Factor 5 snakker om Lair (Ps3)

[UrgeLoL]

GI: One thing we don’t know much about with Lair is the story. Where did you guys come up with the concept and who created the story. Is there anything you can say about that?

 

Eggebrecht: The story almost developed at the same time as the basic concept, because when we pitched Lair to Sony, first of all it was about game mechanics. It was the, “Let’s take the strengths that we have, build on a couple of them and apply them to something that hasn’t been done before—which is a good dragon game.” As far as I know, there isn’t one out there in the 25 years of video games.

 

GI: At Tokyo Game Show, you said control of the dragons could be completely gesture based—you’re not going to use the analog sticks at all. Has that changed?

 

Eggebrecht: I did? So I guess this is my John Kerry flip-flopping moment (laughs). No. You are controlling the dragon with the Sixaxis. So, let’s probably preface it with we analyze every single game mode in the game for basically where does the Sixaxix motion-control part give us a better control and a more-refined control than an analog stick. Then we sat down and took a hard look at the thing and said, “Is this a gimmick? Does it make things worse than stick control, or does it enhance it?” In flight, the interesting thing—and I think it would also apply to racing games, though we haven’t tried that yet—the complete range of motion that you get with a controller gives you a significantly higher amount of control over your turn angle. If you remember, for example, in the Rogue Squadron games, you had the tight turn—you had the too-tight turns, oftentimes, which made people wiggle around, or when we tweaked it into the other round, which you never saw, but internally we had, oftentimes it felt too sluggish. And it was, because an analog stick for a flight game really doesn’t give you the range that you need, and arguably so for racing games it could help more with the whole wheel feeling. That’s actually why in air the Sixaxis controls way better. On the ground, that’s where I’m actually doing the flip-flopping.

 

At Tokyo Game Show, we had a very first implementation of the ground Sixaxis. We got a lot of flak for it—rightfully so—because it wasn’t as good as analog-stick control. We’ve been going back and forth, and in the end we might—but that’s a strong might—we might have the option to switch back and forth between the two, but if we in our last focus testing now find out that everyone just says, “Look, on the ground, the Sixaxis control is not the preferable way to play it,” then we’re going to go analog stick only there. Then there’s knight mode, which is analog stick and it always was, because you’re running around with a character and I don’t think that Sixaxis for moving around—the motion control—doesn’t make sense. Having said that, though, what you do have is a first-person look-around mode, where you basically go into the head of the character and look around, and that’s actually on the motion control. It feels, again, very natural, interestingly enough. When you run around with the guy, you can go into the look-around and you can very seamlessly use the Sixaxis there. So it’s all about doing it right, not gratuitous, gimmicky stuff.

GI: How long is the game? How long do you think it’ll take the average gamer to get through it?

 

Eggebrecht: All of these percentage questions and length of gameplay… Let’s put it this way: If we really succeed in terms of tuning the difficulty curve right, and that’s what we’re doing right now, then even a newbie player should be able to play through to the end—but, we’ve taken a cue from our old games, so we have the medal system and all of that, so you’ll be at home with that. So replayability of the missions is important. Ideally, we want to tune it so someone can get through the game and the story in about 10-12 hours or something like that. Then there’s a whole lot of replay value. We have online leaderboards, supporting network platform fully there, we have chatboards inside the game, we have messaging inside the game, so all of that you can directly do within the game on the network platform. With the leaderboards, especially, I think our replay systems work quite well, because you can compare yourself and there are hidden things that you can unlock later. So your 10 hours is just your first playthrough.

 

GI: Cool! Downloadable content?

 

Eggebrecht: That’s something we’re thinking about. There is, of course—you always have to make a couple of sacrifices for shipping the thing. There’s a couple of points where we cut out parts of the story, and we kept it in place so we could re-insert subplots here and there into the whole thing, and I hope it’s going to happen.

 

GI: How far in development, and when can we see it? Spring is very vague.

 

Eggebrecht: Basically, by all definitions, pretty much everything is there. Now it’s optimization and really getting the difficulty curve right and really getting everything tweaked right. All of the systems are there. All of the unlocking—everything is there. Would I want to give it to you? No, because it needs to be tweaked right. It’s a 80-90%, but those last 10% are actually the hardest ones—because they’re going to make the game really perfect or not so.

GI: Are you still on target for spring?

 

Eggebrecht: Yeah. I know when we’re going to deliver, but Sony’s not going to ship it the next day. They need to determine what’s the perfect day for the platform.

GI: How have your overall experiences been with the hardware?

 

Eggebrecht: It’s an interesting ramp-up, interesting in terms of challenging—like I said before, less so than the PS2, but certainly moreso than, say, the GameCube, which was extremely easy. But that’s to be expected, because that’s where the power is. If it’s too easy, then as we’ve seen with the GameCube, there’s no headroom. We had a terrible time trying to squeeze more out of that system for Rebel Strike. On the PS3, the sky’s the limit. I’m happy that we got as much from it as we do right now, but we could go on for three years developing that engine and we know that the system will bear it. That’s the genius of Kutaragi’s designs—there’s so much headroom. And that makes the start up harder. But when you cross a certain threshold for the system and you know what to avoid and what to do right and how you write efficient code, how to basically have the Cell really talking in an optimized way with RSX, at that point it’s an exponential increase in productivity with what we’ve seen. At this point, it’s really going fantastically. It’s great hardware—it really is.

 

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