Game Informer: Prior to Lair, Factor 5 worked very closely with Nintendo. Why did you decide to split apart, and was the split amicable?
Julian Eggebrecht: Yeah, the split was extremely amicable—you’ll see me drinking as much with the Nintendo people as with the Sony people (laughs). It’s a small industry, after all, so no bad feelings. It was at the point in time when we saw that we wanted to move on to next-gen. Quite frankly, Nintendo hadn’t made up their plans yet completely. For us, it was simply something where we already saw the initial direction of the Wii slightly, and at the time they hadn’t really completely figured out yet the extent of the motion control and the extent of how much they would be doing with the wand and everything. So it was more about, “We’re going to keep the specs for graphics and sound on the same level, and then we’re going to do something else which is cool.” Quite frankly, if you don’t have the complete stuff in front of you—which they didn’t at the time—that’s a scary proposition for a developer, who’s looking for, “Well, we should go high-definition and 7.1 audio and all of these things.” And so, in 2004, when all of that happened, it was just logical for us to move on there. And that’s how it happened with Nintendo, end of story. We talked to them openly back then, we talked to Sony—we also talked to Microsoft—and Sony really had the whole package. I was blown away, because initially, I was hoping for the motion control that would also be in the PS3. When we had our early talks with Sony, it was basically about our dream system. The dream system included high-definition graphics and definitely larger storage media, which at the time was Blu-ray—that was pretty clear—but also motion control. I was like, “Yeah, they’re probably not going to do anything with the motion control, but oh well. We’ll have to live with that.” That was kind of the final perfect dream come true when it finally happened with the PS3. But yeah, we’re still good friends with Nintendo.
GI: Some would say the GameCube was a failure. What do you think?
Eggebrecht: (Laughs) Was it a failure? You know what, those GameCube games that we did make a hell of a lot more sense when you put them into a Wii, just because they’re not in a GameCube, visually, and I think that says a lot about the system. I think in terms of the design, it certainly was a failure, because Nintendo wasn’t ready to step up to the plate of basically saying, “We’re going to embrace also more adult content”—and we’re not talking GTA necessarily here, but other things—just like a Star Wars Rogue Leader, that’s as adult as it went at the time, or Resident Evil. But they delivered a system that, in the end, was supposed to be like Apple had, but what it really was was just a weird mixture of design forbidden young. (Laughs) Yeah, I love to play my games on the Wii, because it’s finally on a system that I was hoping would look like that than the GameCube.
GI: What are your thoughts on the Wii?
Eggebrecht: I love it, absolutely. I mean, I love it as much as the PS3. When I read all of those things about how you have to buy a 360 and a Wii, that’s not true. You have to buy a PS3 and a Wii—that’s the perfect combination.
GI: So why Sony and not Microsoft?
Eggebrecht: On the technology front, there is simply more vision at Sony. By now, there’s now more—if not more, at least equal—vision on the online front. I have to say that. When we talked to Sony and Microsoft at the time, Microsoft was very determined and they delivered very nicely on what they wanted to do with the 360. But even back then, there was the, “Well, 1080p? Well, we don’t know about that. Real high-definition? You know what? Let’s do 720p for the games, mostly.” And they’re doing catch up right now, and they’re doing it quite cleverly. But nevertheless, in the early days you had that as a vibe of the system. What was a killer for me was no HDMI. We had huge fights with Microsoft basically going back and forth about, “Please, please, please, please put an HDMI port in there, because only then can you really see the graphics,” and they said, “No, we’re designing the whole graphics chip around being analog.” And they’re retrofitting it now, trying to catch up with the PS3. But all of that vision was there, right from day one, with the PS3. That was very encouraging. Kutaragi-san, in that sense, is on the technology front, and I don’t think anyone would contest that it’s still the greatest visionary in the industry. So, it made it easy. Sony was the clear-cut, perfect match.
GI: At Factor 5, are you guys Sony second party, or are you free to do whatever you want?
Eggebrecht: We’re an independent, closely aligned with Sony developer. Let’s put it that way. We’re not owned. We’re completely independent. So, we’re like Insomniac, I guess, if you want to make a comparison.
GI: You announced your first game for GameCube when it was still the Dolphin named Thornado. Is that project completely dead, or is it something that you still have in mind?
Eggebrecht: I should stop the tease about that. That’s completely dead. What we are thinking about is basically with the PS3 is going back to our old Turrican games, and basically, finally doing something like that but in 3D. That’s finally going through.
GI: The old Commodore crowd is going to be so happy to hear about that—that’s awesome.
Eggebrecht: Yeah (laughs).
GI: Lair is your first title in a while that isn’t based in the Star Wars universe. Would you ever make another Star Wars shooter for next-gen?
Eggebrecht: It depends on the platform. I’d love to do one for the PS3—we have the wackiest thoughts about when people were saying, “Oh, it would lend itself to motion control and the Wii would lend itself so perfectly for doing a Star Wars.” You know what? We have been playing around with the motion control on the PS3 controller actually, and you wouldn’t believe what you would be able to do there. Having said that, though, last I remember, some guy named George Lucas owns the license, and unless he dumps it onto Sony because he’s so sick of it, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
GI: Was it refreshing to work with a fresh IP?
Eggebrecht: Yes. After Rebel Strike, I think it was a little of a “been there, done that” mentality. It’s really interesting at our place, because we are still right next to Skywalker Ranch—we basically still have all of our friends within the Lucas empire, of course, and we do get our new guys asking, “So we’re only working on new IP? Why aren’t we doing some Star Wars?” And all of the senior guys are basically saying, “Why would you want to work on Star Wars? Are you crazy?” (Laughs) It’s a strange thing—compare it to always having a childhood dream, and you have fulfilled it, and then you fulfill it twice. You then get stuck into something like, “Can I really put the passion in that I put into the early things?” After Rebel Strike, really the answer for me was, “It’s tough, no. I’ve done what I wanted to do in Star Wars,” and it applied to a lot of the other guys in the company, and that’s why we said no. Now we want to create our own things again. Childhood dream fulfilled, it was great, move on.
GI: One thing we don’t know much about with Lair is the story. Where did you guys come up with the concept and who created the story. Is there anything you can say about that?
Eggebrecht: The story almost developed at the same time as the basic concept, because when we pitched Lair to Sony, first of all it was about game mechanics. It was the, “Let’s take the strengths that we have, build on a couple of them and apply them to something that hasn’t been done before—which is a good dragon game.” As far as I know, there isn’t one out there in the 25 years of video games.
GI: Panzer Dragoon?
Eggebrecht: Yes, but, that was a straight linear shooter. By the same token, you could have said when we did Rogue Squadron—which was the first free-flight, mission based shooter—basically we said, “We need to take that genre to the next level,” because Nintendo at the same time was doing Starfox 64. It was a gorgeously done 3D shooter, but nevertheless it was the old way. With Rogue Squadron, we said we had to reinvent this genre the same way that Mario 64 was also inventing free-form. So, with Lair, we thought about—and Panzer Dragoon did come up—the only well-done dragon game ever was Panzer Dragoon, but it was linear, and it didn’t take into account a lot of things. Because a dragon is constantly flying there, it doesn’t land on the ground.
When you think about dragons, then for me the first thing that came to mind and it was one of the initial takes in the concept of how our dragons look was, “OK, let’s not go the mythical route, but let’s go dinosaurs. More Jurassic Park than Tolkien,” and that was the first take. I think when you look at our dragons, they’re very lizard-like and have all of these influences to make them look more realistic. But in gameplay terms, it’s like the most powerful horse or riding animal that you ever imagined. Let’s go through the list. And then you do checkmarks, and you quickly realize that no other game has ever realized even half of the potential of what’s just inherent in a dragon and you riding a dragon.
So that was the first part. The other thing was that we wanted to write a story that actually lived up to probably a little bit higher ground than most of the stories being told in video games. We knew it would be violent, but at the same time we didn’t want to deliver violence just for the sake of being violent. Early on, we said, “Why don’t we also try to be a little more clever about the story?” Where we twist and turn, where you think you’re one thing but then it turns into something else. And there are interesting twists and turns and complete turnarounds in the story that you’re not expecting. We’re starting as an almost—and maybe that’s just a snippet of the story I can talk about right now—the game really starts out in our world, the 9/11 moment of the world, where basically the enemy is coming in and is completely surprising society and you’re in the air force, you’re in the military, and you’re completely blown away by it. You don’t know why, and we were playing it relatively straight in the beginning, and you’re thinking, “These are the enemies, I need to take them down,” and then boom boom boom, what you would expect. But then very quickly throughout the game, it develops that it’s not really the case, and there are completely different motivations here working on it, and there’s quite a complicated character arc for your character. That was a huge motivator to the team. Over the last month, actually, when we were putting together the story and the game and really weaving it together, a lot of the guys who’d been working only on the game parts basically saw some of the story elements for the first time playing out and said, “Wow, this is actually much more clever than I expected.”
GI: How have your overall experiences been with the hardware?
Eggebrecht: It’s an interesting ramp-up, interesting in terms of challenging—like I said before, less so than the PS2, but certainly moreso than, say, the GameCube, which was extremely easy. But that’s to be expected, because that’s where the power is. If it’s too easy, then as we’ve seen with the GameCube, there’s no headroom. We had a terrible time trying to squeeze more out of that system for Rebel Strike. On the PS3, the sky’s the limit. I’m happy that we got as much from it as we do right now, but we could go on for three years developing that engine and we know that the system will bear it. That’s the genius of Kutaragi’s designs—there’s so much headroom. And that makes the start up harder. But when you cross a certain threshold for the system and you know what to avoid and what to do right and how you write efficient code, how to basically have the Cell really talking in an optimized way with RSX, at that point it’s an exponential increase in productivity with what we’ve seen. At this point, it’s really going fantastically. It’s great hardware—it really is.
GI: How long is the game? How long do you think it’ll take the average gamer to get through it?
Eggebrecht: All of these percentage questions and length of gameplay… Let’s put it this way: If we really succeed in terms of tuning the difficulty curve right, and that’s what we’re doing right now, then even a newbie player should be able to play through to the end—but, we’ve taken a cue from our old games, so we have the medal system and all of that, so you’ll be at home with that. So replayability of the missions is important. Ideally, we want to tune it so someone can get through the game and the story in about 10-12 hours or something like that. Then there’s a whole lot of replay value. We have online leaderboards, supporting network platform fully there, we have chatboards inside the game, we have messaging inside the game, so all of that you can directly do within the game on the network platform. With the leaderboards, especially, I think our replay systems work quite well, because you can compare yourself and there are hidden things that you can unlock later. So your 10 hours is just your first playthrough.
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