Resident Evil 6 is a very simple game, really, which is why I think it’s provoked such differences of opinion. It has one ambition, which is to be a mainstream action game, and in this it succeeded – in some parts, magnificently so. But the fate of such a well-loved series is expectation. Many folk don’t want a straightforward action game from Resident Evil – they expect something more… well, surprising. I’m not arguing with that perspective, in fact I think there’s a lot to be said for it. But for my part, I had a blast.
I am luckier than most, of course. I reviewed Resi 6 over a blissful week, holed up in a dark attic with beer and cigarettes, blasting my way through wave after wave of monsters. I wouldn’t argue it’s a forward-thinking game, or any kind of progression for the series. But if you want uncomplicated blasting action, it delivers in spades.
One area of Resi 6 that I think didn’t get the credit it should have was the monster design. This is probably because it has some real red flags – specifically, the zombie types that owe a lot to Valve’s peerless Left4Dead series. Unoriginal as these were, I actually think the designers did a superb job in giving them a Resi flavour. And outside of them, there are some truly brilliant designs – my very favourite being the grotesque Lepotitsa.
These are photographs of concept art from the Resi 6 working environment. I’m sorry that a couple are blurred, slightly skewed, or have camera flashes on them – but I think they’re pretty interesting to see regardless. Enjoy!
Ustanak. This ugly chap is a kind of mecha-tyrant that chases Jake. For some reason, the combination of stringy hair and scoured pate freaks me out.
The Needler. Ranged enemies aren’t common in Resi, which is what can make this such a nightmare to deal with – ESPECIALLY when it’s human-controlled in Agent Hunt.
Invisible enemies in games generally suck. But this one was handled very well, I think, particularly in the way Resi 6 handles the build-up.
Speaking of which, these are concept sketches for just that build-up. In-game I don’t remember it being quite so toothy.
Really sorry about the focus on this one, got a close-up for the next shot tho – this is the snake picking off one of Chris’s team.
EXXTREEEMMMME CLOSE-UP! Of all the horror cliches, being attacked from above is still the one that makes me go ‘brrrr’ a bit inside
The Fly is one of the weaker enemies in Resi 6, in terms of how you engage with it. But I think the design’s wonderful – look at that hand at the bottom.
The Ogroman (where do they come up with these names?) looks a lot different to this in the final game, and not all for the better. It’s a bit more exagerrated in its features, but I prefer this more understated and pallid interpretation
Leon’s first encounter with the ‘Whopper’, and you’ve got to love that name. These artists are amazing, aren’t they?
The Whopper in action. These turn up a few times, and it’s a kind of running joke they get stuck in a few places. Resi 6 has a sly streak of humour running through it, one of the things I most enjoyed.
This is the Shrieker, which dies in the most awesome way if you pop its throat. Love the detail on its spinal column, and the visualisation of its dysmorphia from various angles
The Lepotitsa, one of my favourite Resi 6 moments. The concept of this enemy, and its various characteristics, is matched perfectly to the situations in which you encounter it.
Wish I had a few more, particularly of the other bosses, but this was what was on the walls. Hope you enjoyed!
It’s good to remind ourselves why we love them. And so I thought it would be nice to share some photos I took while visiting the Osaka HQ of Capcom. This company is one of my all-time favourite developers, responsible for more great games than almost any other thirdparty, and I was lucky enough to go there during the development of Resident Evil 6.
I’ll separate out the photos of Resi 6 concept art and put them in a different post, for convenience’s sake. Here we’ll get a look at the building, the devs, and the most awesome merchandise room in the world.
It may look nondescript, but this… this is a MAGIC FACTORY
Capcom’s front door!!! I know!!! XD
This was the Resi 6 development floor. Look at them beavering away.
Another shot of the devs – at the back, you can see a reference mannequin for the BSAA troops
They actually have the Resi typewriter!
I’m giving you another angle on this sweetass setup, because I know you want it
OK. Those of you with no patience for toys had better beat it. Here comes the good shit.
A Fryuit machine?
You KNOW you want to insert a coin in this bad boy
OK, loads of games. we get it Capcom. SHOW US THE TOYS
I hate this meme, but sometimes you’ve just got to say shut up and take my money
Yep. Dante, DMC3-style. They’ll never better him.
DMC3′s Virgil. He knows Dante’s the boss. Loser!
What the hell, why not let Virgil share the spotlight for a moment.
How could you say no to such an attractive salesperson?
Stop the world: Capcom have invented this.
If you don’t realise why this shit is awesome, you don’t dig Monster Hunter. Get orf moi land!
Monster Hunter Kitchen?!? I’ll drink to that!
OOS A GOOD BOY THEN
I SEE… YOUR SOUL
Your eyes do NOT deceive you, fucking GOLD AND SILVER MEGA MAN!
GOLD MEGA MAN, I SAY!
Hope you enjoyed them! I’ll whack up the Resi art soon enough, keep an eye on the old twitter.
The following relates to tweets made on the evening of Wednesday 10th October.
In a moment of anger at Future I said many things that I should not have. I retract them in full and they should not be repeated or reported as fact. I apologize to Future and all parties referred to directly or indirectly in my statements.
If you see anyone referencing my now-deleted tweets, please point them here.
I will be making no further comment on this matter.
One of the most common disagreements within games journalism is about whether companies should be referred to as singular or plural. Valve is a great company. Valve are a great company. Is Valve a singular entity, or a group of people? Clearly it’s both, with each somewhat defining the other. But that doesn’t quite answer the question.
I always come down on the side of the singular, but I understand why others don’t. Especially now. The other night on twitter I went on a rant about Future Publishing, something reckless that has subsequently given rise to much commentary, and a pretty eye-opening Neogaf thread. My motivations were simple and ignoble: I’d been treated badly by some of the company’s employees over the past year or two, it had happened again recently, so I thought “I’ll show them.” It’s strange how the majority of the time, twitter feels like bitching to your mates – and then something like this shows you it’s anything but.
Am I proud? Time was when I dreamed of becoming Edge’s editor, rising through Future’s ranks to be in charge of the magazine I’d loved since I’d first clapped eyes on it as a spotty 14 year old. Instead I left Future on the verge of a nervous breakdown, having worked myself to the bone as part of an editorial skeleton staff, reaching a stage where I literally couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. The company just didn’t advertise for new people until it was far, far too late, and one can only guess at management’s motivations for this. But three people ran the editorial side of Edge and Edge Online over this period and did an incredible job, I think, even if it’s not one they ever should have had to.
I’ve deleted almost all of the tweets from the other night, and obviously people have been asking why. Backtracking? Simple cowardice? There’s an element of both, of course, but far more important was my shock at how one man’s unverifiable ranting had turned into evidence for a narrative that people had already decided on.
I have seen and worked with bad people. Bad journalists, bad ad-men, bad managers, and not just at Future. As a percentage of the number of people I’ve worked with, however, they don’t even register a single digit. The vast majority are nothing like this. But what I failed to realise is that when you talk about bad apples, people think you’re talking about the barrel. There is already this suspicion that games journalism is totally corrupt, with every score available for sale, and I fell right into the trap of adding grist to this mill.
There’s one tweet I especially regret, can’t even remember what it was in response to, but I basically said ‘Future is bent.’ That is an outright lie, and I deserve to be pilloried for it – not just because it’s untrue, and I am telling you now it’s untrue, but because I’d have no way of knowing. I haven’t worked there, in the building, in years. This is a point many people seem to have missed: all of my firsthand knowledge is based on a company from three or four years ago. The management of Future’s games division has changed entirely in that time. Hell, most of the staff in Future’s games division have changed.
Did my motivations give people pause before reporting? The fact I’m a disgruntled ex-employee with a grudge, clearly taking down a bridge with several tonnes of dynamite and all guns blazing? Of course not! One of the most amazing things about this whole affair, which caught me totally off-guard, was that of all the outlets reporting on this, a single solitary one got in touch to try and check the veracity of what I’d said. Do you know who it was? Kotaku. Fucking Kotaku! I have criticised Kotaku in the past for their addiction to lady pictures and Bomberman cakes, but here they were the one place that actually thought it was worth trying to establish the truth of the matter beyond a nobody’s twitter feed.
Neogaf, of course, is a law unto itself, full of wiseass cynics and anonymous authority figures claiming to have insider knowledge of everything. Well, I certainly gave them what they wanted. A friend of mine made a good point about this:
“You’re not just poisoning Future’s well, I’m afraid. When people are given license to assume that every opinion is purchased, every editor is a liar or a pedophile, you’re tainting the ground water in its entirety.”
That made me think more than anything else. I don’t regret having a go at Future, because the behaviour of some of its employees towards me has been abominable, and I’ll be damned before I sit down like a good little freelancer and take it. But I do regret failing to make that distinction between the company and them – Future is not a singular entity, but in my anger I treated it as such. And you can’t depend on others to be able to parse those things when you haven’t.
Let me spell it out. Is Future bent? No. Have I seen individuals do bad things? Yes. And to be honest, I’ve just as often seen people TRY to do bad things, and get slapped down by management.
So draw your own conclusions. But don’t take one angry man’s twitterings as gospel, and don’t mistake score-settling as the truth about score-selling.
Yesterday, a review I’d written for the magazine PSM3 was instead published on CVG. This site is one of Future Publishing’s biggest, a videogame news hub with all the trimmings, carrying forward a name with real heritage. Well, for us UK types anyway.
I don’t like being associated with CVG, and I said as much on twitter. This was noted by the site’s staff, who asked me why, and because I didn’t really want a bunfight I just left it there. But clearly I made an impression, because now they’ve decided to post about how rubbish my review is in the comments.
Not nice, is it? Of course I wasn’t the best fit for CVG, I’ve got a fucking brain.
So seeing as the gloves are off, I guess should explain why I was unhappy with my review being on CVG. Of course, Future’s contract with me lets them republish work across their sites, that’s not the problem.
There are three reasons, so let us pay tribute to CVG by doing a numbered list.
1. CVG deliberately misquote developers
Two months ago I visited Platinum Games’ offices in Osaka, and one of the first things said to me was about CVG misrepresenting something their developers had said. I was there for CVG’s publishers Future, so I had to take shit because of their practices. CVG’s writers might recognise the piece that came from this, it’s the one that’s been giving them bylines for the past week.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Braid’s creator Jonathan Blow on his experience with CVG, an article called ‘CVG appear to be a bunch of lousy hacks‘. Sample quote: “CVG’s article is a deceptive, manipulative piece of sensationalist crap meant to drive hits by stoking the argument between Sony fans and Microsoft fans. It misrepresents the content of the interview almost entirely.”
2. CVG pull slimy stunts like domain squatting
One of the most incredible things I’ve ever, ever seen in the bubble of games journalism was when CVG, looking at VG247.com‘s success, decided to buy the domain vg247.co.uk and redirect it to CVG’s own homepage.
Wait, what? Yeah, that’s right. Someone at CVG thought it was a great idea to buy up a competitor’s potential future web address, and then redirect it to their site.
The ethics of this are incredible, and it’s laughable Future thought they’d get away with it. VG247 made some threatening noises and Future backed down immediately. Someone still owns it though, and I doubt it’s Pat Garratt.
3. CVG hates women
A couple of months ago, I was discussing writing an article on sexism in the games industry with an editor. It never came to anything, because I didn’t feel I had much to add to the debate beyond ‘man-children should grow up, what is this the 1930s’, and I also came to feel that it shouldn’t necessarily be a guy writing an article about the discrimination women in the industry endure.
Now it’s clear I should have been much more aggressive about doing that piece, and said stuff I thought was obvious. Because the sad thing is we still live in a world where a site like CVG thinks it’s perfectly fine to do this:
That’s a 63-page ‘Booth Babes’ gallery from this year’s E3; not only that, here’s the opening sentence that was subsequently removed:
“We here on CVG like to use a 10-point review system, but if you’re more simple-minded you could just settle with ‘would’ or ‘not with yours, mate’.”
Just think about that for a second: CVG thought that the problem was with that line, rather than the gallery itself.
Is it not amazing that we live in the year 2012? Stuff like this is the bane of the industry, one of the cancers that has to be cut out in its entirety before it can become a better place for 50% of the population. The world is full of casual sexism, and the only thing it has more of is blokes who think it’s all laugh.
CVG’s editorial motivation behind this, of course, was much more calculated – it will get hits. CVG are not doing stories like this out of naivety, but because they know they can exploit these women in a way that will give their numbers a boost. It is breathtaking to think about the kind of men, and of course they are men, who consider this a winning strategy. ‘Yeah it’s sexist, but it does the numbers.’
I’m not the morality police, but fuck these guys. Sites like CVG do everyone in this industry a disservice, because it’s made by mouthbreathers that think women exist to be perved on. Julie Horup’s contemporary blogpost gave a perspective I can’t, and perhaps if you’re male you should read it.
CVG don’t give a fuck, of course, about gender equality.
—
That bothers me much more than the misquotations, vg247.co.uk, or a parasitic reliance on the work of others. I don’t want to be associated with CVG because I regard their sexism as old-world scumbag thinking. The kind of people who would publish something like that could only be dickbrains. Why would anyone want to be linked to them?
So that’s why I don’t like my writing appearing on CVG. It’s a shitty site in the first place, and it perpetuates and encourages sexism.
I hope that clears things up!
UPDATE:
With thanks to John Walker, here’s CVG’s original frontpage for the Booth Babes story.
I wrote a Saturday Soapbox this past weekend on the Ouya, the Android games console that dominated the news last week. Something struck me about it as fishy right from the off, and lo and behold today the company has announced it’s seeking more funding. As you’ll see from the end of the Eurogamer article, this is one of the scenarios I though might be lurking behind the crisp pitch.
“There are three possibilities with Ouya. One is that it is an outright scam. One is that its makers are sincere but hopeless dreamers. And the most likely is that this Kickstarter is to impress real investors. The gaming public is being leveraged in the hope that their money can be used to attract even more money.”
It’s hard to call something an outright fraud, because by their nature frauds can be convincing. But I think there’s a case at the very least here that the company behind Ouya has obtained money through misrepresenting what the Ouya kickstarter was for. People thought they were handing over $99 for a console to be delivered in March, it’s as simple as that.
Will they get it? I wish them luck.
Anyway. One thing folk picked up on is that Minecraft and Madden are already on the Android store, so my saying they won’t be on Ouya is wrong. I clearly didn’t make the point well enough – Ouya is a home console, being sold on the ‘TV experience’. Do you really think Pocket Minecraft is what they’re implying will be on the machine, or the mobile version of Madden? This is another example of how Ouya and its supporters are twisting definitions in order to fit a narrative.
This dashboard mock-up owes more to Xbox Live than fresh open-source thinking
Ouya is going to be the name of a famous cautionary tale, mark my words.
Football is the global sport: a phenomenon that crosses all borders. Its exact origins are lost in time, but the modern game was born in 1863 with the rules of England’s new Football Association. The English are, of course, better known for bureaucracy than humility, so I think it rather fits that their claim of having invented football rests on having come up with the rules.
This goes hand-in-hand with another trait of the English football fan, a love of statistics that goes far beyond attention to detail. A fan of any team can reel off their triumphs and worst years. But there is a part of the English that delights in historical form, possession bars and completion percentages. I remember growing up and watching Statto on Fantasy Football League. Here was a character that was originally written as a joke part and instead became a cult hero, probably the most enduring part of the show’s appeal.
The English love statistics. After England’s defeat in Euro 2012, the national post-mortem focused on passes completed. Shots, corners, tackles. Players were ranked, compared, analysed like racehorses. But England’s greatest contribution to the modern game, for me at least, has nothing to do with Wayne Rooney. Instead, it’s the amazing world of Football Manager. It’s not just a videogame. It’s far more important than that.
“I think it is important to win a match, but I think what is even more important is the manner in which you win.” – Jock Stein
Created by Sports Interactive, Football Manager is the pinnacle of statistical simulations – and I’ve lately come to think that its obsession with minutiae reflects its cultural origins. And the numbers suggest a story: roughly half the series’ 15 million lifetime sales have been in the UK.
Football Manager is a game of numbers and pattern-spotting, a world where every player is broken down into a dizzying number of individual statistics. In the 1990s the details were convincing and accurate. But recently they’ve become incredible. It blew my mind to find out that Everton now pay Sports Interactive for access to its scouting data, and I bet they’re not the only Premier League club.
Why? Football Manager has something incredible behind it: an invisible army of researchers criss-crossing the professional leagues of the world and feeding back information. Each region is headed up by researchers that employ others, so in total there are more than a thousand scouts reporting to Sports Interactive. One of my mates worked for them a few years ago reporting on lower division Welsh league games. Think about that level of passion for a minute. I can’t even name three Welsh teams.
It is a scouting network unique in games, and more thorough than much of what’s in actual football. Such quantity of data might seem excessive, but it is the entire point of Football Manager. The mental pleasure of football is in directing players, comparing stats, and playing out what-if scenarios. The match is everything, but the context creates it.
Football Manager is for football fans obsessed with stats – in other words, it’s not for everyone. But anyone can see its player database is one of gaming’s great wonders, a visionary intersection with the sport that has no parallel. You can tell Football Manager is made by an English developer, I think, because its fascination with football goes so far beyond a mere enjoyment of the physical sport. The England football team rarely live up to the expectations and pride of their fans. But from every one of Football Manager’s endless and accurate statistics, the nation’s obsession shines forth.
This is an edited version of a piece originally published on sportbox.ru
Most of my work that appears online is for the excellent Eurogamer, I love them. I work less and less for magazines these days, which is a sad symptom of change – every year I look at the ABCs when they’re released, an old habit, and every year they disappoint. The mags are as good as ever, mostly, but when you look at something like Nintendo Gamer it’s enough to make you cry.
Nintendo Gamer was a relaunch of NGamer about six months ago, and the magazine that team produces is phenomenal. I really mean it, some of the best games mags I’ve ever seen, and absolutely perfect in the mix of content and tone for Nintendo fans. The sales? I don’t even want to mention them. Nintendo Gamer proves that quality doesn’t guarantee sales.
I started off as a games writer on mags, because when I was a kid the nights when my dad would bring home a Your Sinclair were the best of the month. Those tapes! They usually had about a dozen games on them, a mix of demos and full titles, and if you were lucky about half would work. Anyway, enough. I’ll write more about mags soon, past and present, because they still fascinate me.
What have I done recently? Well, not much, but some things.
A piece of art from the MSX manual. Snake looks a bit different, doesn’t he?
I wrote a retrospective on the original Metal Gear for Eurogamer. It’s a curious game, as you’ll hopefully see in the piece, not least because of the rose-tint you can’t help but have when looking back at something with such a legacy. The Metal Gear series is so interesting, so intricate and bound-up in a panoply of its creator’s obsessions, and with Metal Gear 4 produced what I consider to be a defining failure – yet shortly afterwards, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was released, a game with all of the brilliance and invention MGS4 was so sorely lacking in. I’ll come back to Metal Gear in the not-too-distant future.
There are also quite a few Apps of the Day I’ve done for Eurogamer recently. This is a series that’s been running daily for six months (ish) now, though it’s just started to become less frequent. I can kind of see why, but at the same time they were great to write, and I ended up doing quite a few.
Reiner Knizia’s Samurai is an incredibly elegant hex-based turn-taking game, where you battle for control over landmarks in feudal Japan. Equally refined is Ticket to Ride, a route-laying multiplayer game that produces the kind of situation I love – where everyone’s waiting for the others to act, before one move sets off a flurry of action.
There’s also Swords and Soldiers HD, Ronimo’s excellent 2D strategy title, which for my money fits iPad better than it ever did the Wii. And a shoutout for Kingdom Rush, too, a superb Tower Defence that differentiates itself with smashing upgrades.
Assassin’s Creed Recollection in action, complete with rage-quitter
I did a proper big review of an app as well, the latest version of Duels of the Planeswalkers, which is ace. It’s as good as Magic (one of the best games ever) could be on a tablet, I think, which is why it’s interesting something like Assassin’s Creed Recollection feels so much slicker.
ACR is a game designed by wizards. I did that as an App of the Day absolutely ages ago, and I still play it almost every day. And I’ll do a post soon about the things I’ve learned from being in the online wilds with extremely good players. I’m now in the top 1000, and the things that have started happening with decks are pretty interesting – basically, how much can you squeeze out of fixed rules? Not much? I’ve seen shit that’d turn you white.
Yesterday I put up an old interview with Dustin Browder, and today it’s Brian Kindregan. Kindregan is the lead writer on Heart of the Swarm, and joined the Starcraft II team about one year before Wings of Liberty was completed. Before that he was a Bioware man, working on games Mass Effect 2 and Jade Empire, as well as storyboarding the Oscar-winning short The Chubb Chubbs back in 2002.
But the most impressive thing about Kindregan is that prior to meeting him I had a fairly apathetic attitude towards Starcraft’s lore. I love Starcraft multiplayer, was the thinking, and so whether it comes with a story doesn’t concern me. As with most things, researching for the interview beforehand exposed my own ignorance of an intricate piece of world-building. Starcraft’s universe is in the traditions of the best science fiction: it is infested with all sorts of alien scum and villainy, but rooted in humanity. Over our chat Kindregan stoked my nascent interest, and convinced me it’s not all based on Warhammer 40,000.
If you’re interested in Kindregan’s work I recommend this great short story on Blizzard’s site: Mothership. He has his own site too but clearly doesn’t use it – hell, when millions of people are playing through your stories, who needs a blog? Enjoy the interview.
Brian T. Kindregan
Rich Stanton: You’re humanising a race that’s totally animalistic – where do you start?
Brian Kindregan: I start by thinking about it quite a lot, writing down a lot of notes and trying to figure out a way to not totally screw up the Zerg. As you said it’s essentially trying to figure out what it is about that race that humans can react to and understand and plug into, without turning them into human beings wearing Zergy suits. We definitely want to keep that strange alien ‘other’ quality to them. But at the same time they have to have something we can plug into as viewers and sort of understand and buy into.
RS: What would that be?
BK: There’s a lot of different ways to think about it. I mean, just by having voice acting – a human being, even if they have a strange accent, saying these lines of dialogue immediately pulls you in because your ears and your brain make certain judgements about a character based on the way that they talk.
I think for me the biggest thing about the Zerg is that they have a sense of belonging: obviously they’re a hive mind and many Zerg don’t even have individual sentience, but certain Zerg do – like queens, for instance, cerberates. Overlords as well, interestingly enough – I’ve discovered a lot of people don’t know that.
There are certain characters as well obviously, but even if they’re sentient they’re still part of a greater whole, and this is something that they share with the Protoss who have the Khala, right? I think they percieve themselves to be part of… I wouldn’t say a community because it’s something deeper than community, but to share in something greater than themselves all the time.
That’s something that I think many people feel some degree of – whether it’s the town you grew up in, a particular neighborhood or just your family. That’s something humans think about quite a lot – do I belong, do I belong in this group, how does this group feel about that group? All of that is a very human thing, but it’s also an entry point for us to understand how the Zerg think and feel, and it opens up into a whole universe of very non-human things.
RS: Were you tempted to not have them speaking?
BK: That’s something we’ve debated quite a bit and there’s still possibilities for characters who might make growling noises or whatever – another possibility is to have characters who speak but their mouths don’t move because they’re all psionically linked – which would be factually correct, but would sort of look broken visually. There are a number of ways to go and we’ve explored all of them and we might use all of them or just some.
RS: How do you come up with the GRAWR noises the Zerg do make?
BK: Well that, really as a writer I don’t have to worry about – I just call the sound department and say ‘Hey, can you give me like twenty different growls? Make some of them sound irritated. OK great, bye!’ It’s the easiest part of my day.
Kerrigan
RS: Kerrigan seemed to veer between bloodthirsty and philosophic at a quick pace – do you think of her in terms of one mind or multiple personalities?
BK: I wouldn’t say she’s quite fractured into multiple personalities. She’s struggling in a couple of ways. One is, I equate it to having drunk quite a bit the night before and you wake up and have fuzzy memories of doing some things and some of them might have been quite bad and you’re trying to piece it all together.
She’s struggling with what she did as the Queen of Blades [lots of genocide], and whether or not that’s really her or was it this other person or is it some combination of the two. And then there’s even things she did way back when she was a Ghost assassin when her memory was regularly wiped so she’d only have fractured bits from that as well.
Taking the sum total of all these half-remembered things into the present and trying to figure out who she is now and who she needs to become – what she needs to do to survive and whether it’s worth surviving at all. There are so many things weighing on her that she’s going to struggle and swing back and forth between some extremes for a while. And some of that is also stuff that moving forwards we might smooth out a little.
RS: Is that development in any way player-authored by, for example, the battle focus paths you choose in the campaign?
BK: I’m not sure if that’s the source but we’re definitely looking at ways to keep the player engaged with the battle focus.
Statue of Mengsk
RS: Kerrigan’s troubles are on a galactic scale, like you say. So why’s she still obsessed with Mengsk? Surely he’s a speck.
BK: I tend to think it would actually magnify that. If I was the leader of a race and there was someone who had done some really terrible things to me in the past and I had tried to kill them a couple of times and not succeeded I think that that would magnify their position to the extent I would be obsessed with killing them.
RS: It sounds like your job involves a lot of interesting self-projection
BK: [laughs] Yeah that is most of my job, trying to step into someone’s head like that.
RS: Starcraft II’s episodic structure is expanding the universe in a big way. How do you do this in a way that doesn’t suck like, for example, Star Wars?
BK: It’s always a risk. It is a big problem too of perception – I mean, for me, I feel the same way about Star Wars, the first three movies, well the first two really. And I’m probably sitting here today because of A New Hope a little bit. But at the same time, as terrible as this is to say, I’ve met some younger people who were 12 when the new movies came out and they think they’re awesome. I don’t know what’s wrong with those kids but… a part of it in other words is that I’m so invested in that experience I had when I was seven, because I am very old and was actually alive when Episode IV came out, that of course everything that comes after can’t be as good. That stuff that came out when I was in my twenties? It can’t be as good. I was in my twenties.
There are still lessons to be learned though – you want to find out what the core values of that universe are and try to stick with those. Starcraft for instance is a grim dark place where people die all the time. And none of them die in bed surrounded by many loving grandchildren. It just doesn’t happen in the Starcraft universe.
Of course there will be creative decisions along the way that people will not be thrilled about, but keeping those kinds of things in mind are ways to stay true to a universe and expand it while still keeping it all a part of the same thing and not have that feeling of ‘Oh – they sold out’ or whatever.
RS: You say grim, but I always quite liked the little bit of hokeyness in the first Starcraft – did SCII consciously move away from this?
BK: I wouldn’t say that was conscious… I think that we were focused on setting the tone for what that universe is right now. The original was quite a grim dark thing punctuated by those moments, yes, but we had quite a few moments in Wings – whether we had enough or not I don’t know. The news got pretty goofy at times, and there’s the moment you find out Matt Horner, a very very serious character, was apparently involved in a shady marriage to a merc with a cybernetic eye… there were a few of those.
RS: In terms of HotS what we’ve seen is very Kerrigan-focussed, is that true of the whole?
BK: I think yeah. Right now the plan is to have her on most of the maps – one of things about hero characters is that they’re really fun to play with, I think. But to be honest one of the things in the original Starcraft was I would start a mission with Jim Raynor and the game would say JIM RAYNOR MUST NOT DIE, so guess what? I wouldn’t use Jim Raynor – he was in the back of my base hiding. I didn’t really use him that much.
I think a great example of using hero characters and having it work well was the cave mission near the end of Wings of Liberty where you had four hero characters and three could ‘die’ which meant they just fell over – but as long as one was still standing all three would heal and get back up. That was fun but then…
JIM RAYNOR MUST NOT DIE
RS: There’s something unrealistic about being surrounded by monsters and effectively spraining an ankle.
BK: Yeah, exactly. I think Kerrigan offers us an opportunity to do that – have a hero character right in the heart of battle doing all sorts of crazy things and commanding her army – and yet not have that threat of losing the entire mission just because you didn’t husband her hit points. I don’t know if she fell in combat for you, but she gets transported back to the hatchery and after a time gets reborn.
RS: How does the planet mechanic work?
BK: It depends very much on the world – obviously on Char there were quite a lot of Zerg running around, many of them feral. And then you have K’aldar which previous to Queen N’asbash bring her brood there was empty of Zerg. And Kerrigan doesn’t really recover many Zerg from that planet. So it depends. She will go places where there is no Zerg presence and then she will go places where there most definitely is.
RS: In general though we’re talking about Kerrigan re-infesting the sector here?
BK: Yeah, she’s definitely re-building the Zerg swarm in the Koprulu sector, this is a resurgence of the Zerg who were shattered when she was de-Zergified but also before that she had kind of gone quiet and brought back most of her forces to Char in the four years between Brood War and Wings – now the entire sector is getting shaken up and it’s all changing.
RS: What can you tell me about that teaser trailer?
BK: Very little. It is definitely a teaser and supposed to whet the appetite but it’s also a spoiler-ific section of the story so… I could synopsise what you saw but…. you’ve seen it. There’s Nova though, that’s interesting.
RS: Is Tychus proper dead?
BK: Yes.
RS: Would you say ‘Will’ is the theme of HotS’s campaign?
BK: Yeah, that’s interesting that you picked up on that. Yes, absolutely – strength of will and force of will are absolutely… I was just about to make a terrible pun and say [laughs] she WILL take control. But no, strength of will and force of will are a huge part of what makes Kerrigan what she is and what the Zerg are about, I mean literally it is a leader controlling a race based on their strength of will. To me it kind of goes back to what a lot of the characters in Starcraft are about – again, these are not the kind of characters that die in bed. And a lot of times the only thing that carries them forward is sheer will.
RS: Is there some kind of connection between Nova and Kerrigan we don’t know about?
BK: There was a manga put out that shows they trained at the same Ghost academy, but they weren’t there at the same time. Nova is I think about ten years younger than Kerrigan. Kerrigan was the most powerful student they ever had at that academy, and Nova was the only one that ever came close to her.
I accidentally took the above image while screengrabbing the new Monster Hunter 4 trailer, and for a brief instant felt like DeadEndThrills. If that’s the first time you’ve heard of that site, leave here immediately, because it contains the best pictures of videogames ever taken by anyone, and is constantly updated.
Back to Monster Hunter 4. If you haven’t seen last week’s trailer, I thoroughly recommend it.
Capcom have gone very Dragon’s Dogma with this, most notably in the clambering and the guy wielding a greatsword in mid-air. Grabbing monsters I like very much, because Dragon’s Dogma’s combat has a winning blend of depth and immediacy that can easily be married to the greater precision of a Monster Hunter. Well, I say easily. But I really don’t like the jumping attack. Weapons in Monster Hunter are brilliant because of the detail that goes into their use – as in, ‘how would a guy actually swing this thing at a giant dragon?’ The only other (thirdperson) games with weapons like it are the Souls duo, and for me it’s the biggest part of why I like hunting monsters.
People often talk about accessibility and depth like they’re two different things, which is to ignore all those games that get it right. Blizzard are absolute geniuses at this. I’d say Vanquish is another – much as I love Bayonetta, I’ve seen too many people put off to include it here. The trick is instantly gratifying feedback, the gift that keeps on giving. When a punch isn’t just a punch, but a zooming fist of justice that connects every time with a gigantic wham, you’re onto something that will delight new players (keeping them in to learn more) and keep on delighting grizzled vets hundreds of hours later.
Capcom, whatever the company’s other weaknesses, has always been great at this. It’s no surprise that the Monk class in Diablo 3 has basically been constructed by looking at old Capcom games. So I’ve got a lot of faith they can pull off MH4′s new system, but that midair greatsword swing does make me worry. It seems crazy to say this about Monster Hunter, but it’s just not realistic. And no matter how much jazzy feedback they incorporate into this new system, as soon as the emphasis moves away from quasi-simulation of weapon swings and precision blows, it’s not going to be the same. I’ve got a lot of faith in Capcom, but all the same: talons crossed.
