Let’s shift gears a little bit and ask about Insomniac’s relationship with Playstation. Because two times out now you guys have been very closely wedded to Playstation. I mean, Ratchet & Clank pretty much became Playstation mascots for awhile. And obviously Resistance has been a huge franchise for the PS3. So, at what point did you feel like, OK, we can trust Sony in a long-term relationship moving forward and making games for their platform? Can you peg your closeness to Sony up to a particular point?
Yeah, I think that it was during Spyro. When we started working with people like Grady Hunt, Connie Booth and Greg Phillips, up at Sony in the early days, we immediately forged a strong bond with them. And this is their production team that I’m talking about in particular. Because we both were looking at game design the same way. More importantly, though, they had a really great understanding of the developer/publisher relationship. They saw it as we did, as symbiotic, where we both have our roles to play. We make the games. They’re there to help us in anyway they can. To give us feedback. To keep us from getting too myopic. And it has worked beautifully over the last 13 years.
You mentioned myopia as a danger. One thing I constantly hear from talking to developers is that they have no idea what other people are doing, how a game is going to come out, how it’s going to look in comparison to our stuff. Do you feel like that’s something that a publisher should help with?
Absolutely. I think that it’s not just publishers that can help, but it’s actual consumers. We as developers are always looking for outside feedback on what we do because it’s way too easy to get attached to your creations and start drinking your own Kool-Aid. And if we are going off course with a game design idea, and what we’re creating ultimately becomes our little pet project, it isn’t good for business. We want outside feedback on whether or not the game ideas we are implementing are viable.
So, we rely on our producers at Sony to give us feedback. We rely on feedback from the community, from the Insomniac community, from the game community in general. And we also rely heavily on usability tests and focus testing. Because we know that even if a game is easy to play for us and makes sense to us, it may not make any sense at all to somebody who’s seeing it for the first time, and it may not be interesting to them. So, from the very beginning of any kind of game development, we’re always looking for guidance from various areas.
It’s funny that you mentioned drinking your own Kool-Aid because the first thing I thought when I saw the Resistance 3 teaser was that, “Wow, this is really far afield from anything that we’ve ever seen in a Resistance game. I know you are not at liberty to talk about a bunch of that stuff. But, can you talk about your state of mind coming out of Resistance 2, seeing the reception, and going into Resistance 3?
[vodpod id=Video.4250376&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]
Sure. Yeah, I can talk about that. When we developed Resistance 2, we took a lot of risks in terms of changing up some of the core mechanics, and we expanded the scope of the game significantly by including 60-player multiplayer, eight-player co-op, and a fairly large single-player campaign. And we knew that we were running a risk of alienating some of our hardcore fans, and after we released the game, they spoke up. They told us in pretty clear terms what they liked and what they didn’t. As with all of our games, we took that advice to heart when we began developing Resistance 3. So what you’ll see in Resistance 3 reflects a lot of what we knew we wanted to improve for the franchise in general, but also a lot of what consumers had to say about Resistance 2 and Resistance 1.