity to see almost a more naïve version of the girl Clem used to be is unique because now she can have an opinion on how the father is raising his daughter. I mean that’s crazy that an 11-year-old would have a valid opinion on his parenting skills and how he may be doing some things wrong or what he should be doing more of and that’s actually an example of giving her a level of agency that, from the outside looking in, might not click with the group. But we know from being in the background that Clementine has valid opinions to share on how to grow up in this world and stay safe and survive. And that’s the kind of stuff we’re seeking out all the time to make sure this is a compelling experience.

EGM: Talking a little bit more about this first episode of Season Two, it ended on even more of a cliffhanger than usual. Why did you guys decide to end the episode where you did?

SA: We obviously can’t go into a lot of detail without giving too much away, but I think we ended it here because all the ramifications that stem from your last decision in the episode will trickle out and affect the rest of the season. So, to dig into even the beginnings of that, and dig into those ramifications would require a lot more time than we had at that point in the episode.

EGM: At the beginning of Season One you guys had Glenn as part of the group, and made your way to Hershel Greene’s farm. Have you guys ever entertained the notion of intersecting again with the comics?

SA: We have an ongoing discussion about it. We’ve never ruled it out. It just has to make sense. It can’t be something that we’re shoehorning in.

PS: What’s nice is this addition, with the game existing on its own and what we did with it, shows that The Walking Dead is just a really big universe. That this is unique for the IP and not just a story that’s somewhere in a pocket in Georgia. It’s something that’s shaking up the entire world and I like that it makes the universe feel large.

SA: Also, it’s really hard to tie in dead people. [Laughs]

PS: Yeah, we were just talking about this the other day where if you go to The Walking Dead’s wikia page and under the comic book section for the characters, everyone just has a big red “X” on their faces. It’s just what they do. It’s what happens. If you stay with the main gang long enough, you’re going to get killed. So, that’s part of it, too, for sure.

EGM: Alright, last question. Telltale has worked on a lot of licensed properties over the years (Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, etc., etc.) and you just announced two more with Borderlands and Game of Thrones. If you could add another new license to the list, what would it be and why?

SA: There are so many I would love to do, but it would have to make sense for us to spend the time on it. And it’s hard to even say because we never know what we may be working on in the future. It’s just so hard to say.

PS: And even that, everyone is so excited for what we have coming up, like with Game of Thrones. It just fits what we do so well. I will say, though, that before I even worked here I was a fan. I played the first three episodes [of The Walking Dead] before coming on, but I always thought that in terms of what Telltale does, even before I was an employee, that Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets would be a cool adaptation because of its nature. I mean, it would be a game where the bullets matter a lot. It’s not just a number up in the corner of the UI. When a gun gets shot, it means something, when a person gets shot, it really means something. So how precious that is, or how devastating that is was something I always thought was interesting.

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NYCC 2013: Ray Takes on Cosplayers!

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November 20, 2013

It’s been a while since I’ve done a video of any kind, and I felt I needed to shake some rust off my interviewing skills. NYCC 2013 seemed like the perfect place to serve this purpose and so I went around the show floor and chatted up some awesome cosplayers. Enjoy!

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EGM Developer Chat: Watch_Dogs Lead Story Designer Kevin Shortt

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September 23, 2013

Hack to the future

A lot of attention has been paid to the unique hacking gameplay Watch_Dogs is going to be bringing to current and next gen consoles in November. But there’s still a story behind Aiden Pearce and his uber-connected world of the near future. With this in mind, we were able to sit down for a few minutes with Kevin Shortt, one of the writers and Lead Story Designer for Watch_Dogs and pick his brain a little.

EGM: Watch_Dogs has been in development for more than four years now and a lot can change in that time. How has the story changed, at all, from the original vision you guys started with?

KS: I think the core idea has always been there. We wanted a bit of an anti-hero whose making questionable choices towards a noble cause. The story itself, for sure, it’s shifted a lot. And that’s going to happen. As you’re working with the game developers and designers and creative director, we all get in a room and we start realizing what the best flow is both for gameplay and for story.

And so as a result, you end up having to shift the story quite a bit to make sure it hits all the right beats and has the right energy. Four years, for sure, you start thinking to yourself “that idea was kind of crap, but this idea is f***ing amazing and we’re going to go with this.”

So, we finally landed on that amazing idea that we’re really happy about it and we think is a story that’s going to resonate with people. They’re going to get pulled into it. What’s cool about the story is it’s really reflective of how the player’s going to play. The player will find it easy to live Aiden’s life because he’s a guy who can’t stand by and just watch people get hurt and I think the way the game is you find you can’t just walk away from these situations. You have to step in.

EGM: Has it been difficult crafting an anti-hero as your main protagonist?

KS: Yeah, well I think any story can be difficult. They can all be quite difficult to make. The easy thing would be to make him a black and white hero, and off you go. But, we wanted him to be three-dimensional, and that means you have to really think about what are the human choices you would make that aren’t necessarily the right choice. We all make these mistakes and I think that’s what we were after, to make sure he was very human.

The people around him, as well; that was an important part. The characters—we’ve mentioned Clara and Jordi, two characters that you meet in the game—they have their own stories as well. And their stories don’t mesh perfectly. They are not crafted to strictly help Aiden Pearce. They’ve got more than that going on. They’ve got their own ups and downs and their own goals that they’re trying to achieve while Pearce is trying to achieve his goals. And that makes for a great collision between the characters and makes for an exciting story.

EGM: What went into the decision to set the game in Chicago?

KS: We loved the character of the city, the landmarks, the history. I think another thing is we looked at it from a gameplay perspective. It’s a great city for that. Look at all those bridges. And we knew this would just translate into a fun city both visually and gameplay-wise to explore and have fun in and that as well was a big reason why we went with Chiacgo.

EGM: What are you most proud of with the story?

KS: That’s hard to say. I guess I’m most proud of the depth of the characters we have. We’ve got a rich cast of characters who all have their own goals and they end up blending well together without serving each other too obviously.

So, overall I’m pleased with how well we crafted the story and integrated it with gameplay. What was different about this game from other games that I’ve worked on is from day one, I was sitting there in the room with the game designers, the creative director, the level designers, and we worked out together how’s the gameplay and how’s the story going to work. That doesn’t always happen in games at all.

Story quite often can come much later. And you’re wrestling to fit your story into the gameplay. For us, we worked on it right from the beginning.

I’d say that’s what I’m most proud of. We’ve gotten to a point where the gameplay and the story mesh so well that I think it all just flows really beautifully together. We’re able to adapt quite easily on the fly. If gameplay has a problem that they need to solve, because we’ve worked together already so well, it’s easy for us to adjust it this way to make it work and still hold everything together.

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EGM Developer Chat: Pikmin Creator Shigeru Miyamoto

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September 5, 2013

Before everyone gets all in a huff, we know Shigeru Miyamoto is the man behind Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Donkey Kong, and most every other beloved Nintendo franchise. But since this is a Pikmin-centric interview, we simply referred to him as “Pikmin Creator.” And yes, we were able to get a few minutes with this videogame legend and chat about the upcoming Pikmin 3.

EGM: So, it’s never easy to launch a game—any game—but Pikmin 3 was originally supposed to be a launch window title and got pushed back. What went into that decision to push it back, and what were you able to accomplish with the extra time?

Shigeru Miyamoto: Well, I guess one simple explanation for what happened was, in helping prepare the launch titles, I was a little bit too busy working on NintendoLand and the other games. The other reason is that we had a bit of an extravagant goal with Pikmin 3. We want this to be a game for people who haven’t really played games before. We want this to be a game that, from a controls and gameplay perspective, they can play. Even if they sort of take their time and learn the game rules, they could play through the game and experience it and enjoy it. But at the same time, we want it to be a game that really avid and experienced gamers can very quickly get and jump right into the depth of the gameplay and really experience it through the replayability and the high scores and the challenge that it offers.

This is obviously a very complicated task—to create a game that bridges both of those audiences.  So if we had put some more effort into it, it’s possible that we could’ve released Pikmin 3 earlier and had it ready in February or March, but as we got close to that time frame—and looking at the overall balance between these two desires—we felt that we really wanted to take the time to polish them both up just the right way so that everyone who plays the game is going to be totally satisfied with it.

EGM: You mentioned that you were helping work on the Wii U’s other launch titles, and you’re known as the father of so many beloved Nintendo franchises. How do you balance your time between so many given projects?

SM: I—obviously—am getting up there in age, and getting to the point where it wouldn’t be strange if something happened and I wasn’t with the company anymore. Because of this, we’ve been preparing for the day when I might not be there, and part of that process has really been bringing up the younger developers and producers and getting them to a point where they can run many of these series on their own.  So we have someone in charge of the new Super Mario Bros. series, someone else on the Zelda series.  They’re working really hard on developing those games on their own, and I’ll only look at them from time to time. What this allows me to do is really spend my time on the projects that I really want to devote my time to.

EGM: What new features have the Wii U and its controller allowed you to bring to Pikmin 3?

SM: Well, we have three different explorers now.  So this means you can have three different teams working independently, doing different things at the same time.  Usually what you would have to do is, if you had one or two explorers, you would be sending little Pikmin to a task and you would have to run around and find out where they were in terms of their progress on completing that task.  Now, with the new map and site controls that you can access via the Wii U GamePad, you can quickly jump from one place to another and you can see on the map how done they are with their tasks and if I can sign them a new task. So it really helps you to efficiently manage your resources as you build your strategies to play the game.

Beyond that, we also have the pointing technology, which we first utilized on the Wii version that we re-released with the new play controls. With Pikmin 3, we are taking more advantage of the Wii MotionPlus functionality that’s in the Wii Remote. It’s really helpful when aiming precisely at specific areas of the enemies. So, for example, in the previous games, you would simply charge at your enemies with all your Pikmin and they would try to destroy the enemies to defeat them.  With Pikmin 3, what you can do is you can aim at specific parts of the enemy.  So you might attack a Bulborb specifically on the eye, which prevents it from seeing, and so it can’t attack at the Pikmin as long as the Pikmin are attacking it’s eyes. That gives you a window to then attack from another direction on it to defeat that enemy.  So with the use of Wii MotionPlus combined with the pointer technology, it makes it much easier to be a lot more strategic both in terms of how you’re issuing commands to the Pikmin but also in terms of how you’re attacking certain enemies.

EGM: Was there ever a thought of doing some kind of Pikmin tie-in for the 3DS?

SM: Well, certainly there are a lot of options, and my dreams have a lot of potential possibilities for Pikmin, but we really wanted to focus on sort of creating the ultimate version of the strategic-action gameplay of Pikmin, and we were able to do that with Wii U. We thought it was just the right, perfect hardware for Pikmin 3, so that was our focus this time. But I think that in the future we’ll certainly have opportunities to look at ways that we can bridge Pikmin across different consoles or other ideas that may come up.

EGM: The Nintendo faithful in general are very hardcore. How is Pikmin reaching out and helping cultivate that community this time around?

SM: Well, there are a couple of ways that we kind of encourage people to connect with each other with regard to the game. One is that Pikmin is certainly a game in which strategic moves and advice and things are going to be a lot more plentiful and a lot more useful to the gameplay than even something like a Mario Kart with its shortcuts. With Pikmin, there will be plenty of opportunity for people to go into Miiverse and really help give each other advice on ways to better approach their levels and how they can work their way through them, or ways to get higher scores and things like that, because the strategic depth is so deep in this game.

But the other is also a Miiverse functionality that does take advantage of the GamePad. This is something where, with a GamePad, you’re able to go into a first-person view in the game and snap photos.  Essentially, you can get down to a viewpoint that’s similar to the Pikmin’s. With this, what you can do is take pictures and try to get people to guess where in the game you found this, or perhaps find very funny pictures of things that people didn’t anticipate would happen.  Then they can exchange those pictures over Miiverse, which I think is going to help build that communication and help give fans a way to really engage with Pikmin 3.

Pikmin 3 launches exclusively on Wii U August 4 in North America, and is currently available at retailers and the Nintendo eShop in Japan, Europe, and Australia.

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EGM Developer Chat: Batman: Arkham Origins Senior Producer, Ben Mattes

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The DC Comics booth was abuzz as always at this year’s San Diego ComicCon, as demos of Batman: Arkham Origins and other DC-inspired videogames were available for the first time to the public. While everyone else was playing, I had a chance to catch a quick tutorial from Jim Lee on how to draw Aquaman, and found out how much he hates drawing scaled armor. But then I headed back to the movie costume displays and met briefly with Warner Bros. Montreal senior producer Ben Mattes to talk about some of the work going on with Batman: Arkham Origins.

EGM: What made you want to include a small-time villain like Copperhead in Batman: Arkham Origins, and what inspired the character’s drastic redesign?

Ben Mattes: I tell this story differently than Eric [Holmes, Arkham Origins’ Creative Director], but I remember the meeting where we decided to go for it. We had a big bulletin board up with a lot of different assassins on it. First and foremost, we had the assassin angle. So we were looking at KGBeast, we were looking at Firefly, we were looking at Lady Shiva, we were looking at Copperhead. All these different characters. Anyone who might’ve, sort of had the word assassin in their history. And then we were looking for elements that would match different components of gameplay. So we were saying “this one would make a good challenge for freeflow combat” and “this one would be a good option because it could challenge your navigation” or whatever the case may be.

So as we were looking at the board, we realized we didn’t have a ton of women on our roster and that was frustrating and disappointing for a variety of reasons. And Ames Kirshen, who is the vice president of production for all DC properties at Warner Bros. Interactive, kind of likes the idea of the Copperhead character, and likes the idea of this acrobatic, contortionist character. And there was this merging, this alignment of the stars, where we said we have an idea of what the gameplay could be with this character. We’ve got an interesting angle in terms of this being an assassin, but we’re looking for more females, let’s pitch the idea of a refresh, a rebranding, of the Copperhead character and make it a visually appealing female character.

At first Ames and DC were a little hesitant. They weren’t against it, but they needed some convincing. And so working with our character concept team, we put together a few compelling character pieces that showed how visually appealing this character could be with her claws and her tattoos and her costume. And while doing this, we’re describing the image we have of her being a dangerously seductive contortionist, and that was a cool image that everyone could see in their heads. Imagine her wrapping herself around Batman and using her claws to attack and poison him. It was a pleasing image we all thought would be cool.

Once that happened, we got [DC Comics’ chief creative officer] Geoff Johns on board, and then the rest was just implementation. And as we revealed at the San Diego ComicCon panel, the motion capture of her was probably the point where everyone looked back and said, “See, I knew it would work!” We all thought it would be cool, but then we got these three really talented actresses and we hodgepodged together their MoCap, glued it all together to create the Copperhead experience in the cinematics we’ve shown, and that’s really when it clicked.

And then to have Geoff Johns talk about it at the panel and give credibility to the character by saying she’s going to become canon, she’s going to become a character you’re going to see in the New 52, is really validating, and shows the working relationship between us and DC—which has been great—but it also shows the importance of videogames as a medium in the overall DC space. The Arkham games sell. They get millions of eyes on them. And so they’re becoming increasingly powerful and important just as a platform to influence the canon of this character, which is very rewarding and exciting for us.

EGM: You mentioned the New 52 and how the Arkham games are now influencing that. The New 52 is very young, and the Arkhamverse is in its infancy as well. Because of its freshness, are you guys tempted to reach for Batman’s newer history, as it might have a more viable audience, or do you like staying rooted in Batman’s lengthy pre-New 52 history? 

BM: Generally speaking, everything is on the table. We are more influenced by the older comics for sure in regards to references and inspiration and try to steer clear mostly just of the movies, TV Shows, and other media. What’s more important than if our inspiration is from old or new comic material, is if it makes sense to the Arkhamverse, because it is young and it is its own unique branch of the DC timeline.

Hypothetically, let’s stick The Court of Owls into the Arkhamverse. We go back then and ask if that makes sense, especially since Origins is Year Two and very clearly Court of Owls isn’t Year Two, so there are some things where the chronology of our story dictates who we can and can’t have in it. But in regards to what books or authors or anything—it’s all available. We just have to make sure it stays consistent. And that’s not necessarily a DC mandate. I mean, they appreciate that we hold ourselves to that even before we put options in front of them, but we want to make sure that we are building a cohesive, coherent universe first and foremost. Because first of all, we’re huge fans and that’s the world we want to play in, and we don’t want to create an experience where the fourth wall is broken for those extra hardcore fans who find inconsistencies and lose that sense of immersion because there’s something about our narrative that breaks and fractures their sense of understanding in the universe.

EGM: How hard is it to keep that consistency with a prequel, though? You have a lot of new villains and gadgets that weren’t around in the first two games.

BM: You know, it’s really not that hard if you put gameplay first. We’re not ashamed of it. We’re proud of it. We didn’t sit there thinking that we needed to create an awesome gadget, but it needs to be technologically inferior to Arkham Asylum and so we need to limit him. That’s not how you make an exciting game. We wanted to make a game that felt like an upgrade over the previous two games in as far as Batman’s capabilities, even though this is chronologically taking place before Arkham Asylum. As a player, do you accept that the chronology means Batman should miss some punches, the Batclaw cable should snap once in a while, and the Batarangs shouldn’t fly as far? It would be frustrating instead of an empowering experience.

Luckily, though, there is a very well-established component of the canon that makes it all moot. Batman never leaves the Batcave with everything. It’s part of the character. He has different outfits, different gear, different vehicles, different versions of weapons, different versions of gadgets, different suits, and it’s always been accepted that based on the different challenges he may face, Batman will use some subset of his arsenal to use in that encounter, and so we’re just staying consistent, really, with that part of the canon. In Arkham Origins, Batman finds a need for the remote claw, and so narratively we can still be consistent. It’s just part of who he is.

EGM: Well, as long as he never brings out the Bat-Shark Repellant again, I think we’ll all be okay with that. So, you have a new Joker voiced by Troy Baker and a new Batman voiced Roger Craig Smith. Besides the fact these are younger versions of the characters, what made you want to change the actors and what went into choosing the new actors?

BM: Really, younger is it. That was the main reason behind the decision to change voice actors.  It’s not that we don’t love Mark [Hamill]. It was simply the fact that we needed a voice actor who could sound like he was the Joker, but seven years younger from where Mark typically played him.

And everyone acknowledged that need. We are an early career story. We needed our voice actors to be younger men who have younger sounding voices, but who can still very much play the characters the way that Mark and Kevin would’ve played them. We didn’t want Troy to re-invent the wheel and come up with an all-new Joker. We wanted him to the deliver us the Joker who becomes the character played by Mark Hamill in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City.

So what went into the casting was listening and auditioning tons and tons of some of the best male voice actors in videogames for that angle. And trying to make sure we found partners who understood and embraced that, and saw that as a huge opportunity rather than a restriction or a confinement or some sort of limiting factor. And both Troy and Roger immediately keyed into that in their auditions. You could actively hear them trying to do their versions of the vocal mannerisms of Mark. And it became quite evident to us early on in the process that these were our actors—not just because they could deliver the voices, but because they embraced the challenge so wholeheartedly and are so respectful of the giants whose shoulders they were asked to stand upon, which is exactly what we were looking for.

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Assassin’s Creed IV Will Expand Storytelling Techniques, Says Lead Writer

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July 23, 2013

There are many ways to tell a story through videogames. Something Assassin’s Creed IV lead writer Darby McDevitt wanted this time around, however, was to make sure Black Flag‘s world would help influence and tell the story—beyond expected arcs about buried treasure, damsels in distress, and massive naval battles associated with pirates.

Talking to EGM, McDevitt explained how part of this more subtle form of storytelling through environments starts with the major hub cities.

“You know, our cities are very different. Our city designers have been given a mandate to make sure Kingston has its own flavor. Kingston was a British colony, and the British were probably the worst proponents of slavery at the time, so we’re going to have them come across as the most adamant proponents of slavery,” McDevitt tells EGM. “They were also the worst behaved, so Kingston has to feel more like a town built on slavery and sailors and plantations and things like that.

“Havana was controlled by the Spanish, and they were a lot more—I don’t want to say ‘nice,’ because there’s nothing nice about slavery—but they have a lot more rules in place about buying and selling slaves.  It was much less common, so Havana feels different. It feels more Western European. Even the crowd flow is different, so you can tell stories on that scale.”

The cities in Black Flag only make up a small portion of the world you will explore, though. With some 75 uncharted locations in the game, there’s more than plenty of wilderness to explore and tame as well— within the main story.

“You can be wandering through a jungle and a tree has fallen over and there’s a dead body under it, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, what happened there?’ We’re trying to hit all of those levels, and I’ve found a lot of the little details have surprised me even as the writer,” explains McDevitt. “I think we’re putting a lot more care into that small detail of stripped environmental storytelling, and I hope that comes through to a much greater degree. So yeah, we’re trying to hit a broad sweep of storytelling through the entire world itself.”

Darby’s desire to change how the Assassin’s Creed series tells its stories doesn’t end with adding greater emphasis on environments servicing narrative. The writer also wants to see the ties between the past and the present featured more prominently—something he actively focused on while penning Black Flag.

“We designed the present story to kind of mirror Edward’s place in the story, too. I’ve always felt that the present day stories existed on different planes, you know,” says McDevitt. “Desmond had his thing going on, he was always going back into assassins’ memories to look for stuff, but the themes didn’t always match up. I did like that there was a nice father-son conflict in ACIII in the present and the past, so that was cool.  For ACIV, we wanted keep a little bit of that going. But I can’t say any more than that.”

For more on Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag—launching on PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii U October 29 with PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions to follow—be sure to check out EGM #260, available on newsstands everywhere now.

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Assassin’s Creed IV’s Game Director Talks About the Importance of Crew

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One of the most appealing features of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is being able to captain your own pirate ship and set sail in any direction, with no man as your master. But piloting your own ship around the Caribbean is far from being a one-man task. You need people you can trust to help guide the ship through rough waters or difficult encounters with government ships less than welcoming to someone waving a black flag. You need a crew. In an interview with EGM, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag game director Ashraf Ismail talked at length about this key gameplay detail.

“We have two types of crews, there’s the named crew and then there’s sort of the Red Shirts. A lot of gameplay comes from the named characters, like your first mate. They have some side missions, which are very key to flushing out their story, to give them a bit more meat and purpose in the overall narrative. And they play gameplay roles as well.”

And while describing unnamed crew as “Red Shirts” might suggest they’re expendable, Ashraf says they aren’t just there to be randomly killed off. They still play critical roles in your adventures on the high seas.

“These are the crew that you can gain or lose based on how you play the game. The unnamed crew is really important for boarding.  If you’re taking on a man-of-war, and you go on with only 10 guys, you’re going to have a lot trouble,” explains Ismail.  “So you need to worry about your crew.  If you lose too much crew, you can’t populate your ship.  So you really have to pay attention to them in regards to the number you have on board.”

Should you fail in your duties as captain to protect and take care of your crew, you need not worry too much—it seems there are a boatload (pun intended) of available crewmen in Assassin’s Creed IV who would love to come aboard the Jackdaw.

“There’s a lot of mechanisms for acquiring crew [through] finding systemic events that have happened in the world that you can see,” says Ismail. “You can save crew and pirates from government patrols, you can go to taverns for crews, you can hire and pay for crew, you can save crew during some boarding scenarios based on some actions that you do, and you can also gain crew who mutinies from enemy ships.  So there’s a lot of ways to gain or lose unnamed crew.”

Through our conversation with Ashraf, we also learned that there is a limit to how much crew you can have. So if you are a phenomenal captain and thought you could just hoard potential crewmen, think again. The Jackdaw’s crew quarters are upgradable, though, so you can always bring more crew along over time (up to a point), of course.

For more information on what to expect from Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag—launching on PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii U October 29 with PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions to follow—be sure to check out EGM #260, available on newsstands everywhere now!  

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EGM Developer Chat: Transistor Creative Director, Greg Kasavin

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Looking to avoid a sophomore slump, the guys over at Supergiant Games, creators of the smash hit Bastion, have a cyperpunk dream come true ready to deliver early in 2014 on PS4 (and potentially other systems). We had a chance to catch up with the studio’s creative director, Greg Kasavin, for a few minutes to get a more in-depth look at what makes Transistor tick.

EGM: What was some of the inspirations for Transistor’s cyberpunk theme?

Greg Kasavin: It’s always tough pinning down our inspirations, as we take sort of a melting-pot approach on our team, drawing from many different sources and media across all different aspects of the game. Where it started was, we really enjoyed creating the fantasy-themed world for our first game Bastion, and wanted to see what we could come up with in the science fiction genre this time around. While we were initially drawn to the cyberpunk aesthetic, we systematically rejected just about all the conventions, from the flowing trench coats to the pouring rain to the fat magnum pistols and so on. It’s not that we dislike these things — rather, we think they’ve been done really well elsewhere already, and it’s very important to us to find our own identity with our games. So we ended up with this romanticized, anachronistic-feeling city with some vintage qualities and some futuristic qualities as well. Jen Zee our art director took influence from the Art Nouveau movement of the early 20th century for aspects of the visual style, and we also looked to aspects of the late ’60s and ’70s when thinking about the game’s world. But that’s just one example. It takes us a while to distill all our ideas into something concrete, and the result contains influences from many different games and all sorts of different media from different eras.

EGM: I know there is a huge focus on Red’s voice being missing. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

GK: We were interested in the idea of a silent protagonist who was silent for reasons tied to the story, and having her paired up with another character with the opposite problem — his body is gone and all that’s left of him is his voice. We thought it would be interesting to explore this type of relationship through a game and let players get close to that relationship through their actions. I don’t want to say too much more about it since the story is very much about these characters and how they got into this situation, and what they’re going to do about it now. In Red’s case, we reveal early on that she was an up-and-coming star in this world, so the loss of her voice might be even worse for her than it would be for most people.

EGM: Tell us more about the unique combo system. Not only does Red have special attacks assigned to the face buttons, but she can stop time. Can you explain to us how it all works together?

GK: Red is having a very bad evening at the start of the game though the one consolation is that she discovers this extraordinary weapon called the Transistor. It turns out to have a variety of powerful functions, and one of them essentially lets her stop the entire world around her, plan her next set of actions, then execute them in a supercharged fashion. This is a core aspect of play, as we wanted to create a strategic and thoughtful feel to the action despite the simple-to-use controls. So, at almost any time you can use this ability to turn the tables, get out of a tight spot, overwhelm a particular opponent, and so on. We liked how open-ended it felt and wanted to create a deep-feeling system that provided a lot of natural drama. The exciting thing about planning is that plans sometimes don’t go over exactly as expected, and then you need to quickly re-evaluate the situation and make the best of it.

EGM: How hard is it to balance the combat between real-time and preventing players from just spamming the time stop ability?

GK: We were really interested in capturing the sensation of strategic and tactical games in the context of an action RPG, so finding the right balance between the real-time action and the ability to stop and plan was one of the central design challenges while we were prototyping. The strategic planning mode is very powerful though you quickly find it’s not to be used recklessly, since it leaves you vulnerable for several seconds after you use it. In this way there’s a natural incentive to use it wisely, to make sure you’re out of harm’s way at the end point of your plan. Likewise, some abilities or encounters may be easier or quicker if you duke it out in real time. We don’t want to force the planning mode onto players, we want them to discover it for themselves and decide when and how best to use it. On Bastion we were tweaking and tuning that game down to the very end of development, and I expect we’ll do the same with Transistor, though we’re happy with where that balance stands at the moment!

If you want more information about Transistor from Greg and the gang at Supergiant Games, be sure to pick up issue #260 of EGM available on newsstands now!

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Ed Boon Talks Injustice: Gods Among Us at SDCC 2012!

Filed under: EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly), Video — Leave a comment
August 8, 2012

At SDCC 2012, EGM Reviews Editor Ray Carsillo had a chance to catch up with Mortal Kombat co-creator and creative director for the upcoming Warner Bros. game, Injustice: Gods Among Us, Ed Boon.

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