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

Is the game played entirely with the Sixaxis control?

Our philosophy is to use motion control where it actually enhances the game play experience above and beyond the analog state, but anything that becomes a detriment or a gimmick we don't do because the point here is flight. There is absolutely no question that anybody who has ever played Lair basically said the moment we brought in the Sixaxis for flight felt so much better and so much more intuitive.

Do you feel the Sixaxis is a better way to control flying-style game?

Many people have had problems with flight games before simply because of the small range of motion available with analog sticks. We know that because we have been doing Rogue Squadron series for many, many years. Crossing the threshold to casual gamers with that game was always tough because controlling a flying craft with an analog stick is very, very tough. With the Sixaxis it suddenly becomes intuitive, so that is huge.

You can even slam into other dragons with the Six-axis. When we do the rip and tear attack which I talked about earlier, for example, you latch on to things and actually use the controller with motion control to rip them apart.

Do you use Sixaxis control on the ground as well?

When you are moving on the ground we have found that the analog stick actually feels better. You use the analog stick to move on the ground, but if you slam the controller down or if you flip it to the side the dragon does this 360 spin. We were lucky in that Sixaxis does apply to many, many aspects of Lair in just a perfect way.

So was the game built from the ground up to be a Six-axis controller game, or were you building Lair, and then decided to add Six-axis controls?

No, it is a much more complex story. We had been begging years back for Nintendo to put in motion control for the Rogue Squadron games into both GameCube and Game Boy, and had almost made it before they kicked it out again. So when we started Lair, we knew that motion control would be the ultimate thing for our type of flight game.

So I always had it in the back of my head. But we did start Lair extremely early on, long before the PS3 specs were really finished, so we had meetings with people from Sony who were designing the controller. Basically, we asked, "Please, please, please put motion control in!" But I always had a secondary control scheme in mind which -- if that didn't happen -- would also work with Lair. It was just more clumsy, but it had pretty much a lot of the gameplay that we have right now. You had button combinations and the flight didn't feel as good. When Sixaxis happened, it just matched the game perfectly.

When you were designing Lair, what about the PS3 was really surprising or even amazing to you?

The most amazing thing for us always is the scope. We are about wanting to see large 32-by-32-kilometer/mile levels, but at the same time, being able to land and have intricate detail almost on the level of a first person shooter. That has never been possible before, and in the last game we did (Rebel Strike for the GameCube), you basically had the flight parts, and when you landed, it would load up at a completely different level that had ground scale. You would basically cheat around that, which really prevented you from doing a lot of the cool stuff that you wanted to do in terms of game design, such as seamlessly going back and forth to get a little more emergent game play going there and not be as linear. So, our big question with the PS3 was: "Can it do it?"

And the answer is...?

[Laughs] We were blown away by Cell. Not so much by the graphics chip because that was basically what was known and what we expected, but the Cell suddenly made it possible to use techniques in Lair that we had talked about before, but which we never thought a system would be fast enough to actually support. We were able to make this insane level of detail changes possible from the very, very highest point up in the sky all the way to the ground.

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