una entrevista al PRESI DE FACTOR 5(creador del Lair)

"Factor 5 has undergone quite a transformation. Once synonymous with Star Wars games and Nintendo consoles, the developer has moved onto original titles and a tight working relationship with Sony. We sat down with the company’s co-founder and president, Julian Eggebrecht, and discussed the Nintendo split, controllers and what goes into making the best possible dragon simulator.

Game Informer: Prior to Lair, Factor 5 worked very closely with Nintendo. Why did you decide to split apart, and was the split amicable?

Julian Eggebrecht: Yeah, the split was extremely amicable—you’ll see me drinking as much with the Nintendo people as with the Sony people (laughs). It’s a small industry, after all, so no bad feelings. It was at the point in time when we saw that we wanted to move on to next-gen. Quite frankly, Nintendo hadn’t made up their plans yet completely. For us, it was simply something where we already saw the initial direction of the Wii slightly, and at the time they hadn’t really completely figured out yet the extent of the motion control and the extent of how much they would be doing with the wand and everything. So it was more about, “We’re going to keep the specs for graphics and sound on the same level, and then we’re going to do something else which is cool.” Quite frankly, if you don’t have the complete stuff in front of you—which they didn’t at the time—that’s a scary proposition for a developer, who’s looking for, “Well, we should go high-definition and 7.1 audio and all of these things.” And so, in 2004, when all of that happened, it was just logical for us to move on there. And that’s how it happened with Nintendo, end of story. We talked to them openly back then, we talked to Sony—we also talked to Microsoft—and Sony really had the whole package. I was blown away, because initially, I was hoping for the motion control that would also be in the PS3. When we had our early talks with Sony, it was basically about our dream system. The dream system included high-definition graphics and definitely larger storage media, which at the time was Blu-ray—that was pretty clear—but also motion control. I was like, “Yeah, they’re probably not going to do anything with the motion control, but oh well. We’ll have to live with that.” That was kind of the final perfect dream come true when it finally happened with the PS3. But yeah, we’re still good friends with Nintendo.

GI: Some would say the GameCube was a failure. What do you think?

Eggebrecht: (Laughs) Was it a failure? You know what, those GameCube games that we did make a hell of a lot more sense when you put them into a Wii, just because they’re not in a GameCube, visually, and I think that says a lot about the system. I think in terms of the design, it certainly was a failure, because Nintendo wasn’t ready to step up to the plate of basically saying, “We’re going to embrace also more adult content”—and we’re not talking GTA necessarily here, but other things—just like a Star Wars Rogue Leader, that’s as adult as it went at the time, or Resident Evil. But they delivered a system that, in the end, was supposed to be like Apple had, but what it really was was just a weird mixture of design styles, which in the end were geared too young. (Laughs) Yeah, I love to play my games on the Wii, because it’s finally on a system that I was hoping would look like that than the GameCube.

GI: What are your thoughts on the Wii?

Eggebrecht: I love it, absolutely. I mean, I love it as much as the PS3. When I read all of those things about how you have to buy a 360 and a Wii, that’s not true. You have to buy a PS3 and a Wii—that’s the perfect combination.

GI: So why Sony and not Microsoft?

Eggebrecht: On the technology front, there is simply more vision at Sony. By now, there’s now more—if not more, at least equal—vision on the online front. I have to say that. When we talked to Sony and Microsoft at the time, Microsoft was very determined and they delivered very nicely on what they wanted to do with the 360. But even back then, there was the, “Well, 1080p? Well, we don’t know about that. Real high-definition? You know what? Let’s do 720p for the games, mostly.” And they’re doing catch up right now, and they’re doing it quite cleverly. But nevertheless, in the early days you had that as a vibe of the system. What was a killer for me was no HDMI. We had huge fights with Microsoft basically going back and forth about, “Please, please, please, please put an HDMI port in there, because only then can you really see the graphics,” and they said, “No, we’re designing the whole graphics chip around being analog.” And they’re retrofitting it now, trying to catch up with the PS3. But all of that vision was there, right from day one, with the PS3. That was very encouraging. Kutaragi-san, in that sense, is on the technology front, and I don’t think anyone would contest that it’s still the greatest visionary in the industry. So, it made it easy. Sony was the clear-cut, perfect match.

GI: At Factor 5, are you guys Sony second party, or are you free to do whatever you want?

Eggebrecht: We’re an independent, closely aligned with Sony developer. Let’s put it that way. We’re not owned. We’re completely independent. So, we’re like Insomniac, I guess, if you want to make a comparison.

GI: You announced your first game for GameCube when it was still the Dolphin named Thornado. Is that project completely dead, or is it something that you still have in mind?

Eggebrecht: I should stop the tease about that. That’s completely dead. What we are thinking about is basically with the PS3 is going back to our old Turrican games, and basically, finally doing something like that but in 3D. That’s finally going through.

GI: The old Commodore crowd is going to be so happy to hear about that—that’s awesome.

Eggebrecht: Yeah (laughs).

GI: Lair is your first title in a while that isn’t based in the Star Wars universe. Would you ever make another Star Wars shooter for next-gen?

Eggebrecht: It depends on the platform. I’d love to do one for the PS3—we have the wackiest thoughts about when people were saying, “Oh, it would lend itself to motion control and the Wii would lend itself so perfectly for doing a Star Wars.” You know what? We have been playing around with the motion control on the PS3 controller actually, and you wouldn’t believe what you would be able to do there. Having said that, though, last I remember, some guy named George Lucas owns the license, and unless he dumps it onto Sony because he’s so sick of it, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

GI: Was it refreshing to work with a fresh IP?

Eggebrecht: Yes. After Rebel Strike, I think it was a little of a “been there, done that” mentality. It’s really interesting at our place, because we are still right next to Skywalker Ranch—we basically still have all of our friends within the Lucas empire, of course, and we do get our new guys asking, “So we’re only working on new IP? Why aren’t we doing some Star Wars?” And all of the senior guys are basically saying, “Why would you want to work on Star Wars? Are you crazy?” (Laughs) It’s a strange thing—compare it to always having a childhood dream, and you have fulfilled it, and then you fulfill it twice. You then get stuck into something like, “Can I really put the passion in that I put into the early things?” After Rebel Strike, really the answer for me was, “It’s tough, no. I’ve done what I wanted to do in Star Wars,” and it applied to a lot of the other guys in the company, and that’s why we said no. Now we want to create our own things again. Childhood dream fulfilled, it was great, move on.

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: Panzer Dragoon?

Eggebrecht: Yes, but, that was a straight linear shooter. By the same token, you could have said when we did Rogue Squadron—which was the first free-flight, mission based shooter—basically we said, “We need to take that genre to the next level,” because Nintendo at the same time was doing Starfox 64. It was a gorgeously done 3D shooter, but nevertheless it was the old way. With Rogue Squadron, we said we had to reinvent this genre the same way that Mario 64 was also inventing free-form. So, with Lair, we thought about—and Panzer Dragoon did come up—the only well-done dragon game ever was Panzer Dragoon, but it was linear, and it didn’t take into account a lot of things. Because a dragon is constantly flying there, it doesn’t land on the ground.

When you think about dragons, then for me the first thing that came to mind and it was one of the initial takes in the concept of how our dragons look was, “OK, let’s not go the mythical route, but let’s go dinosaurs. More Jurassic Park than Tolkien,” and that was the first take. I think when you look at our dragons, they’re very lizard-like and have all of these influences to make them look more realistic. But in gameplay terms, it’s like the most powerful horse or riding animal that you ever imagined. Let’s go through the list. And then you do checkmarks, and you quickly realize that no other game has ever realized even half of the potential of what’s just inherent in a dragon and you riding a dragon.

So that was the first part. The other thing was that we wanted to write a story that actually lived up to probably a little bit higher ground than most of the stories being told in video games. We knew it would be violent, but at the same time we didn’t want to deliver violence just for the sake of being violent. Early on, we said, “Why don’t we also try to be a little more clever about the story?” Where we twist and turn, where you think you’re one thing but then it turns into something else. And there are interesting twists and turns and complete turnarounds in the story that you’re not expecting. We’re starting as an almost—and maybe that’s just a snippet of the story I can talk about right now—the game really starts out in our world, the 9/11 moment of the world, where basically the enemy is coming in and is completely surprising society and you’re in the air force, you’re in the military, and you’re completely blown away by it. You don’t know why, and we were playing it relatively straight in the beginning, and you’re thinking, “These are the enemies, I need to take them down,” and then boom boom boom, what you would expect. But then very quickly throughout the game, it develops that it’s not really the case, and there are completely different motivations here working on it, and there’s quite a complicated character arc for your character. That was a huge motivator to the team. Over the last month, actually, when we were putting together the story and the game and really weaving it together, a lot of the guys who’d been working only on the game parts basically saw some of the story elements for the first time playing out and said, “Wow, this is actually much more clever than I expected.”

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: One of the things you were criticized most in your last Star Wars game for the GameCube was the on-foot elements. They seemed kind of forced, to a point, and obviously your expertise is in flight games. What did you learn from that game that you’re bringing over to Lair.

Eggebrecht: Lair doesn’t have a shooter weapon on the ground, so you’re not running around with a character who basically would have a gun running around and shooting like crazy. So first of all, I think that comparison directly doesn’t apply. When you’re the guy on the ground, it’s merely to get to the dragon. It’s more to give the feeling that you really are that person, because you try to flee. You are an air force pilot, right, controlling these dragons. Usually, these guys are not perfect Navy SEALS who can basically fight off a horde of people, either. So, in the end, you just need to get to your dragon. So that is traditional Ratchet and Clank control, which is basically just the way you guys wanted it—which, by the way, we had in Rebel Strike at one point, and yes we should have kept it that way. I think, just to finish on that note, Rebel Strike’s biggest problem for the character mode was actually the camera system, because the camera was predefined, and was the taste of the day, and it was a bad, bad decision to do that. No, the dragon actually on the ground is very much inspired by the fact that we had tank versions of it, which felt too much like a tank. It’s a large creature, so what you now get is a lot of weight of the creature still, but the cool thing about having a video game is we can over-emphasize reality a little bit. So when the dragon latches onto humans, basically, we zoom in with the camera to give you close ups, and we actually do time jumps, a little bit Matrix inspired, where basically you get to engage with your enemies a little faster. Outside of that, it’s traditional melee combat with the added incentive of eating people.

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: When you say hidden things, is the Buick coming back?

Eggebrecht: (Laughs) Oh boy, it’s good that you remind me of that one. Yeah, it could.

GI: It could?

Eggebrecht: It could. Maybe. (Laughs)

GI: Good. We want Rudy’s Buick in there. It’s like a staple.

Eggebrecht: Yeah, I know. There’s like a couple of staples in there, including our hilarious logo trailers.

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.

GI: With your N64 titles and your GameCube titles, you were at the mercy of Nintendo’s always unique and different controllers. For example, the digital click on the GameCube controller.

Eggebrecht: That was perfect, by the way, for Rogue Leader. For most other games, it didn’t work—it was as though they put that feature in for us. Thanks, Miyamoto-san.

GI: What was it like switching to the PS2 controller—it’s kind of the standard at this point?

Eggebrecht: When you say that the PS3 controller is the PS2 controller, I would disagree actually. There are subtle improvements, which I think were very important. The shape is not exactly the same, with slight differences.

GI: And the triggers.

Eggebrecht: And the triggers—a big, big thing for us. When there were discussions going around about the controllers, what I was pushing for most were the triggers, I remember, and that was kind of a no-brainer that they would put it in—the triggers and the motion control, obviously. Everything else is great. It’s the only controller that if you ask people from all over the world—including Asia—they say it feels fine for their hands. We saw back in the day with Nintendo, they had an early prototype for the GameCube controller, which had longer handles in a very funny way resembling the early prototype for the PS3—the Boomerang. The funny thing for those of us watching was Westerners loved that—it was fantastic, because we tend to have larger hands. But apparently, and that’s when they went with the stubby one for the final GameCube controller, it was a real problem for Asian people. So the PS2 controller, or that basic concept, is really the only controller that really works with everybody in a really nice way. And it’s got the symmetry. I do appreciate the fact that the two analog sticks are on the same level. If you look at the controller, it’s very symmetric, in terms of feeling, and that’s very Japanese. Sony of Japan feels strongly about it, and rightfully so—it’s important. I think it makes it easier to adapt to the controller than any out there.

GI: You mentioned in an interview that your next project will be a downloadable game on the PlayStation Network.

Eggebrecht: We’re talking about that, and yeah, we’re working on some stuff—on small projects. We’re also working on large stuff, of course, but the EDI platform… As you can imagine, after two-and-a-half-years, people are a little burned out, especially people who have burned the midnight oil for a long time, and the EDI stuff is just perfect to say, “All right, let’s do this wacky little idea. Let’s not spend a lot of money on it, let’s not take a risk and get it out there, and if people love it, it might be a mini franchise. Or it might fail, but at least it didn’t cost that much.”

GI: What about bringing some of your older titles over on that?

Eggebrecht: in the context of what I mentioned there, which was EDI titles specifically for the first-party initiative, I don’t think that the current thinking from Phil Harrison is that under the worldwide studios umbrella he wants to see too many straight ported older titles. Having said that though, you’ve seen Midway’s announcement. The network platform is open to everybody, so there are other routes of releasing that content on network platform, and I’m sure that it’s going to come. We have been in some talks about rereleasing some of our old Turrican titles for the platform, but nothing’s been finished yet. I’d love to do it.

(SOBRE LO QUE VIENE AHORA,SON RESUMENES DE LOS USUARIOS DEL FORO VANDAL)


Factor 5 ama tanto a Nintendo como a Sony . Dice que la combinación perfecta es Wii-Ps3

Sobre X360 comenta que no le gusta que no tenga HDMI, algo asi como que sony tiene más visión de futuro.

“Please, please, please, please put an HDMI port in there (en x-box 360), because only then can you really see the graphics,” and they said, “No, we’re designing the whole graphics chip around being analog.”

Esto que dice es muy fuerte

De PS3 dice que es más fácil de programar que Ps2, pero muchísimo menos que NGC. Pero dice que se lo esperaba, porque ahí esta la potencia. Dice algo así que si el sistema es demasiado fácil de programar se pasa mucho tiempo intentando que el juego "quepa" en la consola. (o algo asi) Y dice que con PS3 no pasa, el cielo es el límite dice

Dice también que el Cell y el RSX está muy bien complementados y para acabar "It’s great hardware—it really is."

Dice que el mando de PS3 no es el de PS3, hay diferencias. Sutiles diferencias que el cree que son importantes. Cambia el tacto, los gatillos, etc.


-Su relacion con Sony es muy semejante a la de Insomniac. Vamos que tienen mas libertad que si fueran una second party.

-Hablan muy brevemente de Turrican , que podria volver en PS3

-La duracion de Lair sera entre 10-12 horas

-Estan muy contentos con el Hard de PS3. Los limites del hard son muy grandes. Segun ellos no hay que preocuparse de saber si la consola podra mover una determianda cosa. Por ejemplo dicen que podrian estar 3 años trabajando en un nuevo motro grafico , que estan seguro que PS3 lo moveria.

-Despues de Lair se pondran con pequeños proyectos que se podran descargar para PS3.