Heavenly Sword - which Sony says will "showcase the power of PS3" - will be out in a few weeks on September 23.
It's made for Sony by developers Ninja Theory. I spoke to Heavenly Sword's Mike Ball about the upcoming title. He is co-founder of the firm and "Chief Technical Ninja". Nice ring to it.
The game has already been awarded titles like best fighting game even though it has yet to be released. Is this heartening to you and your developers?
Yes it's fantastic news. We've been fond of the fighting genre for many, many years and to be acknowledged in this way is something for us to be really proud of.
The combat engine in Heavenly Sword has been developed over a four-year period of heavy iteration. We believe that what we have developed is something that has immediate access for first time players and yet retains complexity and depth for more hardcore players to enjoy. That's a tricky balance to get right!
One comment made during E3 was that the game "could have 1000 characters on a screen, each running their own AI". This sounds amazing. Tell us about the smarts of the AI.
The CELL processor within the PS3 affords us a massive amount of processing power and this actually allows us to handle in excess of 1000 characters. At key points of the game Nariko confronts Bohans army where we simulate the many squads that it comprises. The CELL allows us to give each of the individual characters in the squads their own sense of the environment, other soldiers and their own objectives.
I believe the game started out being developed for PC. How long has it been in development and how has it evolved?
The game started four years ago now. Our ambition told us to start plans for a next generation title even before the hardware and devkits were available. We originally started developing our tech on what was the most powerful PC hardware at that time and then ported it to the Xbox 360 when devkits were available for it. Ultimately though it was Sony that recognised the potential of the game and the talent of the studio and signed it up.
You can still find some video of the early tech demos on YouTube. They look extremely rough now but were leading edge in their day. It's amazing how some of the concepts have actually carried through to the final product.
Tell us about the Havok physics behind the game.
When we started the project we believed that one area of technology that was primed to explode (literally) in the next generation was physics and character interaction.
When killing opponents, Havok allows a large amount of interactive debris, carnage and bodies to be left around. In fact so much so that we even fashioned a combat attack, the debris sweep, that can launch the debris at your opponents.
This will be the major early release game for the PS3. Tell us about the way you have found the potential capabilities of the PS3 and how far you have been able to push this?
It's been a learning experience for us all the way. The PS3 is a very powerful but very complex piece of hardware so developers are still learning the optimal way to handle systems. We feel that we've pushed the hardware pretty hard for this point in the PS3's lifetime but there's still plenty more that we will be able to get out of it in the future.
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