Interview WANTED: Weapons of Fate

X-Power: With The Chronicles of Riddick, Vin Diesel was very involved throughout its production. Do the actors of Wanted also provide some sort of assistance to the development of Wanted: The Game, other than providing voice-overs, their likeliness and such?

Pete Wanat: Yeah, I think that The Chronicles of Riddick was a very different experience [in that regard]. Vin’s a huge, huge gamer, a really die-hard avid gamer, so his involvement tended to be much more interested in the overall quality of the product. Especially because he had his own game production company that he was forming right around the same time that we were making The Chronicles of Riddick. So obviously, that’s not really the case here. We don’t have any of the actors involved or not necessarily as die-hard gamers and certainly none of the actors had their own game development studio. So I think that was really a unique situation.

For us, it was really more about capturing the performance of the characters that these actors played in the movie and translating that performance into the game space, and have it be as vibrant and as rich as it was in the film. The story for the game is important and it’s emotional: the game’s story is about Wesley and his mother. There’s an emotional tie there, and so not capturing that would’ve made the game’s story feel less genuine. That’s was we were looking for with the acting talent from the film and how we integrated them within the context of the game.

XP: The movie has some vehicular scenes. While the game is not entirely based on the movie, will the game have those kind of moments too, be it with the car on-rails or controlled by the player?

PW: I think that you’ll see a moment with the car that’s not controlled by the player, but that we do have a scene that’s more done as a cinematic than an actual controlling experience. My feeling on that was: when we first sort of identified what we wanted to do with the game, we really wanted to concentrate on doing the shooting well, and to do vehicles in that sense we had to put it on-rails… That would’ve been really fake and I hate how fake most rail-based stuff becomes, especially with driving.

If you want to play a great driving game, go play Burnout or Need for Speed or something that does driving really well, something that’s focused on driving from the ground up. Even the driving in Grand Theft Auto is really good and not on-rails! I’ve had a lot of complaints of driving on-rails, so for us that wasn’t something we chose not to do here. Maybe we’d do it for a second game, but right now that was not a priority for this one.

XP: I’ve also read that you’ve previously worked on other movie licensed games such as Riddick and Scarface, both which were highly acclaimed. How did you end up working on those two games at different studio’s, and how did you become a part of Wanted: The Videogame after that?

PW: During the first game I did with Universal, I came to work for Universal Interactive in 2001. Vivendi bought Universal, they merged all their game stuff and it became Vivendi Universal. So I originally did The Thing on the Xbox and PlayStation 2 based on the John Carpenter film and after that was done, I went and did The Chronicles of Riddick with Starbreeze. I also worked on the PC version of Enclave during my stay at Starbreeze. After working with them and Tigon Studios, I left and came to Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, got a chance to work on some stuff there for a little bit…

Later Vivendi actually asked me to come back to finish off Scarface: they had started it, but had run into a few issues with some time delays. I actually really wanted to work on Scarface when they offered me Riddick; I was like ‘Oh, I’d much prefer Scarface!’ because it’s been a huge passion for me. I loved the movie, so when the opportunity came to go back to Vivendi and finish Scarface to co-operate with Radical Entertainment… Whom I really like, because those guys really get it on a good level. I had an opportunity to come back and work on that and then after Scarface was over, I actually started working on both the sequel / expansion to Riddick with Starbreeze, as well as Ghostbusters before I left Vivendi. Then I went back to Universal again to work on Wanted…

Sorry if it’s getting a little confusing! For me, there’s nothing better than working directly for the studio when you’re making games based on their IP. Nobody’s going to have the same sort of care than the studio has, so working directly for Universal on their properties is probably the best situation. If you’re going to do movie-licensed projects, then it really makes a lot of sense to work directly with the studio for whom you’re doing those licenses from.

Did that answer your question? [laughs] I talked for a while but I want to make sure I actually got the answer right!

XP: Oh, it’s okay. I actually prefer it when someone from the development team goes at such length to provide further insight!

PW: No worries!

XP: I hope you don’t mind as I’d just like to cover this for those who’d care: is it true that Angelina Jolie isn’t in the game, nor any of the other main actors?

PW: That’s right. Let me be clear: there’s no Angelina Jolie in the game. We’re a sequel to the movie so even if we do jump back in time to tell some stuff that happened earlier, those were not moments that Angelina Jolie was involved with. For us we felt that if we couldn’t tell her story and couldn’t really get into that; it wasn’t something that was worth doing. If we ever wanted to go back and make a prequel game that starred Jolie, that might be really compelling.

But for us to just sort of dabble in it… Like, she’s amazing! If we wanted to do a game with her involved, we really would want her to be the sole focus of the game. So for us it wasn’t really an option for this one, but I have hopes that at some point we could go back and tell Fox’ story – that’s her character’s name in the movie – and if we could focus on her as a lead character, I think that’d be something we’d be interested in doing. But since we couldn’t do that, I didn’t want to put Angelina Jolie in the game for a brief moment and fake sell it, which is something we’re not interested in doing. Also: she’d have wound up to participate in making the game and for us that was never really an option for the first game. We wanted to tell Wesley’s story with his relationship with his mother, just like the film tells the relationship with his father. For us that was the emotional, intriguing connection to tell this anti-hero who doesn’t know himself.

We’ve talked about Scarface earlier; Tony Montana knows himself! He’s an anti-hero, but he knows who he is. He knows his rules, he has a defined rule set and he gets it. Riddick as well: he knows he is! Wesley doesn’t really know who he is as he’s trying to figure it out. At the end of the movie [and this is spoiler material] he’s killed his father; that’s all on him and he’s in a very fucked up place mentally! So in the context of the game, him trying to find out all the other mysteries about his life, such as where else had he been lied to? He basically spent his whole life being lied to. Lying to himself, his background were lies, he doesn’t know what his history is, … So by the end of the game he knows his history and he’s starting to figure out who he is.

He’s still not there yet though, but I think that relates a lot better to people playing the game, especially like 18 – 19 – 20 years old. I mean, at that age I didn’t know who I was either. You’re in a real serious time figuring that out, and I think that mimics that what our lead character is doing. Though hopefully, there’s not a lot of situations where people playing the game have killed their father before! [laughs]

But what I’m saying is: you’re trying to figure yourself out at that age, Wesley is trying to figure himself out. He doesn’t know who he is, and that to me makes him an interesting lead character to play as he actually is occupied with something like that.

XP: It’s pretty obvious that the core gameplay of Wanted revolves around being a flashy assassin, killing enemies in a spectacular fashion. Does the game coincidentally have an optional mode where you get graded with points, or a Time Trial mode to see how fast or how well you can kill the A.I. compared to others (through online leaderboards)?

PW: We’ve been experimenting with Time Trials. I think you could see the timers at various points throughout the game demonstration… Right now, I wouldn’t say that’s a firmly established feature in the game. What we’re doing first and foremost is making sure the game plays really well. If we get it to our satisfaction, we’ll look at adding those type of elements; I’m not saying they’re in or not in yet, I don’t think we know. We have to make sure we have a great game first from a playable standpoint all the way through, and we’ll worry about making sure that the player never knows what he’s expecting next. That we change the variety, that we make it so that the game doesn’t feel repetitious. Those are what we’re focusing on right now.

We are tinkering with Time Trials and similar things, but we haven’t decided yet whether they’ll be permanently in or not. So I would say: right now, we certainly have those moments as you’ve seen from the demo, but whether that makes it in the final game I think is too close to call at this point.

XP: One question about the curve bullet mechanic: the guy demo’ing the game, despite dying a few times and eventually relying on God Mode…

PW: [laughs]

XP: He made it look relatively easy. What makes the curve bullets not unbalanced, not something that the player can abuse to just easily pass the enemies instead of running into any difficulties?

PW: I would say: the way we designed curve bullets is that it’s easy to use but very difficult to master. I know you hear that all the time, like ‘Great, thanks, you took that from the fucking developer playbook. Oh, it’s easy to use and hard to master! It’s like chess!’, you know? But for us, making it a mechanic that felt good for the player… It takes some skill to perform. And by the way: once you get good at it, it’s not just about killing one guy with a curve bullet. You can kill two, three, four, five guys at once. You can kill a bunch of guys with hidden objects in the environments, have a bullet hit an explosion, have that explosion interact with something else within the level to kill even more guys… By the time you get really good with the curve bullets, you’re going to feel like a bad-ass.

How do you make it so that the player doesn’t lean so heavily on this mechanic? Because if you only use curve bullets, enemies will pick up on that and will start attacking you in different ways. You have to blend the core mechanics: curve bullets, chaining cover, Assassin Time, … If you start to mix and match all of these different core mechanics together, you will become a power-house in the game. But you can’t rely simply on one mechanic to make your way through the game. If you play Wanted like you play other shooters, you will get ‘pwned’ so fucking hard it is not even funny! You have to be able to use these assassin moves, or you’re going to find that the game gets really difficult.

And if you ever read a review of Wanted that says “This game is too hard!”, that’s because the guy playing it was a fucking moron and didn’t play with the core mechanics like he should! You really have to play with all of them and when you do, it’s very rewarding; that’s why we spent so much time building them to perform a certain way, tweaking and polishing them. If you read a reader review or whatever where the guy’s complaining about the game’s difficulty, then it’s ‘cause the guy’s a fucking poser and just tried to play Wanted like a straight run ‘n gun shooter. If you properly use the core mechanics you’ll find that the game is maybe still difficult in places, but incredibly fun to play and rewarding, and makes you feel like you are a bad-ass assassin.

XP: I hope you don’t mind me asking, but will there be an online mode?

PW: No, there will be not. Let me be really clear… Here’s the deal: you played a lot of good multiplayer-focused games. If you want to play a great multiplayer game, F.E.A.R. 2’s going to be awesome! That shit looks so fucking hot! [laughs] But my biggest problem right now is that multiplayer games that are based on single player modes, they do one thing really well: they detract from the single player game. The bottom line here is… Before I go any further into this: do you play a lot of multiplayer games?

XP: Yes, I do.

PW: Okay. There’s like five or six great multiplayer games available now, right? There may be a few more, but the bottom line is most times when you see multiplayer in a game, what happens? It’s just tacked on there, it’s not from somebody who gave it any love or care, it’s simply there because marketing put pressure on you to put this in the game to help –

XP: Another bullet point on the box, so to speak.

PW: Yeah. It’s bullshit! The game’s multiplayer fucking sucks! It’s just generic. And then you go online to play that multiplayer game, and guess what? NOBODY’S FUCKING PLAYING IT! They’re all off playing really good multiplayer games. They’re playing Gears of War, or Halo, or Call of Duty. They’re playing games with multiplayer features that are so well done and so well scripted; that’s why people play multiplayer. The press needs to take a stand and say “Stop!”, for all the developers out there designing [tacked on] multiplayer. Stop; unless you’re going to be top-of-the-food chain multiplayer, there’s no point in doing it.

XP: What if someone says that the concept of Wanted would be pretty cool in some form of multiplayer?

PW: I agree, but let’s get the mechanics down in the first one and then maybe look to try to have a multiplayer in the second game. That to me is how you know you’re doing it right, but if the only reason you’re doing multiplayer is ‘cause of one extra feature, stop…

Gotta have an answer for you guys when you ask it in these type of things, right? By the way: sometimes those higher-up will ask “Well what are you going to say to the press!?”, and I tell them to be honest with them. When other people just lie to you and try to put a half-assed multiplayer together that nobody ever plays… We’re not going to do that. We’re going to take that budget and the money we would’ve used to do that, and put everything back into the single player game and make it the best game possible. Because in the end of the day, that’s what we and Warner Brothers are interested in doing: telling a great story, making a great fun game to play but not having to do it with multiplayer. To me, multiplayer acts as a detriment! It’s a giant sucking leech of resources and money that hurts your single player game, and we’ve been around the block enough times to know to not do it.

They pressured the same bullshit on The Chronicles of Riddick, “You’re a First-Person Shooter! You gotta have multiplayer!” and fuck no we didn’t need to have it! Nobody thought that game needed multiplayer expect for a few clueless reviewers, and short of that we pretty much stuck to the single player story element and that’s what is important. When I or the development team have something to say about doing a multiplayer game, then we’ll do it, but for this stuff I’m not going to succumb to pressure from marketing to have it as a bullet item.

XP: Now that you’ve voiced your opinion about multiplayer in games that are primarily single player focused, this begs the following question: can you explain why The Chronicles of Riddick suddenly does have multiplayer with Dark Athena?

PW: One of the reasons why was when we started to develop Dark Athena, we wanted to provide different ways of doing multiplayer and I think that that game particularly has some different multiplayer modes… Also: the ideas for the multiplayer we had thought of for the original Chronicles of Riddick all got put in a folder and so that folder eventually opened back up when they started considering it.

The other reason was: the Dark Athena storyline was one component of it, but we also felt we wanted to provide an Orange Box of quality on a whole. You have the original game, you have the added campaign component and you have the multiplayer. But it was only after they’ve done the single player so well, they decided to go back to their multiplayer ideas for Riddick. They’ve also had some experience in doing a multiplayer mode for The Darkness, and they felt like they had something to say worth doing a multiplayer option for. I think it’s a combination of all those factors that lead into a good reason for Dark Athena to have a multiplayer section and I think once the fans that start to see how they did the multiplayer and the different set-ups they have for it is really rewarding, and is going to be a lot of fun. I’m super psyched for it!

XP: We’re only allowed to ask one more question…

PW: You can ask as many questions as you want! [laughs]

XP: I’d like to, but they won’t let us due to time constraints sadly. Anyway: Stranglehold, another game that’s more or less based around an existing movie –

PW: Another good game that had multiplayer nobody fucking played, by the way! And I liked Stranglehold: I thought it was great. I thought those guys did an awesome job on Stranglehold, I had a lot of fun with it, but go play the multiplayer, crickets. There’s nobody there.

XP: Indeed. As I was saying: it’s also a cinematic third-person shooter that emphasized on destructible cover. So I was wondering if any of that will or won’t be available in Wanted to that extent?

PW: I think what we do with cover is rather unique; I don’t think you’ve ever seen a game where you chain cover. What we wanted to do is the Tony Hawk equivalent of chaining moves together, we wanted to apply that with cover points in the game. So unlike the Time Crisis ‘duck shoot duck shoot’ or the Gears of War ‘big hulking guys slamming into cover’, we wanted our cover to be quick and fast. “BA-BA-BA-BAM!” (note: at this point Pete started hitting the table) like really coming at you, so that you don’t know what to expect and that for us was more important than just, say, destructible or creatable cover. We do have some of those elements, but that’s not the focus. In Wanted it’s definitely about this fast-paced cover system where cover becomes an offensive attack, where you see your enemy and you use it to zing between points, and then end up around your enemy to slice their fucking throat.

It also has to go back to doing with the concept of fast-slow: if you saw the film, they have these sequences where he starts out across the room and the guy will come flying up, cut the guy’s neck in slow-motion and go flying back out. That’s fast-slow-fast. What we’re trying to do, is take that and put it in a gameplay element so that chaining cover is really quick, and then you come out of chaining cover into Assassin Time. We’re basically ripping off Max Payne where we go into that super slow gunplay. But that’s about that fast-slow-fast pacing that the movie does with a visual style, and we answer that in gameplay so that it becomes something very different.

XP: They’re calling us, so that was it. So thank you very much for your time and –

PW: No problem at all.

XP: Just a quick short question which you can answer briefly if you want: will there be a demo of Wanted?

PW: Yup, that’s the plan!

XP: Alright, thanks.