Interview: The Making of Sony's Warhawk (2/2)

Often times in course of a game's development there are things that end up on the cutting room floor. What things were you not able to include in the game that you wish you could have?

DJ: Looking back on it leaving out the single player mode was a very hard decision. There were some really neat things that we were doing in our single player game, but at the end of the day the bar is set very, very high in single player. I'm a firm believer that if you're not going to bring your 'A' game then you need to concentrate your efforts. So while we had some missions that I thought were really cool, as a cohesive story line with a gelled set of missions and game arc, it wasn't there. On the multiplayer side, there were things that people brought up during the beta that I thought were really killer points that we are using to seed our development for our first expansion pack.

Is it a possibility that in the future fans will see a single player Warhawk game?

DJ: The reason why we made the decision, and I know Sony thinks this as well, was to make sure that gamers got a great game. If we're even in a place where players want it and we are positioned well to make it, make it great, and deliver on it, certainly. I would definitely be open to it. But it all goes back to being able to do it well. IF we can do a single player that ultimately is as well received as our multiplayer seems to be, then we would entertain the idea. We don't want to just crap content out that's half-assed. We're really happy with multiplayer and we think we did a great job on it and we're glad people have a good time playing it. If we can do the same thing with single player then sure, we'll look at it.

How is Warhawk motivating this evolution of downloadable online gaming on the PS3?

DJ: I'd love to say that Warhawk is breaking new ground in multiplayer gaming, but it's not really, and it sounds weird to say. There are conventions that have been in place in PC gaming for quite some time, and it's not smoke and mirrors. The notion of dedicated servers, global server lists, and all of this stuff are conveniences that players have been enjoying in PC gaming. When we made the decision to drop the single player campaign and go forward in the direction of online multi-player only with Warhawk we tried to reset the machine and say, ok multi-player console gaming is this, this, and this, but are those really the best practices? And the answer we came up with was no, they're not, because there are something's from the world of PC gaming that should have come over. That was kind of our approach. We didn't want to just take console gaming to the next level, we said let's wait and assess the landscape and pick the best parts. There are something's that are great and something's for PC gaming that are great, and there's no reason they can't be worked together.

There's been some criticism over the exclusion of the single player campaign. How did that criticism improve what the game is now?

DJ: We knew when we made that decision it was a tough thing to sell. It really was. And quite honestly I think the jury should still be out until the game's in thousands of players hands and they have a good time with it. I'm sick of developers that I've read in interviews spewing B.S. like, "This game is absolutely revolutionary and you should all go out and buy it." You know what, gamers are going to ultimately decide it's good or not. We made what was truthfully a very painful decision to focus on what we felt was going to yield a great product for players. And thankfully Sony has adjusted the price and done the bundle for retail to try to supplement that. I personally don't want to dissuade any of those criticisms until gamers have had a chance to play the game. I do think once they're played it they'll have a really good time with it.

More specifically to your point, what excluding the single player allowed us to do was focus our efforts. I thin people have a hard time realizing that we could be work on a game and not be happy with such a big chunk of it and to turn around and say screw it and walk away from it all together, though that's not exactly how it all played out. We weren't happy with single player for quite some time, and we spent quiet a bit of time trying to get it on track. We were confronted with making a decision of spreading our efforts so thin that players got a mediocre single player and a mediocre multi-player, or focusing our efforts in one direction. Not that we wanted mediocrity, but we felt like if we continued down the path we were on that's what was going to happen. I think a lot of the press doesn't give enough credit to Sony's executive staff, because they noticed the same problems that we did, and they were driving this change as much as we were, if not more. I think that just goes to show their flexibility in saying, look everyone around the world knows that multi-player is fun, so let's focus on that. There are games out there that are single player only, and do they get dinged for not having multi-player? Some do, but in our current day and age of gaming single player only gaming is more acceptable than multi-player only gamin. But if we take a step back and look at the roots of gaming the vast majority of it stems from multi-player gaming, not single player. If you look at board games for example, they're social experiences. You can go out and get a great board game for $40 and it's a multi-player only experience. For us I think that Warhawk represents that -it's a fun multi-player only experience part of gaming. You can have a great single player game, and that's where they decided to focus. For example Rachet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction from Insomniac is a single player only game and it's fun. In Warhawk we want to focus on it being a fun multi-player game and make sure when we release the product it's as good as possible. I've been on the receiving end, and many people on our development team have as well, of playing a game after paying full price for it and it not being fun; it didn't cook long enough, it didn't have the development time that it needed, and we didn't want to do that. We wanted to make sure what we released was a fun game and people really enjoyed it.

What is your target audience for Warhawk?

DJ: (Giving his best commercial announcer impression) Males ages 18-35, (laughter)... I bet you've never head that one before. Actually this is actually something that's really killer about Sony is that they will never hand you a piece of paper saying "Make me a game that involves pony's for girls 8-12." They let us organically come up with the game. So we didn't have an age demographic set up specifically. We did however have a key tenet driving the production, and that was that we did not want to make a sim. We felt that sims were so niche. Whether it was a ground troop sim where the guns behave realistically and you had to run for five miles to a check point to wait to make a shot, miss, and then get sniped in the head and have to do it all over again. We didn't want that, and we didn't want pixel combat which is what traditionally plagues flight sims. It's like you flying and the ground looks horrible and the features look horrible and there's a pixel off on the horizon which is another aircraft. That's not the type of pacing we wanted. We wanted to make an everyman's warfare game. It's kind of like the love child of unreal tournament and battlefield. There are aspects of full warfare games that I think are great and could be made accessible to non-shooter fans. A big part of it is pacing, getting players' adrenalin really going. Allowing the to jump in and out of a game is key to that. With Warhawk you can hop in and play for 10-15 minutes, have a great time and be done, and pick it up again later and have just as good of a time. We're trying to make a war game very couch friendly and accessible. There's a thread in the essence of Warhawk that's very similar to the energy in the original quake. I remember when I used to play the original Team Fortress mod or the original Capture the flag mod. There are aspects of that that definitelyhelped guide us on Warhawk. It's not rocket science. There are lots of little clever things that we put into the game it plays really similar to a lot of the other warfare games out there. If you love Halo, if you love Battlefield and you want something that's more pick-up and play and more of an arcade experience than this game is going to be great for you. Given the potential space of activities in the game, as we saw in the beta people played the game for 50+ hours. If you have a singly player only game like an RPG and you get 40 hours out of it you're having a great time and that's great value. With Warhawk you're seeing a title you can pick up for $39 that we saw thousands of people play for more than 50 hours. Ultimately we turned the servers off, who knows how long they would have played it.

The pacing and high energy is definitely something that kept me playing. How difficult was that for you to keep that balance and keep that energy between being on the ground, and then jumping in a plane?

DJ: It was very difficult. I don't want to be that developer who sits here and tells you we pulled it off 100% flawlessly. The players will ultimately be the one's that tell us how well we pulled it off. It was very tricky and that's why the beta was so useful. It was really tricky because I think when people see the product the think about the original game and think this one's going to be flight only as well, and that's just not the case. In fact it's so not the case that, while flying the Warhawk is deep and fun and you can do nothing else in the game but fly it and have a great time, but the ground mode is a first class citizen as well. Again, one of the core tenets of the production was that we wanted to make sure that as a war game it could pull all of these different types of people together. If someone doesn't want to fly the Warhawk they can have just as much fun running around on the ground engaging in ground combat. We had people in our focus tests that specifically did not like air combat that played the game and had a great time with it. People that were fans of Gears of War, S.O.C.O.M, Ghost Recon, or even first person shooters we would ask if they've ever played flight sim games, and they said no and they never would. Then they played Warhawk and they gave it 9 out of 10 for fun factor. In some ways it's like a gateway because they'd start out on the ground, run over to an aircraft and start experimenting and fly around. While the vast majority of players that hated flight games had a blast playing the game but mostly stayed on the ground, but there were some of them that liked flying the Warhawk. It's not super complicated to fly. There are nuanced second and third tier controls, but you can pick up a Warhawk and have a really fun pilot fantasy pretty much right away. I think that's one of the benefits to not being bound to the conventions of a sim. If you see a Warhawk at a hover and you see him in one move fold up his wings and go afterburner and then do a corkscrew and a loop you would have killed the pilot in reality that's like 300g's he would be putty. It's not realistic but it doesn't matter, because it's damn fun.

What's your favorite gameplay mode?

DJ: I loved zone for a really long time, and I still do. The games we've been playing a lot of lately have been capture the flag. One of the things we found from the beta was that original the flag had a really quick return timer. So if you ran in, grabbed the flag and got killed the enemy team would just have to stand by it for 3 seconds to reclaim it. It made it so that capture the flag games didn't really score that high. Many were 0-1 or something like that. So we increased the timer and it drove scores up.

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