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Shack: Where can players pull of heists, and what loot can we go after? Is it a case of simply grabbing anything we can get our hands on, or are there specific objectives?
Scott Crisostomo: Players will be able to rob all sorts of different businesses in HEI$T--diners, strip ... Read more
Shack: Since combat is such a specific focus, tell us about the fighting system players will be using.
Slavo Hazucha: One of the main focus areas of our combat system is set on fighting involving duels with elvish opponents that are both noble and fierce. A thounsand year-old elvish warrior will not give up his life easily. To defeat them, you will have to partake in what we call cinematic duel fights.It is nice to hear about your interest in our fighting system, because this is really the most exciting area of the game. Our approach to the depiction of combat, the quality of character models, animations and mimics will allow us to show the fights in an unseen level of detail. We use a dynamic camera model and special camera perspectives to show these details and bring the player as close to the action as the gameplay controls allow.
Shack: What control options will Mortal Kombat: Armageddon support on the Wii?
Shaun Himmerick: It depends on what controller the player has chosen to play with. We have completely redesigned the controls of Mortal Kombat for the Wii remote and nunchuk system. However, if the player prefers [a more traditional set up] they can use the Nintendo Classic Controller or the GameCube Controller for every mode of the game. We wanted the player to have any option they could think of. On the Classic Controller and GameCube controller the controls are what you have always experienced with Mortal Kombat.
Shack: What was the rationale behind going for somebody like Scott? He's been lead designer on Tribes, worked on something that was more of an isolated online experience with Majestic, and recently the Syphon Filter games--none of those are MMO-related.
Mark Kern: If you look at what Scott's done, he's kind of been out there beating bushes before anybody else would for online gaming. I think that when Tribes came out, people had a hard time even understand what a team versus team shooting game was. If you look at the stuff he's done on Syphon Filter, there's like a mini version of Xbox Live built right in there. It's kind of amazing to pack that right in. I admire his work just in the online field, and also as somebody who thinks outside of the box. We don't want to create just another fantasy-based MMO. In fact, a lot of the WoW team weren't MMO makers before we set out. We had very few people with that kind of experience.
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[With MMOs,] you kind of have this long heritage going back to the MUD days, and that has kind of led to some inbreeding, and a lot of sacred cows, and I think we're kind of in a rut. I can say that I've actually deliberately gone out and not hired any MMO designers as a result of that. Definitely everyone here is a hardcore MMO player, very seriously, but I think that I'm looking for something different, for fresh ideas.
Alex St John: One of the things I think will happen to the games industry--in fact, I think it's happening now--is, I think a lot of what we know about the games industry will get buried pretty quickly. The traditional PC game business is collapsing. It went from a 2.2 billion dollar software business in the 1990s to less than a billion dollars last year--and it's still shrinking. What's happening is, the market is moving from single-player 3D games being the compelling thing to games becoming competitive in terms of how accessible they are to a broader audience, and how much community and social dynamics they support. What you see emerging is that the games business is moving online.
Shack: Why were these particular characters [Hulk, Venom, etc] chosen over others? Were there any the team wanted to include but couldn't?
Chris Palmisano: We worked closely with the Marvel Ultimate Alliance VIP community site to figure out what characters people wanted most for the downloadable content. Truthfully Hulk and Venom were going in regardless, but they are also fan favorites. Adding to the largest character roster ever in a Marvel game is always a challenge, but we were all excited to make the total number of playable characters 32.
We have four campaigns planned for the first version of Left 4 Dead on the PC. Each is comprised of 5 maps strung together with a loose narrative--usually of the "we gotta get outta here" variety. What's unique about these campaigns is that each is populated procedurally with our "AI Director." This is a technology we've developed to tailor each game session to the players' experience--if things are quiet, the Director may schedule an attack. If things have been intense for too long, it will schedule a break in the action. This allows every play session through each campaign to be completely unique each time it is played.
A month or so in, I still didn't know exactly what my job was until one of the guys who hired me said, "Write a strategy for how you would persuade the publishing industry to move to Windows." I spent a lot of time writing documents saying here's what our strategy should be, here's how we could convince companies to sign on, all that. I came in to do my presentation, and I got about three slides into it before I was interrupted by one of the executives saying, "This is all great stuff, you have a perfect plan. Developers who are reasonable should all support it, but what do you do if none of this works." "What do you mean?" "What if in spite of your best efforts, your best arguments, you best relationships, you can't get them to support them. How do you force the industry to support Microsoft anyway?" "Force them? Well, I don't know." "Come back when you have a plan that answers that question."
That perplexed me for a long time. I'm thinking, "What the hell does he mean, force them? I can't hold a gun to their head, so how do I put all these companies in a position where, regardless of what they see is in their best interest, they have to adopt your technology?" That experience had a major impact on my thinking. I realized that a major part of my job was to figure out how to use technology control to create economic force, or leverage, such that money and business flowed in Microsoft's direction, and people had to go [to them]. That, ultimately, is when I became a "Microsoft guy," when I got that concept.
The core game is free. You can kill monsters, gain levels and grab as much loot as you can carry without ever paying a dime. However, there are some perks to being a member (which only costs $4.99 a month). As a member, you have access to the in-game bank. This bank gives you a place to store all of the loot that you may want to save for later use. Members can also use special healing and mana potions. These members-only potions are more powerful than the free versions and can be put in stacks of five. The free potions cannot stack. This saves tons of inventory space to hold more loot! Finally, only members can access the best qualities of loot. Sure, free players can use some pretty decent stuff, but the members get the best of the best. Their loot looks better and has better stats. Indeed, if you like loot, be a member.
We spent a lot of time focusing on better ways of making the game accessible. I really want to make sure people don't confuse this with trying to simplifying the game. We felt that was the wrong approach. Instead we tried to find out ways to help people understand what was going on. Probably the best way to explain this is to point to specific features. The freeze-cam feature, when you die. We did a lot of play testing, and one thing we saw in TFC and other multiplayer games was the general confusion about death. A new player often dies. If we bring in a new player in and make him play any multiplayer game today usually he'll die a few times and not really know what killed him. What we tried to do is eliminate that kind of problem. What are the problems new players face when they play these kinds of games, and how do we solve them specifically? "Who killed me? Why did I die?" We want to say, you died, here's the person who killed you. Here's what he killed you with. So on. We take that opportunity to tell you things  hey look you're getting better at thingsÂwhich is the stat panel. The persistent stats. All these things are about solving this core problem. Our approach to dealing with all these new players was to try and help them walk them through the game so they understood every step of the way what was going on. How they were doing, how they were getting better and so on.
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