[Video] Too Human: Entrevista a Denis Dyack + Gameplay

transcripción escribió:Denis Dyack: My name is Denis Dyack, I’m the director of the Too Human trilogy. Q, actually, sorry, Ken (we call him Q or qbert), is a designer on the project, and he’ll be driving for me because I have a hard time doing more than one thing at once which is talking that’s hard to play, anyway he’ll be driving for us.

Too Human, is something that as a concept, we have been thinking about since 1994. We first created this concept before we started work on Legacy of Kain on the PSX. We've loved this project since Day 1, and we always wanted to take it to the next level.

With the game, you play a cybernetic god called Baldur whos charged with the defense of humanity against an army of machines bent on the total annihilation of all mankind. You're a cybernetic god not because of magic, but because your technology is so advanced you appear superhuman to everyone. You're going to find a lot of Norse mythology throughout this whole game, you'll see the gods of Thor, Heimdall, and you play Baldur. And you’re always being told, and this is where the title gets is name, that you’re “too human” and you need to further cyberneticly enhance yourself to deal with this growing menace.

One of the first things you'll notice about Too Human is that you do not control the camera. We feel strongly that gamers should not control the camera in videogames, because it adds this layer of complexity that you have to worry about gameplay plus control the camera. So even though what you are seeing may look like a cutscene, it’s actually not and Ken is in full control at all times. So what we're trying to do is merge gameplay with cinema in a way thats never really been done before, and by doing that, the whole tired way (in our opinion) of cinema gameplay will start to go away. So here you see Ken is still in full control, he can actually kill this guy (one monster featured prominently in the camera) before the "interactive cutscene" is done and he can start fighting right away.

Too Human uses a combination of very fast action swordplay or melee with gunplay. And the idea is that you should be able to pick up and play this game with literally no introduction. The controls have been made intuitive, so most players should be able to pick it up almost with no effort.

Now you’ll notice with the dynamic camera here, depending on what he’s doing, if the player starts shooting the guns, the camera will pull back to make sure you can see the threats in the immediate area, but if you start doing melee combat, it will pull in so you can see all the detailed action.

Now, one of the things that Too Human has been compared to is God of War or Devil May Cry, and we really love those games, but, to be really fair we're quite a bit different than those games, and where we really branch apart is that we are 4-player co-op over Xbox Live throughout the entire trilogy. So the single player experience is no different than the multiplayer experience, and you could just do the whole game co-operatively. Also, Too Human has a very deep role-playing element, where you can change your body parts out to effectively change your gameplay. So whether you want to cyberneticly enhance your legs to jump higher or you want to increase the strength of your arm to use bigger weapons, you will be allowed to do that in Too Human. And further beyond that, we also allow you to cater to which weapons you use, here you see the pistols and the sword, but you can use very different weapons as well like pole-arms or axes or hammers, or shields, depending on whatever you want to do.

So anyway here's one of the super moves where you create a gravity well to suck up the enemies and destroy them. There are hundreds of super moves in the game, and you can map them anyway you want depending on how you want to play whether you want to be more human or more cybernetic, there are different skill paths and different skill trees so in many ways this resembles games more like World of Warcraft or Diablo where you continue to fight enemies and gather epic items and improve your skillset.

This is a work in progress, so the framerate of course will be improved by the time we ship the game, and you'll probably see more enemies as well. We’re only showing a small number of the monsters right now – these are the goblins – we’ll probably show more throughout the demo, but, all I can say is that there are many many types of enemies, many types of races with different components that are very widely varied.

Question: You said there is 4-player co-op on Live, presumably you won't all be Baldur?

Denis: Actually you will all be Baldur. But, because there are so many different paths you can go down and what can be attained, one might be a damage dealer and not have as much armor for example, so that’s at least for the first game. The trilogy itself is well underway. The theme of the first game is Discovery, find out what’s going on, the second game's theme is Revenge, and the final game's theme is Enlightenment. And you'll be able to take your characters from one game to the next.

Question: So what you build up in the first game will transfer so the next game will give you the same profile?

Denis: Absolutely, that’s correct. The whole trilogy is built from the ground-up to support that.

Question: So, is the “Soul Reaver” in this game? *AMN*

Denis: Ironically, the Soul Reaver was a weapon that we first created for Too Human many years ago, and when we were working on Legacy of Kain at the same time I liked the concept so much I threw it in there. But no, Soul Reaver will not be making its appearance, we’re well beyond that stuff now, and actually we have a lot of different messages to say since that early time back in ’94. But thanks for asking it’s one of my favorite weapons still.

Question: What were the reasons why, well, its been in your thoughts and development since ’94…why now?

Denis: Well, back in 94 it’s always been our most favorite game to create. We first started on Legacy of Kain and worked on that for a while. Then we started working on Too Human right after Legacy of Kain on PSX, but we were also working on Eternal Darkness on the N64 with Nintendo. We became a Nintendo 2nd party, stopped all Playstation development obviously and started getting ready to move Too Human to the GameCube. After we finished Eternal Darkness on the GameCube, we then started working with Kojima-san on Metal Gear Solid, and so we said ‘ok, after MGS now we're going to do Too Human’, so we've been waiting to do this forever. At some point, Nintendo and Silicon Knights decided to go our own ways and that was the end of the last generation, and then we started thinking about the platform best for Too Human and the 360 actually allows us to have production values that are competitive with Hollywood. And if we’re really trying to combine entertainment and bring it to the next level, the Xbox 360 is actually perfect for that. So, it really was just timing that took us so long, but good ideas last forever. And we've been thinking about this game it’s been our passion, and Microsoft has been very very supportive and it’s been a collaboration, and working with Microsoft has helped realize our vision for it, in particular some of the online modes like the 4-player co-op through the whole trilogy probably wouldn't have been possible on any other platform. So, really it was a matter of timing more than anything else.

Question: How has the Unreal 3 Engine enabled you to do things that you’ve always wanted to? *AMN*

Denis: Right, well the Unreal engine is actually the first time we haven’t developed our own engine, what it allows us to do is focus on the content and not the technology. So our artists and game designers have been able to prototype stuff early and really really work out the gameplay, where as if you make your own engine, you really have to wait almost a year before you get into full development. So the Unreal engine is not only beautiful, but it allows us to rapidly prototype and test things so we’re pretty excited about it. And you know, we’re heavily modifying it as well so there’s a lot more to go, but once we’re done we think the results are going to be pretty spectacular.

Question: The camera system looks very much like Eternal Darkness… *AMN*

Denis: It is, well, Eternal Darkness is a small start, one of the things Eternal Darkness doesn’t do – here you can see some troll surfing there, if you jump on his back you can quickly kill him, and we’re using the camera here and the camera will tilt to tell you when you’re ready to do the final sword stab – we started thinking about camera systems back in…well before we started Eternal Darkness actually, and the camera system in Eternal Darkness was only based of environments so it always focused on the action correctly but never adapted to the combat, this system adapts to the combat.

Here’s our version of cyberspace – uh Q is almost dead here so it’s flashing red – but, our version of cyberspace, we wanted to juxtaposition it with all the different technology you see in the regular world, so this world is all completely natural, so that’s one thing we want people to think about as they’re playing the game. And you explore cyberspace looking for weapons and looking for upgrades…it’s this natural environment on what the world used to be like. Any other questions?

Question: In terms of the combat... The combat thus far on the show floor is not fully implemented so some would say its very limited, what can people expect from the final game? *AMN*

Denis: Well from the final game, you're obviously going to see improved framerates, more enemies, more detailed animation, and just continuing to add to it you're seeing a very small set of weapons as well, and we are just now developing the air-combat and the different combinations, so you have to consider that combined with all the role-playing elements, you can change your body parts out and get different skill sets that we haven't even gone into here, so as you continue to kill enemies you're going to get things like bounties and special weapons and special technologies that you can augment yourself with, none of that is being shown here, this is a very very small early slice of the game.

Question: Can you give us a hypothetical example of an augmentation? *AMN*

Denis: I could, but I don’t know if it’s too early to talk about it. But imagine augmenting your legs to jump higher, so things that actually change gameplay, imagine getting some ocular implants to change your vision modes. There’s all kinds of things we’re planning on doing that we’re just not talking about right now.

Question: How much voice acting is going to be in the game? *AMN*

Denis: The script for Too Human is much much larger than that of Eternal Darkness. So, this is the biggest title and the biggest amount of content we have ever done and we are not showing any of that here either. So, quite a lot actually, more than ever before.

Question: The demo levels shown here seem fairly linear, is that how the game is going to be? *AMN*

Denis: No, they're very small slices, they're meant to be linear because in the show there's a lot of noise, you can't hear what's going on, and we just want to give people a general gameplay experience of what it's going to be like, but yeah they're going to be open there's going to be areas to explore and take different paths and it's going to be quite a bit bigger.

Question: What’s the resolution of the game? *AMN*

Denis: It’s running at 720p.

Here’s something we call the “Contra moment” (camera enters a fixed position making it look like a 2D game), lets just show this moment really quickly. It’s kind of fun – there’s one of the Dark Elf leaders – there’s going to be bosses and stuff, but we don’t consider any of these enemies to be bosses. We sort of did a little homage to Contra here and with the camera system we can change the gameplay up quite a bit just by making the game look and feel differently.

Question: Are the animations motion-captured? *AMN*

Denis: Yeah, there's a ton of motion capture, there's more motion capture in this game than anything else we've ever done before. There's still a Lot to go in, and just the sheer amount of motion capture data is just insane actually. So we're still working on it and things are being dropped in as we go.


Denis closed up the presentation after this by letting members of the audience try the game. Our own hands-on impressions on the E3 demo will be up later today.

Be sure to check back with Advanced Media for more information and details on the progress of Too Human as we continue into the months ahead.