Lair devs: "We were blown away by Cell" (a GP Q&A)

Julian Eggebrecht, president and chief creative director, explains what the Cell processor, Star Wars, The Passion of the Christ, and dragons have in common.

By Bro Buzz

How would you describe Lair?

Lair is a "flight and fight" PS3 game, in which you basically spend a lot of time in the "Air Force" of our world as a really kickass pilot -- except you don't have an aircraft, but a dragon. And you can do with the dragon pretty much anything we hope that you would imagine that a dragon can do. So you can fly obviously. You can shoot fireballs, and you can blow fire breath, giving air support to your troops on the ground.

And what can you do once you land on the ground?

You are fighting on the ground as well, and you can use the claws of the dragon to latch onto enemies, and rip and tear them apart. That is something that is new with the Sixaxis controls, a tear attack. You can do anything you can imagine really with a dragon.

Does all the action take place with you as a character on a dragon?

The action is taking place with you on the dragon. Having said that, there is a character mode where basically we start out a lot of our transitions from story elements into the actual game. There you are a knight on the ground, but since you don't do melee combat, your job pretty much is to quickly get onto your dragon and take off, because otherwise you are going to be slaughtered! [Laughter]

Do you build up your dragon skill set as you go through the game or do you automatically begin with monster skills?

You actually have quite a few skills at the start. Then you must build up skills because the dragon combat is not what you would expect. In the end, what we do is get you into direct physical combat between the dragons. You have to get as near as possible to medium- and large-size dragons because you cannot kill them with fireballs. You can shoot as many fireballs at them as you want, but they will not die from them, so you need to get into physical contact. That actually is quite an involved system because we have almost a full fighting game in there so you actually get into the dragon vs. dragon fight, very much like what you know from games like Tekken that use combos.

Is there a combo system of some type?

You can unlock further combos; you can build on those combos. Then we have a system of "carnage" where basically you build up points which do other things for you in terms of getting you better stats and better medals throughout the game. All of the game systems feed back into this Carnage system, and building up Carnage is basically is how you build up abilities.

There's a sequential finishing move system, too, isn't there?

You basically can get into what is called Rage mode, which we use for two different things. First of all, we have Rage vision, which is basically looking at the world through the eyes of your dragon. It's a black and white view which actually points out enemies and friendlies because obviously you won't have a radar. You can quickly push a button to identify friends and foes.

You can also trigger the Rage mode itself, which basically slows down the whole world except for you and your attacks and projectiles. Almost everything else is frozen, and you run around in a frenzy and can build up unbelievable amounts of Carnage in that mode. Your dragon's in a fighting rage, and you kill off enemy dragons and dragon riders using a system that's very similar to the God of War stuff. The system's inspired by it, but having said that, we are using the Sixaxis to trigger more combos inside that.

Combat involves you versus big armies of warriors. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yes, as I said earlier, you are really acting as the Air Force here. And like in any war type situation, your army is basically moving against another army, and you are trying to support them.

Here, sometimes you want to land. Why do you want to go to the ground? To get health, for example. As your health decreases, you need to eat so that is the obvious thing to do. You go down to the ground, and you eat what you find there! You get the picture. [Laughter]

You also cause destruction to your enemies by taking out dozen of soldiers at any given moment, so it is a very different type of melee combat than any other game has had before simply because you are riding this massive creature. You do that a little bit, and you do it for strategic purposes, but it is not very hard to do.

But what is hard in that mode is that the adversaries bring along certain creatures which can attack your dragon on the ground. We have these rhino creatures, for example, that cannot be burned, so they run up to you, and I guarantee they can actually slaughter your dragon. The army combat itself is more about influencing your troop morale in a positive way, and then feeding on enemies to build up your health.

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