Saints Row 2 Q&A with Volition's James Tsai
A lead designer at Volition answers a few behind the scenes questions about the development of Saint's Row 2.
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With the release of Saint's Row 2 just around the corner, we recently had an opportunity to speak with James Tsai with Volition, the lead designer of Saint's Row 2. His responses are very candid, and discusses the development of the game, features that didn't make it into the final cut, and the challenges and benefits to having a multi-team studio.
Shawn Snider (GamingExcellence): Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. First off, can you tell us a little about yourself, your role at Volition, and how you were involved with the team developing Saints Row 2?
James Tsai (Volition): I'm James Tsai, and I'm a lead designer at Volition. I was the project design director for Saints Row 2 and was part of a team of over a hundred dedicated artists, programmers, audio designers, gameplay designers, animators, and testers working on the game. We've been working on it for over three years, and actually began more than a year before the original Saints Row was released in stores.
Shawn: What can you tell us about the Saints Row franchise, highlighting a few of the new features in Saints Row 2?
James: Saints Row is our open world, urban action franchise. The player is a member of the 3rd Street Saints, a violent street gang bent on dominating the fictional city of Stilwater and thus often at odds with other gangs, business owners, corporations, the police, schoolteachers, social workers, old blind people walking their dogs, and virtually every law-abiding citizen out there.
The sequel we've been working on expands upon its predecessor in numerous ways. We have new vehicle types, like motorcycles, airplanes, helicopters, boats, and jetskis. We feature fully enabled co-op from the beginning of the game to the end, so you can play on-line or system linked with a friend and share all the laughs and excitement of our missions together. And we've continued to expand our combat system with new abilities and weapons that complement our over-the-top setting and our team-based multiplayer.
Shawn: Volition is a moderate sized studio, at any given time the studio is working on at least two projects. We've already seen a bit of team interaction with the reference to "Ultor Corporation" from Red Faction. Do you find that multiple concurrent projects are a benefit? Do the teams interact at all for development ideas and share technology. If so, can you cite a specific example of how this has benefited the development of Saints Row 2?
James: There are a lot of benefits as well as challenges when working in a large, multi-project studio. In terms of a knowledge and information sharing standpoint, teams can really help each other out; in the case of Red Faction: Guerrilla and Saints Row 2, both of these games are open world and there are some definite design lessons each team learned and passed on to the other. Programmers and artists from the teams regularly meet and talk about what they're doing, what challenges they face and how they overcome them.
And though the engines for these two games are different, there's still some technical assistance the teams can provide each other beyond just sharing learned lessons as well. For instance, at one point in Saints Row 2 we actually had several of the Red Faction programmers join our team on an interim basis to assist with several systems like physics and vehicles...we affectionately called these guys our "mercenary" programmers. But you have to be careful and balance the demands of each project as well, making sure you're not leaving one shorthanded at critical times. It can definitely get tricky for the studio, managing the schedules and roles of all the different people across multiple projects.
Shawn: With so many open world shooters on the market, and going against a mammoth franchise like Grand Theft Auto, what does Saints Row 2 bring to the table that makes it a different experience? Specifically, as a consumer, what does Saints Row 2 offer me that I can't find in other open world games?
James: In Saints Row 2, we're giving the player the power to take ownership of their open world gaming experience like never before. The level of customization we offer goes far beyond just manipulating the physical aspects of your character's appearance and also delves deep into the gameplay realm. Different things like fighting styles and move sets, the kinds of vehicles your gang uses, even which activities you want to do to unlock more missions are driven completely by player choice. If you love what you're doing in Saints Row 2, you keep on doing it, and if you don't, you'll have tons of other choices in the game.
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