Q&A: Insomniac CEO Ted Price talks Resistance

GamePro's Vicious Sid recently sat down with the CEO of Insomniac Games, Ted Price, to talk about Resistance: Fall of Man and the challenges of working with the high-tech PlayStation 3 hardware.

GamePro: What will Ratchet and Clank fans immediately recognize in Resistance: Fall of Man?

Ted Price: The weapons, absolutely. We brought a load of exotic weapons over from Ratchet and Clank. But we needed to make them a little more deadly, a little more visceral for Resistance. We tried hard to make sure we had a complementary group of weapons that avoided having, say, five machine guns that did basically the same thing.

GP: Are there any particular weapons from Ratchet and Clank that made the transition to Resistance?

Price: Not off hand. There are some that have similar functionality. You could say that the Shock Raptor in Ratchet was the shotgun equivalent in Resistance.

[Insomniac's marketing director, Ryan Schneider, adds more detail]: The Sapper in terms of explosive globules, it works as a comparison to the napalm mod in Ratchet: Deadlock. But the globules that shoot from the Sapper can stick to the ceiling and all over the walls. It's a great example of a weapon you may have seen in a PS2 game and how we're able to take the foundations of the principles and really expand it into something a little more...grand.

GP: What does the PS3's Cell Processor give you that other CPUs don't?

Price: Because the Cell has eight SPUs that are available to use for highly complex mathematical problems, we can take things like our physics system or our navigation system or our collision system and have the SPUs crunch on those all at the same time so that we are doing a lot of parallel processing. That means that you get a lot more done per frame.

When you get weapons like the Hail Storm, which fires a lot of bullets at once, every single one of those projectiles is doing physics calculations whenever it hits something. But there are a lot of them out there. This means that if we had devoted a couple of SPUs just to those bullets we still have three processors to burn, you have the main processor and the other SPUs, which are working on other things.

GP: In terms of these wide-scale calculations, would you be able to do this something of this scale on a PC or on another console? Or is it PS3-only?

Price: We designed this game specifically for the PS3 and it really takes advantage of the SPUs. That said, I think we are only scratching the surface of what the PS3 can do, and that's what's cool about this console. As teams become more and more proficient with the PS3, you're going to see bigger and better stuff.

Another thing that's important about designing for the PS3 is that Sony's hardware always let you get very close to the hardware itself, and there's not a lot of layers in-between what you are programming and the hardware. That's what's our programmers are used to because we've been working with the PS1 and PS2 for so long. As a result, we've been able to be very effective with the PS3 from the very beginning. We've designed this game for the PS3. [but] if we changed the design we could be on the Xbox 360 or PC. You could say that about any game.

GP: What's it like programming for the Cell? What's the learning curve like?

Price: Challenging, absolutely. We went from a single-processor paradigm to a multi-processor paradigm. For us as a company, we took some time to get it down. But from the very beginning because we knew what the Cell's architecture was going to be like, we began to prepare for the big jump from PS2 to PS3. That said, we're still uncovering ways to maximize potential for the PS3 and will be doing so for awhile.

GP: Speaking of giant generational leaps, does Resistance really use 22GB on a Blu-ray disc?

Price: No, it doesn't. We actually cut back to 16GB. We have a lot of data to create those levels, those assets are so much more complex than anything we've been able to build in the past. All those assets take up space. You've got a lot more maps per character, characters that use significantly more polygons than previous characters. Ratchet had 20-30 animations per character and in Resistance we have 300-400 animations for some of our characters.

Sound has also gotten much bigger, and it's also higher fidelity [and] in 7.1. HD video takes a lot of space as well. So the list kind of just goes on and on. Basically, as a developer, it's great to have a storage medium like the Blu-ray because it's room for us to continue to grow.

GP: Does Blu-ray offer an advantage to make one version of the game and then ship it around more efficiently?

Price: Yes. [The game is a] world-wide release which you can play in Japanese or Korean, any of the European languages. And why we are 16GB vs. 22GB is because we learned from out friends in Europe that we could play movies in NTSC, not PAL, and that freed up a lot of space. That's really why we are 16GB. If we really wanted to be 22GB for marketing purposes we could have, it just would have been a little disingenuous at the end of the day.

GP: What kind of slashes would you have to do to squeeze a game like Resistance onto a standard DVD?

Price: [Laughs] We couldn't. The game, as built, would simply not fit. We would have to take out entire levels of the game and that's just not cool. The game doesn't work if you don't have all the levels. We built the gameplay around the story and removing a couple levels means the story falls apart and there's no reason to play the game.

GP: Phil Harrison told me recently he thinks 50GB is sort of the new benchmark for PS3 games. What could possibly take up that much space?

Price: [You could] have more levels, more creatures, more skins, more variation in terms of the texture set that you're using. A better example relevant to Resistance is, if you've got a lot of soldiers who talk all the time, you need to make sure you have varied dialogue in all the [international] languages, you've got to be recording a lot more lines than you used on the PS2 or other consoles. That takes up a ton of space. You can take up a lot of space with just sound.

GP: Is the game set at 720p only? No 1080i?

Price: Well, it's native 720p, which is much better than 1080i. The funny thing is when you say "1080i," people automatically assume it's better than 720p because it's a bigger number. But, 720p is smoother.

GP: What are your thoughts on the PS3 not including rumble in the Sixaxis controller? Does that move upset you?

Price: In Resistance, you're getting hit a lot and firing all the time. If we were to use the rumble like we did in Ratchet, it would never stop rumbling. That's one potential drawback. Me personally, I like the lighter controller. And I actually like the way the controller feels in terms of the way the dead zones between the sticks have been decreased. Nobody here really misses it.

GP: So you haven't done a first-person shooter [since Disrupter, an early PS1 game]. What was it like to come back to the genre?

Price: This was a great chance for us to branch out as a company, and we saw a perfect opportunity to start a new franchise that would look attractive to the early adopters of the PS3 and beyond.

GP: Where did the inspiration come from to make a first-person shooter?

Price: Most of our inspiration comes from movies and book, not necessarily other first-person shooters. I mean, we play other first-person shooters, but we are very conscious about the need to separate ourselves from the others because it's inevitable we'll get compared to others.

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