GP Q&A: Itagaki Speaks on DOAX 2
- October 06, 2006 14:02 PM PST
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We recently spoke with Tomonobu Itagaki, the head of Tecmo's Team Ninja, about the most recent changes to his new sand-and-surf Xbox 360 game, Dead or Alive Xtreme 2.
On the graphical improvements since DOA4...
It's based off the DOA 4 graphical engine, but we've made a number of improvements like self-shadowing, and some of the physics elements of the characters. You'll notice that the animations of the characters have been refined, so you'll notice more lifelike and more vibrant animations.
On changes to the volleyball experience...
People who played the build today might notice it's not much different from the original game. We're going to be adding new features to make the game more speedy....one of the techniques will be called "Quick Attack," which makes it easier to do spikes more quickly. So we're aiming for a faster, more aggressive style of volleyball.
On the decision to make a jet ski game...
When I was working on the first game, do we feature beach volleyball or do we feature watercraft racing? At the time, I wanted to lean towards volleyball. But I really like to play WaveRace on the Nintendo 64, and a lot of times I get ideas from games I like -- if I'm playing Zelda, I want to make an action game -- so that's how the jetskiing element came about.
Eventually, there were two people working on that, but mainly it was one of our ace programmers who was working solely on our jetskiing engine for over a year. Of course, the team who was working on our jetski portion went to Fiji or Okinawa to ride on jetskis and get that knowledge. I haven't, personally. [laughs]
I think [we added jet skiing] it's the fact that jetski games aren't so popular. We have created a jetski engine that's so good it could be a standalone game. In this build right now, we haven't totally implemented all the water obstacles and everything, but you'll enjoy the kinds of humorous things that happen when you slam face-first into a rock [laughs].
We have experience with those kinds of interactive environments from Dead or Alive 4.
