Mikael Haveri: Yes, we’ve had tens of thousands of Resogun ships created now. Are you planning on a similar social element in Alienation? PlayStation.Blog: It was great to see how the ship editor in Resogun really started to go viral - in a similar way to Photo Mode in inFAMOUS Second Son and The Last of Us Remastered. There are so many cool things that we can do on the PS4, so we feel like we have to make this game. Some people online have been asking why we haven’t tried our hand at something completely different and we have actually experimented with a lot of things but this is the sort of experience that we’re really passionate about delivering. Looking back at Dead Nation, it defines a certain type of top-down shooter, and we’re trying to expand on that core experience. PlayStation.Blog: How do you think the studio has evolved in the four years since Dead Nation first launched on PS3? I’m not promising anything but there’s a good chance she might be involved somehow… Like, a lot of our games feature that female android-y voice. To us, it’s all part of the same multilateral Housemarque universe in some weird way, where everything co-exists. There could be parallels to other Housemarque universes, like how we dropped some Resogun ships into the latest version of Dead Nation. Storytelling will have a role to play, but it will be that classic game storytelling where it’s more of a thrill-ride. We know our core competency and we’re sticking to it. Mikael Haveri: We’re playing around with that a little bit. PlayStation.Blog: Will there be any narrative link to Dead Nation or returning characters? So, explosions are absolutely going to be a mainstay! We’re not going the route where absolutely everything is destructible, but a lot of stuff will get blown up.Īnd grenades. You’ll blow something up and the debris will interact with the environment and ricochet off walls. We’re able to do very dynamic stuff, and very visually pleasing explosions that go beyond the edge of the screen with real physics interactions. Mikael Haveri: We’ve got some really, really cool stuff in Alienation - explosions with smoke plume effects, and next gen effects that you wont have seen before. How will you be refining that art form in Alienation? PlayStation.Blog: Housemarque is of course famous for its love of explosions. I’ve got to keep a little air of mystery here! Why would you attack another group? Are there factions involved? Let your mind go crazy and think of different reasons players might start murdering each other. That’s us asking how we can do interesting things with player relations and I’d say there might be some influences from the Souls series in that aspect of the game.Īsk yourself what the scenario might be. And that’s an indicator of the kind of elements we might have in the game. Mikael Haveri: We’re not going into too much detail right now but in the trailer there’s a segment where you see co-op play and then a message that says, “Go rogue”. Can you go into more details on how that influence might manifest itself in the finished game? PlayStation.Blog: Dark Souls, you say? You’re talking my sort of language, Mikael. Then we take a concept we like and try and improve it or put a twist on it. For example, we play a lot of Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls, and a lot of different stuff to get inspiration. We happily admit that we do borrow from what we think are some of the greatest games ever, but then we reinvent them in the Housemarque way. So it’s not like we were making Dead Nation and said to ourselves, “Oh, we should do this again… but with aliens!” It was more like, “We’ve got this cool technology - how do we implement it in the best way?”Īnd then we start iterating. Would this work best in a top-down shooter? Or would it be better suited to, say, a platformer? These experiments are the setting point, and then we start implementing those things in different game scenarios. We have our own engine which we’re always upgrading and trying out cool new things - new lighting systems, particle effects, and so on. We start projects by just playing around with tech. Mikael Haveri: We’ve always been a tech-centric company. PlayStation.Blog: How far back does the idea for Alienation go? Is it something you’ve wanted to make for some time? Read on to find out a little more about what the brilliant Finnish team has in store. Questions that I wanted answered! So I tracked down Housemarque’s Mikael Haveri after the show in search of a few answers. The launch trailer was predictably splendid, but it also raised plenty of questions.
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