Kikizo has an interview with Terminal Reality dudes, Drew Haworth and the incredibly misidentified Mike Fetterman (not Mike Douglas. Just substitute Fetterman every time they say Douglas.) It’s a good read, particularly for those of you that don’t see the benefit of waiting until Summer 09 to get the game.
Haworth: We’re no exception – we’re very happy with the interval. Some of the cinematics need work, and we’re adding a more fluid animation system for the NPCs, working on the sound levelling, and for the most part just improving the experiential aspect of the game. Pacing can be changed, stuff like that, but we haven’t added any new features, just improved on features.
Douglas: We’re not going crazy with it. At the time the transition actually happened, we were actually pretty close to being near final, so what we’re doing is we’re making a pass through all the levels, taking a good hard look at every single one, to make sure they all have the same attention to detail, the variety of gameplay… not just fighting ghost after ghost after ghost but there will be environmental interactions, puzzles and other interesting things to do that are within the remit of what Ghostbusters are expected to do… We’re just pushing that through all the levels, really taking the time to do it right.
Big thanks to Mr. X for the tip (and pointing out the Fetterman issue – I’m so sleepy right now, I would have started calling him Mike Douglas too.)
I like this explanation, and this was about the reason i thought they were waiting to release the game to clean it up and to sharpen it more. GO Atari!
Er, as an edit to the above statement my evil twin wrote, Go Terminal Reality, which the interview was conducted with. *Sigh* It’s been a long week for everyone…..
Boy we’ve gotten some great interviews over the last couple of weeks! I’m sure at this point we can all agree that the extra time to go through each level with a fine tooth comb will make the wait all the more worth it. These TR guys couldn’t be more dedicated to nailing this game and I think we’re all lucky that our beloved boys ended up in their hands from the get-go.
One minor complaint: can people stop asking about driving the Ecto-1 please?! It ain’t gonna happen, let it go!
Plus I think I finally understand the money system. Before I didn’t understand why you get money for catching ghosts but don’t lose money or get penalized for destroying the environment, I mean it seemed like the logical way to go. But now I get the whole “Peck is footing the bill” thing we’ve been hearing for months. You get rewarded for both catching ghosts AND destroying as much of the place as possible. Pissing off Peck is an added objective. You’d probably get trophies/achievements for doing exceptionally expensive amounts of damage. Am I right or am I still not grasping what they’re going for? (you gotta admit they’ve never explained it very well)
“they’re presented as a series of montages from the Ghostbusters films”
Now I just can’t wait to see what the multiplayer co-op missions exactly are.
This was very interesting….
Kikizo: A company called Zootfly released demo footage of what they claimed was an unlicensed Ghostbusters game back in 2007 – the project is now going forward as a new IP. There was a lot of interest in that. Did it have a bearing on you or the license holders at all?
Haworth: We had actually been working for about eight months on the Ghostbusters game in total secrecy when that surfaced, so while the positive reaction certainly reinforced to whoever was looking that there should be a Ghostbusters game here, we were already under contract. [It was called] “Proton” at the time – we were not allowed to say Ghostbusters 3…