Interview Condemned 2: Bloodshot

X-Power: Could you start the interview off by introducing yourself and telling us what your job is at Monolith?

Frank Rooke: I’m the lead game designer on the Bloodshot project, or Condemned 2. What I do, I basically start the project off with the initial design and then I just creatively direct the team through the development. And I also helped develop the first Condemned by the same capacity.

XP: I don't know if the development team has played The Darkness, but I feel that it and Condemned 2 share some similarities in one regard alone. Both are primarily single player games, but Starbreeze added a multiplayer component to improve its replay value. However: The Darkness' multiplayer got a lot of negative feedback because it lacked polish, such as only a few options, a terrible netcode and so forth. As a result, very little people truely cared about The Darkness’ multiplayer.

Now, could you assure the fans that Monolith isn’t going to make the same mistakes with Condemned 2 and are trying to make a thoroughly polished multiplayer, instead of a quick ’n easy solution?

FR: Well, yeah: multiplayer from the very beginning, even from Condemned 1, is something that we wanted to have. We thought it’d be super fun to fight with melee in First-Person against your friends or people online, but it was too big of a risk at the time to put it into our launch title, because we absolutely wanted it to be a launch title. So we decided to cut our list down to something that was managable.

But in the background, the design, the intent, everything was still developing, so when the sequel rolled around, we were in a good position to really hit hard and so the design of multiplayer, the whole implementation of the multiplayer started from the very beginning and so it’s not something that’s just been slapped on, it’s not something to fill a tic box. Now, the level of success, you know… We’ll have to wait and see how that turns out. That’s the same kind of unknown we have with the single player, but I can honestly say that we are not slapping the multiplayer on to the single player game. It’s something that’s very important to us.

We do have the same reason: it’s something we wanted to have on the game to increase its longetivity, and I don’t know the history behind Starbreeze’s whole process, but we are definitely trying to make it as polished and as comprehensive as possible.

XP: On the subject of the multiplayer: how difficult was it to balance the entire thing for online play? Especially due to the nature of the franchise, where gunplay and melee combat are combined?

FR: Very, very, very difficult! (laughs) I can’t even stress how difficult it is… It’s difficult for the single player: because we have a combination of fire-arms and melee and fist fighting and everything… To balance that sort of trio of elements is hugely difficult, so the best thing we can do is just play it. Constantly play it and bring people in from the outside to play it. Internally we just constantly played it. And that’s just the best way to finetune the multiplayer, to constantly play it and I think it was played every single day where notes, observations were taken in regard balance, features, functionality, connection, everything.

XP: Most fans of the original Condemned consider the mall section as the point where the game peaked in terms of being scary. Do you or the team feel that the sequel has considerably upped the ante when it comes to the amount of “mindfucks” throughout the entire single player?

FR: We are upping the ante on every aspect we can possibly do and being a frightening game is certainly one of them. Now, we’re not trying to entirely replicate the formula that we used, we want to make sure that Condemned 2 has a certain degree of freshness about it. So the way we’re going about, you know, providing those scares and providing that creepy atmosphere is just a little bit different and I think it’s gonna be something that we’ll…

Well, first of: Condemned 1 had this kind of singular feel to it. It started with this kind of creepy atmosphere that was oppressive and dark and it just stayed there. We wanted to make sure that that experience had a little bit more dynamic feel to it. And I think that’s going to provide a little bit different skew on how the scares are percieved by the player. So, instead of just constantly being scared or constantly being… “Ugh!”, you know, having the weight of darkness on you… Moments to relax and then it will get ya! That kind of stuff, you know? And so: I think overall it’s gonna be a little bit different, but in the end you’ll have the same degree of scare and perhaps just a fresher feeling about the game because, you know, it can be really oppressive just to be in darkness the entire time. Stuff like that.

XP: You’re most likely aware of this, but the first game started with an autopsy scene. This reminded me very much of the movie Se7en (which I was a fan of) and it just so happened that the team mentioned in other interviews that this was a direct goal for them when creating the game.

Seeing how the horror genre has had a pretty big revival so to speak over the last few years in the movie industry, I was wondering whether or not the team felt like emulating any new movies into Condemned 2? Like for example, The Hills Have Eyes?

FR: Well… I don’t think we emulated per se. What we did: we just found inspiration and what Se7en offered for us, was the combination of horror and serial killer, and that was something that has never been seen in a video game before. So for us to kind of quickly capsulate what our game was trying to achieve, we used Se7en as an example. I don’t think we literally tried to emulate anything from that movie. In fact… The only movie that we kind of emulated, was 28 Days Later. That was just how vicious, how quick and immediate danger could be upon you and that was really our initial design for the enemies.

So I would say: Se7en, 28 Days Later and then perhaps a more forensic based element of Silents of the Lambs, that kind of stuff. Those three movies provided the ground work as part of our inspiration for the game. But since we got jump started from there, the universe of Condemned is pretty much defining itself at this point and we’re not really drawn upon other movies or other looks or anything like that as much anymore.

We may see or somebody may watch a movie and see a scene and get kind of like “Hey, that was kinda cool!”, so maybe we could do something similar. That may get injected into the game in some form, but nothing too literal and nothing too obvious. I hope that answers your question.

XP: No, your answer’s fine... Anyway: Some people felt that the shooting parts of the original Condemned (particularly: those near and until the ending) were more like a way to extend the game’s length instead of it being a truly fleshed out gameplay component. Will you try to cut back on this or refine the mechanics? Maybe both?

FR: I think fire-arms are an important component of Condemned and instead of dialing that back, we wanted to refine the mechanic. So this time around, the A.I. enemies are much smarter when they’re using fire-arms towards the player, the overall feedback of using a fire-arm is much greater, so the value of fire-arms are much more satisfying and much more fullfilling.

Just to emphasize that point: we do have a mode that you could unlock at the end of the game, which we call First-Person Shooter Mode, so you can replay the game as a traditional First-Person Shooter. And we can only really succesfully do that if we have succesful mechanics for the fire-arms.

XP: Could you discuss how the team has handled censorship? How much did they have cut out of the game and what’s their opinion about having to follow such a process?

FR: We have not had to cut out – we’ve got our ratings, so we’re all good and we didn’t have to cut out anything. We have our own internal kind of 'censorer' and it’s not even censoring as you call it, we consider it as editting and our goal is to remain true to the universe that we created for Condemned. And one of the things that’s very important to us, well, actually two things… One is: it needs to be contextual to what is going on. Yeah, it could get graphic, it could get violent, it could feel really kind of jolting but usually it fits with what is going on.

And the second thing is that we’re just trying to stay away from things that are overly humorous. So I would say… 90% of the ideas I would get from the team were too humorous. They were just too crazy. People would just laugh at it and that would be too distracting to the immersion we were creating to the atmosphere. So as far editting and cutting out stuff, that was usually the reason why they were cut, not necessarily because we might’ve been worried about the whole censorship and uproar about violence in games.

XP: Here’s a question that you guys have probably heard a lot: why were there only 970 achievements points instead of a 1000 in Condemned 1? Furthermore: will the achievements in Condemned 2 be more varied instead of primarily fetch quests where you had to find this or that?

FR: The second part: yes, they’re all over the board and a lot of them are attached to the multiplayer, so you want to try and earn these achievements through the multiplayer.

And then… Euhm, we kinda goofed! (laughs) On the point, we just goofed. What was the story again…? We thought we were going to include additional content, downloadable content down the road and it just never panned out. And so, it just ended up being short and when we figured what was happening, it was too late, so that was just part of being a launch title. Part of the team [of Condemned 1] that was using a brand new engine, that was our first concept title and everything about it… I’m just amazed we even got it out of the door! (laughs)

XP: Now that you mentioned downloadable content, you can answer this shortly if you want because we’re stressed out of time… Will there be any downloadable content in Condemned 2 or would you rather just skip it altogether?

FR: We’re hoping that it’ll be succesful enough to motivate us to support multiplayer and support the Bloodshot Fight Club with downloadable stuff.

XP: Alright, that was our final question. Thank you for having this interview.

FR: You’re welcome.