Hunted first look and Briian Fargo interview

[Firis]

Hunted first look and Briian Fargo interview

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March 15, 2010 - If you've been playing videogames for any significant amount of time, the chances are good that you've made your way through a few dungeon crawlers in your day. These are the fantasy games dominated by dark caves filled with skeletons, goblins, spiders and secret paths filled with loot. There was a time when this genre was all of the rage as Dungeons and Dragons heavily influenced most every game designer out there. Times have changed but this once ubiquitous genre has been pushed to the sidelines. But it has not been forgotten and now Bethesda and development studio inXile are giving it another spin, this time pulling in modern design standards.

Hunted is being designed from the ground up as a cooperative experience, with the two protagonists looking about as classically fantasy inspired as you can get. The petite, elvish girl is good with a bow and at her side is the hulking, sword and axe wielding brute. The two have teamed up in the initial stages of the game with the singular goal of scoring a few bucks as hired guns and that's where my demo of the game began. Something awful had befallen a town of muddy roads and thatched roofs. The mayor had sent out a cry for help, but upon arrival our heroes found only empty streets. Down into a dungeon they went in search of answers.

This is where I got my first look at how the combat in Hunted works. If it weren't for the fantasy setting, it wouldn't look or move that differently from your standard third-person action game or cover shooter. Alora, the headstrong female lead, can slide behind rock outcroppings to line up bolts from her bow. The thinking man's Conan sits at the front line, pummeling anything within reach and smashing shields to bits. Both have a set of complementary magic to use, which can do anything from temporarily levitate foes to freeze them in place.

Though each character has a specialty, both can attack hand-to-hand, ranged, and with magic.

The crux of the gameplay lies with what the developers are calling "co-op at a distance." The magic powers are designed to back up or temporarily empower the other partner, but nothing in the game forces you to stick to their hip. The dungeon areas I saw ranged in size from small crevasses to gigantic caverns, and the game will regularly roam outdoors into ancient ruins. That gives you ample space to approach the battle from multiple angles. If your ally happens to go down, you can revive them with a potion delivered via a throw that would make Peyton Manning jealous. There's ample reason to split up too -- the environment looks to be fairly interactive. At one point I watched as a massive column was pushed over to create a set of deadly dominoes. Another time I watched Alora fire a lit arrow into a barrel of gunpowder to set off an explosion.

Hunted can also be played as a solo game, in which case the artificial intelligence takes over control of your partner. You can swap control between the two characters at set intervals, a feature that also works while playing online with a friend (there is no split-screen option in Hunted). In this way, players are free to approach dungeons or boss fights as they please, getting up close and personal or firing off projectiles from the safety of cover. One of the cooler parts of the online co-op system is that if you join a friend's game, you'll keep all of the loot you find for your own character, and you're free to jump in and out of as many different games at any time, regardless of how far you are in your own adventure.

Of course, combat and co-op features aren't everything. Half of the equation of that makes up a dungeon crawl is the exploration and puzzle solving. Were you to simply rush through the game moving from one combat situation to the next, Bethesda claims the game will last about as long as your typical action romp. Search every nook and cranny and solve every little puzzle and you're looking at a substantially longer experience. The one puzzle I saw fell into the easy category (the developers promise some will be real head scratchers), involving a talking stone face built into a wall that had to have a lit arrow fired into one of its eyes before it would open. This led down a massive series of tunnels that eventually ended at a really impressive looking boss fight.

This nasty boss closed out the demo.

And there is loot to be found down these secret corridors. Nothing is randomized (the grounds are not covered in random loot after every battle) in Hunted, which means those who take the time to explore will find weapons above and beyond what is possible by simply sticking to the beaten path. Leveling, likewise, is structured in a way that doesn't encourage grinding. By finding special crystals and trading them in, players can unlock new skills and spells, or upgrade existing ones, in a branching skill tree. I got a brief look at this menu screen during the demo and it didn't look there were a ton of options, though it doe

The environments in Hunted look pretty sharp thanks to the Unreal Engine doing the heavy lifting, and it definitely feels like the kind of world that would be fun to explore. The animations at this point are fairly decent, but some of the sound felt very much like it was all placeholder. The music was generic and the sound effects didn't exactly make the combat a thrilling experience. Let's hope it's brought up to speed before the game releases. On the flip side, the battle chatter was pretty good. The pair seemed in constant communication during all of the down time between fights, which helped to keep things fresh in the quiet recesses of the caverns.

Hunted currently has an ambiguous "when it's done" release date attached to it, though from the overall polished look it appears on track to hit store shelves as soon as the end of 2010. We'll have more on this action game just as soon as Bethesda lets us.















UK, March 15, 2010 - Hunted: The Demon's Forge is easy to sum up: it's Gears of Middle-Earth. Alternatively, it's Army of (the) Two (Towers). At its base level, it's a co-op fantasy hack n' slash featuring a sexy elf called Elara, a gruff human called Caddoc and their violent forays in melee, projectile and magical combat through a variety of dank dungeons, gloomy villages and the lairs of giant horny, winged tentacle beasts - all of which you can read about in our Hunted first look.

That Gears of War reference is quite pertinent though. With all the grime, gristle and moss-heavy visuals of Fenix's power-saw adventures, coupled with the slides into, and leaps over, cover that made him famous, Epic's mega-franchise is never far from your mind in Hunted. Touches like a co-operative move that has Wargar beastlings treading air nervously before getting pierced by flaming arrows give Hunted a fantasy spice of its own, but from the moment the Gears generation picks up the pad they'll feel at home.

The game may have all the hallmarks of the most modern of games then but, alongside the torrents of blood it slaps on the screen and its frenzied appreciation of elven side-boob, its heritage runs deep. Brian Fargo, the CEO of developer inXile Entertainment goes way back: as one of the founding fathers of the modern western RPG and the former head of once-triumphant PC developer and publisher Interplay. There Fargo begat Wasteland, which begat Fallout – but the game that started it all was The Bard's Tale in 1985, which inspired more electronic tales of dragonry and magic sticks then we'd care to mention.

Although largely off the radar since the release of the somewhat disappointing Bard's Tale remake in 2004, and during the now ceased production of Codemaster's Hei$t, IGN had the opportunity to chat to Fargo about all things gaming, Fallout, Interplay and sexy elf. Sadly we didn't get chance to ask if the floating eyeball enemy in Hunted: The Demon's Forge was in any way inspired by the eyeball-rape beast in Garth Merenghi's Darkplace, or why beefy human warrior Caddoc is afraid of spiders.

IGN: So, Elara the Elf. Do you not think that she'd get a bit cold? She's not wearing very much.

Brian Fargo: We do not think that. Did you know the elves have this amazing temperature control? Most people don't know that. She's actually quite warm, and would like to take off what she is wearing if she could. In Germany they were actually thinking they could have her topless.

IGN: Good answer. That's knowledge that must only come when you've got a lot of experience in developing RPGs…

Brian Fargo: Yup. It's a little-known fact about elven blood. Not everyone knows that.

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IGN: So could you give us a brief overview of your career? You've been in gaming for a fair while…

Brian Fargo: My professional career started in the early eighties, when I founded Interplay Productions and Interplay Entertainment. I started doing some graphic adventures for Activision, but what really put us on the map was Bard's Tale in 1985. After that we went on to our bigger titles: Wasteland was a title of mine, Neuromancer which we did with William Gibson and Timothy Leary of all people, Battle Chess, Castles… I'm trying to put them in order but I don't think I can! My brain can't do it. We ended up doing Baldur's Gate of course, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Fallout, Redneck Rampage, Kingpin, Descent…

Then I founded inXile in 2002 and we did the cheeky relook at Bard's Tale, where we had fun having a protagonist who himself had just played too many roleplaying games. We also have some smaller titles – Linerider, Fantastic Contraption, Impossible Quiz for the iPhone – and we've been secretly working on Hunted: The Demon Forge with Bethesda for two years, but from when we started it, and put it together to demo, it's more like three years.

IGN: As someone with his name attached to both Wasteland and the original Fallout, is it a happy coincidence that you're now working with the guys who brought Fallout back?

Brian Fargo: Well they wouldn't have chosen to work with me if they didn't believe in Hunted – as games are expensive, right? So, as much as they might have respected whatever I'd done in the past, they also really liked the game! But it seems perfect somehow, that Fallout is so big. It's one of their big successes, and that was my baby, you know?

IGN: So what do you make of what they've done with your baby?

Brian Fargo: Oh, it's horrible! Kidding. I mean really, to their credit, the original Fallout was a good success – but it wasn't a Baldur's Gate success. It did have this incredible following behind it though. It's only a very good company who would have looked at it and said, "This is really great as a license: this world is so rich, the mythos is so deep and the people who played it are so loyal" before picking it up and making it a console title. I bet you that Bethesda are the only company in the industry that would have done that. Great credit to them for dialling it up to what it is today.

IGN: It's interesting that when you were showing off Hunted: The Demon's Forge earlier, you were very much talking about the dungeon crawls of yore. The action itself is very modern though, very Gears of War. Are you trying to make a game that will appeal to modern action gamers as well as the older crowd?

Brian Fargo: Here's how I look at it. The dungeon crawls themselves had become action-orientated in the nineties. They really all had. Then it bifurcated: there was the Japanese RPG, and I wasn't going to make one of those, and then there was KOTOR and Mass Effect - which are cool but I didn't want to make one of those either. I loved the dungeon crawl. So, what's the best platform for that basically?

In Hunted there are elements that people will know, like secret doors and magic mouths [famous chattering lips found in The Bard's Tale and referenced in Hunted through vast talking faces hewn in rock], but you have to recognise that people playing games in the year 2010 have different tastes. We wanted to do something where it's a sensory experience, so that right away leads me towards something that's a little more action-orientated. Again, this generation is comfortable with that, so it didn't need to be a hardcore RPG.

At the beginning you're right, you'll see the cover system and you'll compare it to Gears of War – we're not shying away from it – but that's because we want you to get the controls and start playing right away. We then start slowly taking you somewhere else. With Gears you're running, you're running, you're running – but that's not what we want to do. We can do big set-pieces and all that, but there's the exploration, discovery and puzzles.

Now, we won't make you get stuck, that's another thing that's changed: in the nineties if you had a puzzle and you got stuck – you were stuck. You could only call customer service if you wanted to proceed! Now we can give you a puzzle, and we can make it hard, but there has to be a reward – we can't ever let you get stuck. We're just recognising the differences, philosophically speaking, of today.

IGN: In terms of the Bard's Tale games are there any thematic links that carry on into Hunted?

Brian Fargo: Well, certainly the first Bard's Tale – being the quintessential dungeon crawl. It was primarily the dungeons, but there was some outdoors, the magic mouths puzzle solving… it was more of a hardcore RPG but there was a lot that we borrowed from that. As far as the remake of Bard's Tale went, well we made a comedy with that right? Although I will say that we learned from that from a comedy writing perspective, Hunted isn't a comedy but one of the things we did really well with Bard's Tale is having writing that operated from a 'we know what the players are thinking right now' angle'. Writing that just blathers on is not very powerful, but when you write to the point where you're inside the player's head – and you know what they're thinking and you're writing accordingly – that for me is the best interactive writing.

IGN: What was the initial inspiration for Hunted? Why fantasy, and why co-op?

Brian Fargo: The first thing we had our artists do was assume that money was no object, and that processor power wasn't an object either… I just said "You give me a dungeon that looks unbelievably fantastic." Sometimes other developers will make games and my guys will say "Oh well to get that, they did this" – but who cares about the excuses? They did it. They pulled it off. Give me a fidelity experience. Make it stunning going through a dungeon. That was absolutely where we started.

As for co-op it came from the fact that there are a lot of people that I know that say that there aren't enough games that they can play with their friends. They can battle and kill each other, but that's not the same. So that was a demand that was sent our way from some of our best friends playing games.

IGN: Habitually, Bethesda always get great Hollywood voice-actors in on their games. Is that something you'll be looking to get into Hunted?

Brian Fargo: For sure. We have those crazy British accents in it at the moment, but they're there as placeholder. There are some great named actors being bandied about, and I hope that some of them come to fruition. An honest answer is that it's up to Bethesda – the developer doesn't usually go out and negotiate. Pee Wee Herman was unavailable, I can tell you that.

IGN: Do you think you'll keep the British accents?

Brian Fargo: I would like to. There's a lot of debate. English, Scottish… whatever. I like a European accent – since the medieval days were over here, and not back in America.

IGN: At the start of the interview, when you were listing all the old Interplay games, some of them like Descent and Kingpin were some of my favourite games. It's really sad that they're not around anymore – how does that feel for you as someone who introduced them to gaming?

Brian Fargo: On some levels it's frustrating. There's a lot of those things I would have wanted to get into... but the world has changed, and the problem is the cost of these things. People don't realise, but we've got those production costs which get into eight figures and add that to the manufacturing and marketing costs world-wide… that's forty to fifty million dollars per game. Back then, with Interplay, we could do something and, if it didn't work, it didn't matter so much. Now if it doesn't work, you're jumping out of a building. It's high stakes. That said, I do like what's happening with things like Facebook – which are opening up some areas for us to experiment in again.

IGN: Is that why inXile are doing a lot in the iPhone and free-to-play market too, with your Sparkworkz website for instance?

Brian Fargo: Yeah, that's why! I love learning about that. We have our website and a million customers coming there a month playing games for free, and we are really getting to understand that world so we can maybe try some other creative things. In the late eighties and early nineties there was a lot of creativity, but then as it got to the early part of the twenty-first century that creativity was being sucked out. It's only in the past two or three years, I think, that all of a sudden all this stuff like World of Goo is happening. It couldn't have been distributed before. I guarantee that with World of Goo, those guys could have pitched to every publisher – and there's not one publisher that would have greenlit that game. They made a lot of money out of that game, so kudos to them. I love that.

IGN: Finally, inXile were working on Hei$t with Codemasters – a crime game that really looked quite fun when its first shots were released. Could you clarify what happened to it.

Brian Fargo: The work stopped on that back in 2008, it's really old news. It's really hard to answer those questions without pointing fingers at anybody or anything of that nature. It was an ambitious project, using the Unreal Engine in an open world, and Codemasters were having their own issues at the time. It was born under a bad moon. That's the only way I can describe it.

Too many images so I had to cut 2 IGN source front page.