IGN scored a great interview with 3 guys from the Condemned 2 team. The producer David Hassle, the associate nultiplayer producer Tarl Raney, and the lead software engineer Brian Legge.

IGN: With E3 less than two weeks away now, people want to know: what kind of presence is Bloodshot going to have at the show?

David Hasle: SEGA is going to be taking users through a big chunk of the “Mission 1″ experience and is going to be showing off our new forensics system which has been completely revamped. They’re also going to show off one of our combat arenas so we can show off our enhancements we’ve made to our fighting system. 

IGN: With the forensics system “redone,” what does that really mean? Is it more interactive or user-enabled than before?

Hasle: Yes. One of our key goals this time around is to allow the player to be in control of all the forensics. The first time around, our forensics were just used for two purposes: First, as a driving force behind the story — to push things along — and second, as a direct story element itself.In Condemned 1, when you came to a forensic moment your light came on and you pretty much had one thing to interact with. This time around, we’re going to give you a full evidence zone that, when you go into it, has some questions that pop up from Rosa that you can then decide how to react to. It will be up to you to pull out the proper tools necessary to figure out what’s going on. You also get to use your practical senses and just use the power of observation. You can zoom in and look around, break out whatever tools you want in real time and draw your own conclusions. But don’t worry. If you just want to go around and kill things, you can ignore the majority of the game’s forensic moments; we want the player to be the driving force behind these investigations.

IGN: How about the weapons? Which weapons from the first game have returned and what are some of the newer items in your arsenal?

Hasle: We definitely have our favorites that we brought back. I personally really love the feeling of smashing that pipe against someone’s face [laughs]. That’s really what’s at the core of Condemned for us: that visceral feel of combat. What we’ve done is expanded the list of weapons quite a bit as well as expanded the ways in which you can use those weapons. For example, you can throw your weapons — that’s really become a crowd pleaser internally. In fact, throwing is actually quite handy. If you time it right when a guy is running towards you, you can throw something at his feet and trip him up, hit him on the back when he’s down on the ground, and then finish him off.

Just remember, though, anything that you can do to the AI in Condemned, the AI can do to you. Just imagine trying to peer through the darkness in an unlit area and then, all of a sudden, something is flying at you out of nowhere and smashes you upside the head. So an early tip for the player to stay alert for visual cues that could save them.

IGN: Since you mentioned finishing someone off, are you bringing the finishing moves back and are they more varied?

Hasle: We have a whole of them. But do you remember how they happened in the first game? You basically had a selection of finishers once the guy hit the “daze state.” Instead of leaving it at that, what we’re doing now is allowing you to grab a guy and hold him when he’s in that daze state — you can put him in a half-nelson and walk him around and decide right there if you want to twist his neck real quick or force him to some spot in the environment that you can interact with. Just imagine walking up with a guy and there’s a dumpster there. You can smash him into, the dumpster falls down and he’s out. Or perhaps you’ll find a bookcase where you can perform the old “American History X” move and stick his mouth against the edge and… Well, finish him off. We’re having a real good time with them including some I don’t want to mention because they’re so hardcore I’m not sure we’ll even end up having them in there.

IGN: One of the best moments in the original Condemned was the final boss battle in the processing plant. It was multi-tiered and allowed Ethan to use multiple tactics. Can we expect more moments like those in Bloodshot?

Hasle: Yes you can. This time around, we have a lot more boss battles and distinctive AI elements for them. There are definitely specific tactics and combinations of things you’ll need to do in order to beat some of them. I don’t want to say much else and give anything away, but let’s just say for argument’s sake that one boss can only be killed if you use a specific sequence of finishing moves or environmental kills.

IGN: How about the storyline? It has been kept a secret so far and a lot of our readers are curious about how it’s going to start. Will there be a recap of the first game’s events for new players or are you just going to drop us right into the action and go?

Hasle: We’ve had this discussion a few times internally. It’s a good question because we don’t have a clear answer yet. We have an opening right that reintroduces players to Vanhorn and that’s your goal for the very first mission — to find him. But we’ve also debated as to whether or not that’s enough and may end up with a small recap. Then again, our ultimate goal is to immerse players in the story quickly and early enough that they don’t have to worry if they played the first game or not. Besides, there have been some very serious changes to the main character Ethan Thomas. He is so far down in the sewer that he’s really on edge. He’s in bad shape and is spending a lot of time in a local bar.

IGN: A lot of the screenshots we’re debuting today have environments that look reminiscent of the stages from the first game. Will we be going back to some familiar locations or does Ethan just have an impulse to explore dangerous and dirty warehouses?

Hasle: Ethan will definitely find himself in dilapidated, condemned buildings and there may be some similar crossover in the types of places he goes, but we’ve made a very conscious decision to ensure that our environments are unique to the type of gameplay we’re pushing.

IGN: Does that mean we can expect more outdoorsy stages or daytime levels?

Hasle: I wouldn’t say we’re using the daytime because Ethan is sort of stashed away in the darkness. However, there will definitely be a wide variety of locations and some of them will be outdoors, yes.

IGN: Are the stages going to be more open-ended or are they still linear to help push the story forward? Are you going to populate them with more NPCs for a more realistic appearance?

Hasle: The answer is “Yes” to all of that. One thing we did when we decided to make Condemned 2 was to seek out every piece of feedback on the first game we could find (reviews, blogs, message boards, etc) and apply that to Bloodshot. We had a lot of discussions as to whether or not we’d use a hub-based world or a completely open-ended one and we found ourselves straying away from what made Criminal Origins what it was. That is, a very controlled experience with a story that was happening very deliberately in front of the player.

That said, we’ve also made a conscious effort to make our stages less linear and feel more open than before with greater variety. Expect more puzzles as well — but don’t expect any free roaming stuff on the level of GTA or something like that.

Brian Legge: What we want to do is provide a great single-player story. The narrative we’re using is appropriate for that goal. Forensics are optional so there’s still player control, but we’re still delivering a specific story-driven experience.

IGN: How about the enemy variety this time around? One area that the first game was knocked on was its abundance of transients and few others.

Hasle: Those slimy guys you see in the screenshots are actually part of something that is really important to us. We want to emphasize Ethan Thomas and get a more rewarding conclusion to his story. What I’m saying is that Ethan suffers from hallucinations and when it happens these strange little creatures come out. That’s what those black tar-covered things are. We also have a much greater variety in our enemy type and, as I mentioned earlier, more distinctive AI types as well. There are different enemy factions that are fighting each other, for example, and you have to deal with that.

IGN: My next question is one that our readers demanded. After our last Q&A we received a number of letters asking us to beg you to let Greg Gruenberg come back to do Ethan’s voice. So here we go…

Hasle: I know, we’ve gotten that same request quite a bit. That was a very, very hard decision. We loved working with Greg and he was excited about working on the game himself. When he found out that we were making Bloodshot, he was the first one to call us up and say, “I’m willing to do it even though Heroes is taking off. “But in the end, we had to make that really hard choice about the type of character that Ethan has become. In the first game, Ethan wasn’t as hard or dark as he is now and the voice had to go into a new and darker direction.

IGN: You couldn’t have just asked Greg to smoke a couple of non-filters beforehand?

Hasle: [Laughs] No we couldn’t do that. Greg is a real nice guy and he sounds like a really nice guy, which is why we had to opt for someone who doesn’t sound so nice. We wanted to go really, really dark.

IGN: The game’s darkness has me wondering about something actually. With the recent decision by the ESRB to give Manhunt 2 an AO rating, has it affected or changed anything in your game? Are you more apprehensive about putting the extreme stuff in there?

Hasle: We’ve had a lot of discussions about that and have been following what’s been happening. We always keep an eye on what we’re doing because, you know, we’ve been developing scary games for a number of years now and maybe we’re a little numb to what’s too much. That’s why our next line of defense is SEGA. They might turn to us and say, “You guys are nuts, you can’t do that,” and we’ll listen to them and hear what they have to say. Of course, we also have the ESRB to fall back on and show them our scariest, most evil moments and see what they think about it before we finish everything up. But to be clear, in spite of all the events surrounding Manhunt in the last week, we have not decided to remove or tone down anything we have in the game at this point — we’ve just had discussions about it. Also, keep in mind, part of what our game does is try and explain why this evil and violent stuff is happening on the streets; so we put what you’re seeing into context.

IGN: Why no PC version this time?

Hasle: We wanted to focus on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. That’s really it.

IGN: Are you bringing back collectibles? The first game had dead birds and metal pieces.

Hasle: We do have collectibles but they’re not in the same vein. The metal pieces and birds were used to help put the story together and admittedly it left some people going, “Huh?” But with Condemned 2, what we’ve done is include an emotional response system; you can react to certain NPCs and what not. If you complete them all, then that goes to your collection. If you find each environmental kill within a level then that’s another thing that goes towards your collection, etc. We want replay value, and a good way to do that is to encourage the player to want to play through a level again so that they can complete the various objectives — whatever they may be. But make no mistake about it: there will be an impact on your gameplay based on how you do.

Legge: There are also more secondary objectives within the level as well. They vary mission to mission and those take on a lot of the role that the first game’s collectibles had.

IGN: A lot of people would argue that the ultimate in replay value these days are the types of online options that are offered. Condemned 2 has them but they haven’t been talked about yet. What can you tell us?

Tarl: One of the goals we set about multiplayer early on is that we wanted to keep the same feel and tone of the single-player game with the added edge of facing human opponents. So without getting into too much detail, we’ve been playing around with a lot of different game modes and beating the hell out of your friends with a pipe can’t be beat. That’s at the heart of it obviously, it’s what we’re known for, and it’s what we’re trying to bring to the multiplayer space. As far as game modes are concerned, nothing has been completely locked down at this point. We’ve been trying a ton of different stuff and one of the things that’s coming out is this idea of pitting two teams against each other with one team tracking down forensic evidence, while the other team prevents them from doing so.

IGN: How about system-specific differences? Will the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions be pretty much the same game and how will you use the Sixaxis?

Legge: Honestly, the Sixaxis control isn’t something we’re looking at. We’re more concerned with both games having the same core mechanics. As far as one platform versus another… they both have strengths, and to be honest, there’s been a whole lot of outside talk about how impossible the PS3 is to develop for but I’ve been really impressed by our tech team and how quickly they’ve gotten the PS3 version going. In other words, the differences between the two are minimal.

IGN: Any parting shots you’d like to give Condemned fans before you go?

Hasle: The thing I’m most proud about in Condemned 2 so far is the fact that almost every single problem or issue people had with Criminal Origins has been handled. We’ve improved or expanded everything and our combat, input, and forensics systems are great. More than 90% of the team here was present for Condemned 1, and that means that our story and our tech is so much better too because they know the game and they know the engine. We’re having a lot more fun this time because we don’t have the pressure of trying to make the launch window, and just really excited to get it out there.  

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 4:29 am and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.