Interview Rise of the Argonauts

XP: Let’s start with a standard introduction. We already know your name (Ed del Castillo), so which role did you play during the development of Rise of the Argonauts and what were some of the games you’ve worked on in the past?

EdC: I am the director on Rise of the Argonauts, which means I’m basically in charge of all of the creative vision. Games I’ve worked on before include – as crazy as these names are going to sound – are, let’s see… Desperate Houswives, Dragonshard (which was an RTS), Battlerealms. And then going back a little further: Command & Conquer Red Alert, Ultima IX, Sid Meier’s Gettysburgh!, ... It goes even further back, but I’m guessing that’s less relevant to you! (laughs)

XP: That’s quite a departure then? Seeing how you’ve worked on RTS games and now you’re involed with Rise of the Argonauts…

EdC: It is… The thing is: even though we were working on these big RTS games, I think we always wanted to be a story telling company. I think if you look at entertainment in general apart from games, the one thing that is true with all forms of entertainment is story-telling. I think that certain genres like RTS are suffering a little bit in success (at least in the States), because it’s harder to tell a story in those than in other mediums and I always wanted to be in – specifically – the third-person/over-the-shoulder story-telling medium. And I thank Codemasters for allowing that to happen.

XP: You mentioned that there will be no multiplayer modes in the shipping version of the game. Since this is an action-RPG, why isn't there a co-op mode where you can play with two of your friends, what not with the limit of three characters in-game?

EdC: There’s a part of that I can’t talk about and a part that I can. I’ll talk about the latter: I think it was really important to us and Codemasters that we established the universe and the characters before we allow the players to kind of branch out and experience it with multiple characters. It was very important to us for Jason to be the center of the universe and that everything concerning the story is about Jason.

We were nervous that if we allowed co-op from the very beginning, the result would be a loss of focus in the story and a loss of focus in the universe as well. So again: it’s just very important to us to establish the world and its characters very strongly and so we felt that the best way to do that, is let you play one [character] and let you see how the other ones play. I can’t talk about the future, but I think it’s fair to say that at some point down the line there will be co-op multiplayer.

XP: So hypothetically speaking, if there will be co-op missions or a co-op component later on, I can reckon those will be seperate to the main game? As in: a different, new story that’s not really attached to the main storyline or anything like that?

EdC: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. Every Argonaut has a story to tell and it’d be nice to tell those stories.

XP: Action RPG’s usually have loot, so how will Rise of the Argonauts handle it? Or will it be done in an entirely different way than most games of this kind?

EdC: It’ll be handled in a different way. I really don’t believe in the whole… pulling the mace out of a bear or pulling gold coins out of a spider-

XP: It’s pretty ridiculous.

EdC: Yeah, I don’t get it! I also don’t get why heroes loot dead bodies. So one of the things we’re doing is that all of Jason’s gears, everything that he gets comes for a reason, just like it does in a movie. Very rarely do you see in a movie that the hero goes through five different weapons or eight different swords. Everything in Rise of the Argonauts is very inspired by the story; if he picks up a new weapon, it usually has something significant to do with the story. It means Jason will fundamentally get fewer things, but he’s still gonna get more than you see in an average movie. Maybe he won’t pick up 300 swords, but I think we have something in the area of 10 for each kind of weapon (of which there are four) planned for the game, and another 20 or so different armor sets that he’ll be able to cycle through and decide which one he wants to wear.

Because the other thing we’re doing that makes giving you just random junk or loot very difficult is, I really hate when in certain games you have like green shoulder pads, red chest plates, blue legs, … It’s silly and you look more like a clown than you look like a hero! I really wanted Jason to always look like a hero and be very character-defined, so all of our equipment is costumed to look good together.

XP: During the presentation you mentioned something about new weapons among others, that there will be visually noticeable differences in the way you hit the enemy. So with the mace you said something like: at first it knocks them down and another one would knock them back. Now, since the character models seem to be pretty detailed (specifically their armor), I’d like to know whether the aforementioned alterations will be visible on their bodies? Customisation so to speak.

EdC: The answer is yes. That’s another one of my pet-peeves: you as the player getting something and not having it seen it on your character’s body. Every new weapon you get will be illustrated and every new piece of armor is shown on their body, so everything is visually represented.

XP: Something that bothers the kind of gamer that’s also really into ancient history (in this case: Greek mythology) is that not all games that go down that road provide an accurate depection of the mythology. Could you tell us how close you’re trying to follow the source material in Rise of the Argonauts or what things may (or may not) have been altered to a certain degree?

EdC: Well, I’m gonna be the guy that those players hate! (laughs) We’ve altered it significantly and I’m not going to back away from that. We took a lot of creative license and part of the reason for that is, outside of Europe the Greek mythologies are not close to people’s hearts. They are very distant and very scholastic things. Although in Europe they’re close to people’s hearts, we had lots of debates about this early on, but both Codemasters and Liquid agreed that it’s much better to have a game that inspires people to go research the Greek mythologies than it is to have a game that teaches people about it.

I don’t want it to be ‘Ed del Castillo’s Mythology’, you know? I want it to be first and foremost a piece of entertainment and secondly an educational tool, not the other way around.

XP: For that matter, could you put an estimated number on the amount of familiar faces that'll be included in the game? Not necessarily playable characters, but NPC’s as well.

EdC: Give me a minute, I have to count. Obviously all five main characters, Argo, Epometheus, Prometheus, Tadelus, … I’m gonna guess about 20 different known Greek mythological figures that are going to make either major or minor appearances, but I know I’m leaving out a couple.

XP: Why is Hercules so frikkin’ huge?

EdC: (laughs) Ok! I’m going to answer it seriously: lot of debate about that actually! I really, really, really wanted a huge Hercules. The reason for that is because I wanted people to immediately get the image that it’s a fantasy (not a realistic) representation of the mythologies in this game. And so Hercules is big because I want him to be strong, I want the player to instantly get he’s the strongest character in the party. I want that to be a visual thing and not something that has to be constantly be told or constantly be shown otherwise.

XP: Could you provide a little more insight about the technology behind Rise of the Argonauts? Is the company using their own or someone else’s technology and what's the goal: 30 or 60 fps (preferably with vsync)?

EdC: Better than 30 would be great obviously, but 30 frames per second is the minimum. We’re using Unreal Engine 3 under the hood, but our condition for using it is that it couldn’t look like a normal Unreal 3 game. I think we’ve done that. Then there’s a lot of code on top of the engine because there were many technical things that Unreal Engine 3 didn’t do well enough for what we needed, so we wrote it ourselves. Liquid has a long history of doing its own technology, but Unreal Engine 3 has an amazing toolset and a lot of wonderful things it does very very well. And so it only helped us make a better game. I hope that answers your question.

XP: You’ve talked about the city, that it’s constantly evolving depending how far you’re in the game, the behaviour of the people (the way look at Jason) and so on. I was wondering if there will be mini-games at some point in that city?

EdC: Absolutely. I mean, there’s numerous little things that we’ll do from gambling to having to fetch something, … There’s plenty of specific things we have going on, in addition to sidequests et cetera.

XP: You’ve also discussed the boat a while ago. For instance: there will be people on it you can interact with and you can travel with it from island to island, so is that in-game traveling like in Zelda: The Wind Waker?

EdC: I’m going like this [ed.: making an X with his fingers] concerning The Wind Waker and I’m doing that on purpose, because I don’t want you to record it! (laughs) Wind Waker’s method… I found it very boring. It’s a travel map in Rise of the Argonauts. The boat’s in-game: you can run around on it, you can experience things on it and it comes with you from island to island. But when you actually do the traveling, it’s either a cutscene or a map scene depending on what we want.

XP: Final question. Is there a demo being planned?

EdC: It’s not set in stone yet, but we’re definitely considering releasing a demo.

XP: Thanks for having this interview.