We hope you’ve got an Ogre-sized chunk of time set aside in March, because BioWare’s Dragon Age II looks like a whopper. Here’s an appropriately gargantuan chat with Online Producer Fernando Melo, conducted shortly before VGD went hands-on with the game at EA’s January showcase.

Great to meet you, Fernando. Let’s start with something fairly specific. My big bugbear playing Dragon Age on console was tactical positioning. My lead character was a Rogue, and getting her into place for a back-stab was a nightmare without a cursor. Can you talk about how you’ve addressed that?

There were really three things that we got a lot of feedback on, most of which actually came on console. At the end of the day we had a seven year game, it took that long to make, it was PC-centric, and when we did a port for consoles that was actually done with an external team.

This time I think one of the key, fundamental differences is that everything is being built at the same time. It’s all being built in house, we have people who are dedicated to each platform, in terms of user interface, in terms of controls, in terms of the visuals. So you’re going to see a much better version than we had in Origins for consoles.

In terms of Rogues in particular, that was an area we spent quite a lot of time on [with the sequel]. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to play it yet – if not, I would definitely try a Rogue on the Create-a-Character screen. For me there some of the most fun characters, as they should be. I think in Origins Rogues suffered a bit of an identity crisis, they were sort of like warriors that could dual-wield, and it didn’t feel unique enough. Whereas with DA2, each class has very specialised things that they can do. The way that the Rogue manoeuvres through combat, they’re very much geared towards taking down a single enemy, because of how fast they are.

And you have new abilities, to answer your initial question – you have a backstab ability which when you fire it, you essentially teleport behind the character and execute a backstab. And you also have other evasive manoeuvres you can do – backflip out of [trouble] if you get swarmed. So you’re much more acrobatic, more nimble, on the battlefield, which should be a lot more Rogue-like, using the combination of stealth and speed is exactly how you want to win the fight.

Whereas a Warrior is much more built now towards taking down a variety of enemies at once – they’ll swing in large arcs, hitting two or three characters at the same time, that kind of thing. They’re much more for taking down mobs. So one of the nice new things is the idea of cross-class combos.

We kind of had a bit of that with spell combos in Origins, where you could freeze somebody, then hit them with Stone Fist and they’d shatter, or combine certain storm spells to create big ones. Now we have cross-class combos, for example Rogues can use certain abilities to weaken an enemy towards a Warrior or a Mage strike, or vice versa.

In terms of the combat, we’ve added a much more action layer to it. We haven’t taken away anything from Origins – all the tactics are still there, especially on PC – but we’ve added a very thin layer of immediacy. When you press a button, when you implement an action, they execute right away. So you can now execute team tactics the way that you were probably supposed to in Origins, where you can have your warrior protect your Mage, or you can have two Mages striking correctly within moments of each other to get the effect you want.

You no longer have to worry about your Warrior shuffling into position while the enemy is chewing away at your Mage, till he can finally start swinging, or the fact that one of your Mages has to move a little bit, therefore your spells can’t go off at the right time or whatever the case is.

And I know that when we use the term “action” people freak out a little bit – it’s a bit of a loaded term. But I’m hoping as they see more footage, and as they get to play it, they’ll realise how much it feels like Origins, on all the platforms. That stuff hasn’t gone away – in fact, there’s actually more depth in DA2, it’s just hidden away in little layers, so somebody who’s new can jump right in, start mashing buttons and get some fun out of it.

But somebody from Origins, they’ll be able to take advantage of the deeper layers, really build up on tactics, and how they can customise their characters has a lot more depth to it now, in terms of specialisations and how abilities work and the fact you can upgrade abilities now – instead of getting a broader spectrum of abilities you can specialise in abilities you can really like.

So all those things create much more interesting builds of characters as well.

In 2011, the first-person shooter is everywhere. No knot of waving ferns, wooden shack, look-out tower or section of crumbling wall is free from its influence. Between the Battlefields and the Breaches, the Call of Dutys and the Bodycounts, the Killzones and the Medal of Honors, even the least trigger-happy of gamers have become connoisseurs of that time-honoured dish, the bullet breakfast.

Big budget multiplayer gaming in particular is now indissociable from the successes of shooter franchises. Thank God, then, for the dimension-tunnelling, ironsights-averse Portal series. Valve’s acclaimed 2007 original featured precisely one real enemy and zero real guns, and while the multiplay-tastic second game has a larger cast, we’re still not expecting much of a death toll.

Having tackled the cooperative mode for the first time, VGD sat down with Chet Faliszek to discuss the return of GLaDOS. Watch out – Portal plot spoilers ahead.

The PS3 version of Portal 2 is being bandied around as the “ultimate” version on console. Will some of the extra content there be transferred to the Xbox 360 later on?

We do everything at Valve in very incremental steps. We like to test and get reactions, see how it works out, see what we need to improve or change. So I think we see the PS3 as just the first step in that, and we’ll see. We don’t want to make any promises about what will happen, but we’re definitely excited by it, and would like to keep expanding on that. We’ll see the feedback to Portal 2, how it works out.

So it’s not purely a question of agreeing dates with certain publishers and not with others, then? Or of different console capabilities?

Honestly, it’s just how we update. If you think about it this way, if you have to go through a gate to update, you have to do a lot of testing beforehand to make sure that you’re perfect, so when you go through that gate, if you have to update again, there’s going to be some delay.

Among the new elements Chet mentions are different kinds of gel that rubberise or repulse other objects. It's going to be messy.

Whereas on PC and PS3 as well as the Mac – we still test beforehand but we know the minute we release it in that next hour we’re going to get more test data than we could ever possibly do, because there’s three million people playing the game versus hundreds of testers. And so the feedback we get is very valuable to us and we like to update based on that. You’ll see a big update and then a smaller update, which is an effect of what we’ve learned really quickly there. And so with the PC, the PS3 and the Mac we’ll be able to do that.

The idea of a Portal sequel upset me a bit, to be frank. The first game was so complete and accomplished, I’m not sure how you could iterate on it.

Honestly, in the team itself, there was that feeling that there were things people wanted to say and do. There was very much the [sense] that that was this perfect little thing that delivered from start to finish, and people actually started and finished it, and if we do something else we had to make sure that it worked with that, has that kind of feel but isn’t just more of that.

How do you think you’ve achieved that with Portal 2, then? Avoiding narrative specifics, obviously.

Well first we respected the story we started with, and ran with that, so you kind of get some payoffs there if you’ve played Portal 1. And we expanded the world out a lot, and there’s just a lot of difference. In Portal 1 you saw the testing labs and behind the scenes, and in Portal 2 there are all these different areas you can go to, you can see all these different sides of Aperture Science, and learn all this stuff about that’s going on there, about GLaDOS, and [hesitates] other things going on there… it’s so hard to talk about! Expanding that all out.

And then it also comes with expanding the puzzles out. We didn’t want to just take the same puzzles and make them more difficult – we expand that out by giving you more to do, more complexity but not necessarily difficulty. So that you have all these different elements you have to pull in – you have hard light bridges now, you have tractor beams, you have all these different elements that you’re using in the game, and you add them all up and run with it.

I guess the more complicated puzzles will be in co-op.

It’s this weird thing – we bring in a lot of outside testers in to test, and it depends on the person. Some things people struggle on one person will get, some things that are super easy people will just flail at… And we try to make sure that if you know how to solve it, if you’ve figured the puzzle out, you can solve it. You don’t have this dexterity problem that you’re not going to be able to do it.

The super-computer GLaDOS hasn't changed much in the centuries between games - she's still a maniac-depressive, double-speaking menace.

And co-op is just weird, because what you see is, with two people, one person will have a block on certain kinds of puzzles, and the other person will be able to see it and get through it -

That was me a few minutes ago!

Right. And there’s a lot of “just shut up and listen – follow my way, this is the way to do it”. And you’ll have these situations where you’ll say “OK, that was one way to do it, but I bet we could have done it this way and I want to go back and play that puzzle”. There may be more complexity in co-op, but probably [the puzzles] are equally solvable because you have two people looking at it, and just having that one person help you break through when you get stuck.

Do you think you’re asking more of the player than co-op games tend to on console? Portal 2 isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill slice of team deathmatch – constant communication is so important, you’re dealing with puzzles rather than opponents, and there’s a story to follow. Are the PSN and Xbox Live communities up to the challenge?

I think so. Definitely, I’d encourage playing with a friend – that’s going to be the bext experience you’ll have. But we’ve done a lot of work where we’ve brought strangers into play, and it’s about communication, you have to communicate with each other, and they’ll do fine. And so we bring a lot of elements where in the actual controls, like you saw with the ping tool, and there’s a picture-in-picture camera as well so you can see what the other person’s looking at.

Those are the kinds of things that really help the relationship form between the two – because it’s not that “whoo, group party” feel where you don’t have to pay attention, you have to know where your partner is all the time.

There’s been a lot of talk about the relationship between Portal and Half-Life. Is that something we can expect the sequel to explore further?

Oh yeah, that definitely raises its head again, and we have a little fun with that. It’s kind of fun being able to poke fun at this Black Mesa thing which is on this pedestal of “you can’t poke fun”, and we can do that through Portal.

Can you tell us anything about the mod tools? Presumably they’re a given on PC, but will we see any such functionality on PS3 or Xbox 360?

Yes, you’ll be able to do that. Right now we’re doing some experiments with bringing Left 4 Dead mod stuff over to Xbox 360, and that’s something we’ll be looking at as well for all four platforms.

Chet, thanks for your time.

Portal 2 is coming to Mac, PC and PS3 on 22nd April in Europe, 18th April in North America and 21st April in Australia. For details of the co-op campaign, check our recent hands-on.

In some games, the idea is to destroy, in others, to preserve. Hothead’s downloadable oddity Swarm induces ferocious mental somersaults straight off the bat by asking that players both destroy and preserve, beginning each level with 50 chubby, docile blue Swarmites under their command and attempting to finish with just the one.

Controlled as a group, the Swarmites are the offspring of a rather larger and less personable alien lifeform known only as “Momma”. Traversing a hellish industrial landscape, the brood must reclaim blobs of DNA – or in other words, points – to spread their parent’s influence, unlocking new levels. You don’t just get points by collecting stuff, though – you can also haul ‘em in by casually murdering surplus Swarmites – tipping them off ledges into pools of lava, miring them in toxic gas or cramming them into air intakes, among other things.

It’s a strange, arresting proposition, presenting classic, pixel-precise platforming conumdrums in a whole new light, as you struggle to keep your army permanently on the brink of complete obliteration. The Swarmites run and jump like Mario and his ilk, but you can also cluster the group together by squeezing one trigger or spread them out by pulling on the other, depending on whether you want to minimise or maximise casualties.

Thirsty for more? Never fear – here’s Joel DeYoung, Hothead’s director of technology and Swarm producer.

You’re coming up to release on Swarm. Have you finished development?

That’s right, it’s done. We’re wrapped up pretty well. We’re just putting it into submission with Microsoft and Sony right now.

The Swarmites have a sort of weird negative appeal, so charmless they're charming.

How do you feel about it?

Personally I’m really proud of Swarm – it’s been a long time coming, getting it done. We started the idea actually back in late 2006, pretty shortly after we started the company. The idea was put forward by Dr Mike Hayward, he’s our resident PhD here at Hothead. And his PhD research was in artificial life, artificial intelligence, based on the idea of having large groups of small autonomous agents cooperating to achieve a task.

So you can imagine maybe a bunch of small robots that are in themselves fairly simple but they work together to achieve something. And his idea was, what if you had these agents be little cute characters, and they were kind of dumb, but they could work together to save the day. And that’s kind of where things started.

We made a prototype, we entered the game into a contest that was being held here by Telefilm Canada, called the Great Canadian Videogame Competition – sort of an indie game dev contest. There were 70 entries and we ended up making it through the first few rounds into the final four. We got $300,000 out of that and a bunch of attention for the prototype, and we realised from the way people reacted to the demo and the characters that we’d created for it, we knew we had something on our hands.

So Mike sent the next several years just working on his own, honing the idea. The prototype was really cool, but what it involved was having a whole swarm of these little guys but taking control of one of them, and the rest would watch, and you’d do something and they’d try to imitate it, not always perfectly.

It was quite hilarious, and it was quite interesting as a mechanic, but we had this whole level where you were reclaiming an environmentally devastated landscape and destroying these mining machines, and the problem is the more you taught them to do stuff, and the more they remembered to do those things, the less you were actually doing things, and the more you were just watching the game unfold.

Once clustered, you can stack your minions by repeatedly jumping.

And we felt that that wasn’t really a game, so we played around with it, thought about how we could make it more “actiony”, something that’s more appropriate for the platforms we’re focussed on, like XBLA and PSN. So he came up with this idea of swarm control, taking control of the entire group of 50 swarmites all at once. And that’s where the action aspect of Swarm came from.

It looks very good. It’s nice to see Hothead itself getting a bit more limelight, too. With Deathspank, I think your role went unacknowledged at times simply because Ron Gilbert was involved.

Yeah, that’s true! Deathspank was definitely something that Ron Gilbert had created, it was his vision, his character, and that whole pitch. But then once we took it on and funded the game, worked on the game, it was definitely a collaborative team effort. But that’s fine, we were happy to work with Ron – he’s a giant in the business, and it was very cool to work on that game.

By contrast, this feels very much like your own project.

I hear what you’re saying. I think people that have played the Penny Arcade games and Deathspank will definitely recognise some similarities as well, because those games were made by the same group of people, and some of the similarities they’ll see will be quirky art direction, and a lot of strangeness.

The story in Swarm isn’t told very explicitly, and it’s pretty weird, and also just the humour. We don’t really take any of this stuff too seriously, and we end up putting a lot of funny stuff into the game. It’ll be a different kind of humour, not the dialogue-based humour we had in Deathspank. These guys die a lot, and it’s pretty hilarious. That’s something we found about Swarm, the game is just as much fun to watch as it is to play at times.

Vast and lawless, a breeding ground for the best and worst tendencies of online socialites, EVE Online has captured imaginations to an extent only World of Warcraft can rival. VGD took time out to chat with Kjartan Pierre Emilsson about EVE’s evolution and development of Dust 514, a console-based online shooter set in the same universe.

I don’t really play MMOs, but I’m fascinated by the histories of these virtual societies, the tales of competition and cooperation we read about on sites like Massively.com. What’s your favourite EVE Online story?

My favorite recent story is when we introduced wormhole space which created ephemeral gateways to new and potentially dangerous solar systems. Some players didn’t take care of the fact that the holes could collapse and disappear, leaving them stranded in no man’s land.

Instead of seeing disgruntled users as you could expect you started seeing cooperation and new activities with experienced players advertising their services to come and rescue them. We didn’t really expect that, but that is always the pleasant surprises in a sandbox game, when new interesting gameplay emerges.

How do you think the practice of keeping one version of the universe in play on one set of servers, rather than maintaining several universes across several server sets, has affected how the EVE Online community has evolved?

Running in EVE in one universe is pretty much central to it, and it’s difficult to imagine how the game could have been any different. This now seven plus year old game is brimful of epic stories of empires that have risen and fallen in monumental conflicts spanning years involving thousands of players, some of which have gained a quasi-mythical status. It’s difficult to imagine such richness in a series of smaller xeroxed universes.

What are you most dissatisfied with about EVE Online as it stands?

As we have kept adding to the game throughout it’s lifetime, EVE’s complexity has always been on the rise, even though it was considered already quite complex at launch. Keeping all the moving parts well oiled and interesting to both our veteran players as well as our newest members is an ever increasing challenge. It’s a challenge we love taking on.

This year, the rise in our subscriber numbers started to put lots of load on our infrastructure, resulting in a lessened player experience. We finally tackled the problem heads on and put our finest into making a radical overhaul of our core systems. Today, EVE’s performance is pretty much the best it has ever been and even more improvements in the pipes.

How is development on Dust 514 going?

Development is in full swing, with your 100+ studio in Shanghai dedicated to it, as well as in our studio in Newcastle.

Would it be true to say that Dust 514 is the long-planned planetary aspect of EVE Online built up into a whole new game?

To a certain point yes. We have always felt that fast timescale of a first-person shooter would be difficult to match to the slower strategic timescale of space combat, thus if we really wanted a ‘boot on the ground’ experience for EVE, we would have to do it in a separate ‘view’ of the EVE universe.

This doesn’t mean that planets will not be part of the reality of EVE. The link between EVE and Dust ensures the cohesiveness of both and enforces the fact that it happens in the same universe, event though you have to wear different glasses to experience it.

CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson has been quoted as saying that the EVE Online and Dust 514 universes will “meld” in time, and that one of the ways this might happen is that EVE players will carry over agreements and alliances to the new game. Are you going to wait for the respective communities to make the first moves and follow their lead, or do you have a plan for how you’re going to integrate these two games?

There is definitely a plan to meld both games from the very start. As a precaution though we made sure that the design is such that both games can live without each other to start with such that we can ease into the union of both at the pace that suits the playerbase of both. This will be an interesting social experiment.

What do you think of the free-to-play MMO market?

It is an interesting development that certainly revitalizes the market. Already in EVE, good players can play for free by using in-game money to purchase PLEX (30 day Concord Pilot’s License Extensions) on the in-game market, from those who bought them for real life money. The flipside allows people to boost their in game currency through the same system.

This is a good way to introduce such a model in a subscription service such as EVE. But free-to-play does not necessarily suit all type of experiences. Somebody worded it as such: ‘if you are not paying for it, then you are the one being sold’ and not everyone enjoys being sold.

Kjartan, thanks for your time.

The year is 2029, the nations of the Earth are locked in a brawl over scarce supplies of fossil fuel, and David Samuel Maher, a bald chap with disconcertingly blue eyes, has just awoken in the depths of an enormous Antarctic research facility. His memory is a blank page, his precise identity a mystery, but he’s evidently no ordinary lab rat, for grafted to his arm is “the Tool”, a gauntlet that allows him to lift, propel, magnetise and even crush objects from afar.

Raw Games is no run-of-the-mill operator either. The release of a teaser trailer for The Spire last week brought the UK-based independent to public notice in a big way, demonstrating a level of technical competence and an artistic coherence many of the industry’s household names would struggle to match. A moody first-person adventure, the new game sees Maher calling on the Tool’s powers to solve physics puzzles and fight undisclosed adversaries, all the while grappling with the riddle of his entrapment.

It’s not exactly the most original of setups, and Raw Games isn’t trying to argue otherwise. Billed as a “homage” to certain Valve-developed classics, The Spire aims to impress by the quality of its presentation, the richness and involvedness of its narrative, and by lending fresh intricacies to existing mechanics. VGD tapped John Tearle, Lead Designer and Managing Director at Raw Games, for more.

The Spire uses the Unreal Development Kit. For a pre-alpha project, it's looking shockingly complete.

Hi John. Could you tell us a bit about the history of Raw Games – where you’ve all come from, what you’ve worked on before, and what gave rise to The Spire concept?

It came mainly from a collaboration of different guys. We all met at university, doing computer games design courses. Without saying too much about that, we ended up realising that the skillsets that we had from the mod industry – the mod scene, I say industry – probably stood us in better stead than we realised, if that make sense. We decided in our final years to go and do a collaborative piece that wasn’t really part of the Uni’s agenda.

And we started that with what would eventually become The Spire. Within that group there was Matt Clark, who’s the lead artist, and also one of the executive directors of Raw Games. Matt and I went to work at Rebellion Games on Aliens versus Predator – they kindly took us in! We were really honoured to do a little bit of testing and learn about the pipeline and that, and they even brought us in for the Sega distribution milestone we got, which was quite cool. Sam Cobley, who’s one of the other guys, he worked on Mare Nostrum, which is a really successful mod for Red Orchestra, made by Sandstorm Productions.

The other director we have on the team, our programmer or actually technical director at this point in time, is Lee Snookes – and again he’s done a lot of little projects. All of us, we’ve come from that mod scene really. But otherwise, nothing major! Nothing at this point in time.

Alien versus Predator is pretty major, surely? You’re talking about the most recently released game, right?

That’s correct, 2010. We’ve worked at the bottom end of the scale, but it really helped us learn the pipeline. I’m not sure I’m allowed to drop names, but there’s a guy called Mike Burnham who we really feel that we owe so much to. He’s the head of production at Rebellion, and the amount of support that he showed us, me and Matt, in bringing us on board to do some stuff was just incredible. We weren’t major players in way, shape or form on that title, but it was just a really great learning curve for us, just to realise the seriousness of creating something special, something that people wanted, and of sticking to those deadlines.

The Tool is more of a precision instrument than Half-Life's Gravity Gun, but don't worry - you can still throw things around in a fit of pique.

AvP is a survival horror franchise, or perhaps “survival action” is a more appropriate label. There seems to be a natural progression there to the Spire, which you describe on the Raw Games site as a “first-person, survival, mystery, action-adventure game”. Is that “survival” as in “survival horror”?

That’s a good question, it’s something we really want to turn round and do with the game. We don’t want to reveal anything about the story at this moment at time really because without diverting from the question, a lot of people have said “Oh, look another story about amnesia” – that’s been the thing we’ve read on a lot of the forums – but it’s massively integral to our game, and it’s not told through a host of flashbacks. Let’s just say that we are very big fans of things like Lost and 24 so we take influence from them on certain of their story telling techniques. The original idea for the world of The Spire was for something episodic – whether that actually happens or not now is dependent on really either publication or investment.

But the actual survival horror side of it, regarding your question? Yeah, I wouldn’t say horror, but there’s definitely a survival aspect to it. We’re trying to do things a bit differently, let’s put it that way.

It can be a deceptive term, “survival horror”. Silent Hill is one of the biggest so-called horror franchises out there, and it’s more about tension than having something ghastly constantly leaping out at you.

Brilliant, that word that you got there, the tension – I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to tap entirely into it, be really hope that that will happen. The air of “what’s round the next corner”, that kind of creepy feeling of – I wouldn’t say entirely being alone, because in The Spire you’re not. Again, I don’t want to go off on one, I’m sure there’s going to be a question about Portal at some point – but it’s a different feeling of being alone that we’re going for with this.

Well, coincidentally my next question was about Portal! That seems to be the most obvious reference point here, or at least the comparison that’s most often made by forum-goers. I think it’s perhaps more a response to the aesthetic of it than anything else.

Yeah, which is intentional. We’re massive fans of Valve and Portal. I think the whole ethos they created was incredible. I think every designer can say that they’ve learned something from that team, because they did something that was really special and different. The word that I’d really like to use is “homage”, we really just want to pay homage to Portal and Half-Life in what we’re doing, but we don’t want to do another – without pointing the finger at anybody – we don’t want to turn round and do another Modern Warfare.

Is it going to be good? Is it going to be different? The thing is with Portal guns and gravity weapons, you don’t have to worry about balancing like, say, between shotguns and machine guns. So with physics manipulation as our weapon we’re trying to do something that’s similar, helping us to avoid certain traditional balancing issues but is does cause us others! So in other words we’re realising the limitations of a small team and are playing to our strengths. What we’re aiming for is that AAA+ style, aesthetic and feel to it, really which warrants something that’s polished.

But again, that Portal feel is definitely something we went for in the first place. Maybe somebody else mentioned Dead Space, which is also a huge influence for us – the feel and aesthetic of it. That’s the way we’re heading with the artworks.

Suspense is very much a part of the game's DNA.

Is this more of a puzzler than a shooter then, going off what you were saying about the weapons? Will combat revolve around the Tool and manipulation of the physics, or will we be trying for headshots?

It’s a good question again. At the moment in time, it’s a funny thing to say, it depends how much of a budget we end up getting for this. Being realistic, if we do introduce any kind of traditional FPS weapons they would have to have be relevant to the story, because the story is very important to us – so I wouldn’t entirely rule it out. Let’s put it this way, guns aren’t going to be a major focus of what we’re doing by any means. We’re actually doing some stuff with combat at this moment in time which we believe could be quite innovative, but we can’t say anything about that right now because the combat is still under development.

How complete is the game right now? Could you put it to a percentage?

At the moment in time we’ve had to do a revision of the game. At one point it was looking quite solid, because of the episodic idea, but at the moment we’ve been talking to potential investors, and the thing that we’ve realised is that a lot of people don’t want to risk a two or three hour game – which is what we originally wanted to do, make short, short games, and spin them out to guys like us who have busy working lives but who really enjoy playing hardcore games.

Till Criterion rolled out Hot Pursuit last month, Slightly Mad’s SHIFT was very much the Need for Speed reinvention to beat: an SFX-laden sim racer which focussed squarely on life behind the wheel and at the far side of the speedometer.

The key difference with Unleashed 2 seems to be that there’s a hell of a lot more in the way. Besides the new visor cam, which borders the top and bottom of your view with fuzz, cockpits are vastly more detailed, with webbing down one window, crash grills and a host of dashboard read-outs to draw the eye perilously from the tarmac ahead.

Those who found the previous game disconcertingly “messy” won’t be especially tempted, then, but racing fans turned off by the sterility of floating external cams will be in their element. For more particulars – including some intriguing thoughts on what night-time races have in common with survival horror – here’s Lead Designer Andy Tudor.

How did you feel about the last game and what did you change?

That’s a broad question, isn’t it?

Why yes, Andrew, yes it is. You’d better get started then.

We looked at community feedback for a start – the community wanted more authenticity in the game. The rivals, for example – they were all fictional in the previous game, now we’ve got a team of Need for Speed drivers in there, real-life guys that are doing real-life things in the drift and race, GT3 and time attack worlds.

No worries, O ye of faint constitutions - there's still a third-person camera if you could do without the whiplash.

And with Autolog in the game you’ll be able to read about what they’re doing but then actually play against them in the game, so authenticity was a massive one. Handling, being able to control things to a finer degree, and then the connectivity. Being able to share information, show your proudest moments, upload videos to Youtube, beat people’s times in a more meaningful way. So yeah, basically, that’s it.

And then from our side, innovating in new areas. Because we don’t want to just push a sequel out, and say “there you go guys, happy?” We want to keep on top of the pecking order. Already we can see people looking at the cockpit view and saying, “ooh, maybe we can do a little bit here and there in cockpit view”. So we want to make sure that we keep pioneering in that area.

Can you give me an idea of the time frame for the sequel? Was it always on the cards?

Yeah, so the idea is that Shift is a franchise, and that it’s not just a sequel – it’s the next stepping stone from the first game. If you look back over the previous Need for Speeds, there’s definitely been an evolution in terms of illegal street-racing, and then Pro Street came along and started to put people on circuits, and then Shift came along and we’re definitely, very definitely on circuits. And now with Shift 2, we’re kind of like “OK, you know where you are – let’s just like add all the great locations there are in the world”. And I’ve completely forgotten the question!

I was asking about the time frame.

So yes, we knew there was this evolution of stuff going on. It’s certainly not the case that we waited for the sales figures to come in and then said “right guys, push a new Shift out there”. We knew towards the end stages of Shift, like: “OK, we’ve got some great ideas here, we wish we’d had time for that – all this is going to blow people away”.

What grabbed me most about Shift was the sense that you were looking out through the driver’s eyes, fighting inertia, feeling every knock and jar. Can you talk more about how you’ve expanded on that?

Yeah, I was speaking about this to someone before. You’ve seen our D-box over there, which actually pushes you back in the seat physically, and that’s something that happens in a real car as well – you put your foot on the accelerator, and if it’s a powerful car your head hits the seat rest.

Unfortunately people don’t have a D-box at home, they just have a gamepad. So you’ve got to take that emotion and that physical experience that happens in real life and then somehow translate it into virtual form. So in Shift we obviously had the cockpit view – cockpit view had been done in many games before, but we took that on and said “well, nobody really uses it – why don’t they use it”.

The idea beggars belief, but once upon a time, simulation supremo and professional racecar driver Kazunori Yamauchi had his sights on Mario Kart. The Polyphony Digital CEO’s first project for Sony Computer Entertainment was Motor Toon Grand Prix, which appeared alongside the original PlayStation in Japan, 16th December 1994.

With its grinning engine grills and rubbery hubcaps, Grand Prix was far from the game Yamauchi dreamed of making, nor was it backed by the full force of Sony’s fledgling videogames division – PD itself had a staff of just 10 when it was incorporated in 1998. Nevertheless, the 25-year-old college graduate went to work with a vengeance.

“The year and a half that it was in development,” Yamauchi remarked this month to Autoweek, “the last three months as the release date approached, myself and my staff were getting three hours of sleep a day to try and get the game done. Near the end, the people from Sony came to our development studio and told us it was good enough and that we could release it.

“At the time,” he went on, “I probably wasn’t thinking very clearly, being as exhausted as I was, and I talked myself into thinking this was good enough and it went to release. But all the things I thought were not enough yet, the users said the exact same thing when the game came out.

“That was something I regretted very much when that happened because I knew it was coming. And that happened at the beginning of my career, and it was something I vowed would never happen again.”

It may have failed to live up to its creator’s expectations, but most reviewers of the day were impressed by Motor Toon Grand Prix, praising the driving model beneath that Loony Tunes veneer. Recognising greatness in the bud, Sony handed Yamauchi and his team a golden ticket – an open brief to develop Gran Turismo. It took them five years, presumably at further dire cost to sleeping patterns. The results, of course, were worth the effort.

Go on, try recalibrating the suspension on that.

“There were no promises, no deadlines,” Yamauchi explained to Esquire, “and I was able to achieve something that I was finally satisfied with, that was received very well by users all over. Because I had that experience at the beginning of my career, my confidence is unwavering.”

The release of Gran Turismo is often cited as a watershed moment in gaming’s drift towards the ever inadequately-defined mainstream. Styled like a car catalogue, licenses fighting for space on photo-realistic bodywork, it was an immediate hit among racers of a virtual persuasion or otherwise, and went on to sell over 10 million units worldwide.

GT’s success did more, though, than confirm the industry’s place in popular culture. It taught Yamauchi and his team that where the design and production of videogames is concerned, no stone should be left unturned, no rough edge tolerated, and damn the consequences to budgets and release cycles.

If Peter Molyneux turns up the phrase “overweening ambition” in the round of developer word association, and David Jaffe “controversy magnet”, then the PD boss tends to be found alongside “perfectionism”.

Not everybody is enamoured of Yamauchi’s zeal, as attested by guarded praise for the latest Gran Turismo – another five years in the making, and plagued by anachronisms like cursor-driven menus on the one hand, and apparently pig-headed design calls like a progressively unlocked damage model on the other.

The problem may be less, as Rupert puts it in our own review, that perfection is unrealisable, as that Yamauchi’s particular brand of perfection is “particular” to the point of perversity.

Oli Welsh writes for Eurogamer, “GT5 is inconsistent and strange. But that’s because it’s the result of a mad ego being given almost unlimited time and money to build a temple to his own artistry and passion. It is, in that sense, absolutely a work of art.”

At the risk of getting into yet another debate on the nature of art, it’s fair to say that all artists benefit from a little outside input, a sprinkle of healthy creative opposition, even those not tasked with making money out of a $60 million investment. Yamauchi seems to have spent the past half-decade in an intellectual greenhouse, accompanied only by those already steeped in the pecularities of his vision.

Ah, Dragon Age: Origins. A love letter to fans of the rickety old PC dungeon-crawler, laden with twenty-first century blood spatter and side-boob. Bioware’s most popular title to date, the heavy-duty fantasy RPG has sold well over three million units worldwide, and its expansion packs do a brisk trade on Xbox Live and PSN. The sequel, which charts the rise of glowering beardy-face Hawke from refugee to regional legend, will shear away a few of its predecessor’s knottier features, hopefully leading to a more pick-up-and-playable experience. We caught up with Development Manager Robyn Theberge to discuss specifics.

Hi Robyn. This might not be the best way to start the interview, but what do you think of Fable 3?

You know what, I haven’t played it!

I just ask because BioWare seems to be heading in a very Lionhead-ish direction with its RPGs – the key features haven’t so much been changed as “digested”, arranged in a more intuitive way. How far do you think you can follow that approach before the underlying complexity of your game suffers?

We’ve kept a lot of those core values, especially on PC. On consoles, we’ve definitely moved into more of an action-based RPG just so, you know, we’re going to quarry that line, between the core group and the [casual] people. We want to sell videogames. We want to appeal to as many people as possible. And that was one thing with our feedback – we have forums, we have a ton of great fans and we definitely listen to them, and respond to their desires and what they’d like to see, what direction they’d like to go in. And that’s where a lot of the key changes that we’ve made to Dragon Age 2 have come from.

How severe are the differences between console and PC versions?

You still have the full tactical menu on the console and the ability to switch between party members – put them on the enemy over here, and then you’re going to attack this person. They’ll follow all your commands – you can think like a general but you can fight like a SPARTAN now too on the console.

I think there’s just more variation now between PC and console on Dragon Age 2. I didn’t work on Origins so I can’t speak to their decision-making on that. But on Dragon Age 2 they just wanted to appeal to more people, add more combat in for those who wanted it, keep the tactics for people who loved the game and loved that about our games, but take it to another level as well.

Do you think it’s possible that Bioware might release entirely separate Dragon Age games for PC and console?

Same story, different versions?

I mean completely different games, set in the same world.

I don’t know, I’m not really privy to those kind of decisions. I think they’re just committed to making good games. They have a lot of dedicated fans, they’ve been in the business of making RPGs for 15 years. And they’ve really coined their look and design, and I don’t think they’ll vary from that any time soon. But as to making variations, I couldn’t speak to that. I know The Old Republic they’re just doing PC, but I don’t think that making two versions… I couldn’t speak to it.

There's apparently much less of a "dice, pen and paper" feel to the quasi-real-time combat in Dragon Age 2.

You’ve presumably been privy to focus tests for this game.

Yeah, it’s been everywhere. It’s not just focus tests. Our forums are incredibly busy at all times, our fans are incredibly vocal. And we listen, we hear, and we have made adaptations. Of course we can’t adapt everything, there’s a bunch of reasons why certain things can’t be done.

One of the things you’ll see in this game that’s directly from the forums is one of the followers, who we’ve already introduced, Aveline – she’s a very powerful female warrior. And that was something the forums were asking for, they wanted a powerful female warrior. Because we haven’t really seen that – Origins had Morrigan who is a powerful mage – and they needed an outlet.

Were you surprised by any of the forum requests? Was there anything which cut against what you thought you knew of the first game and its audience?

Not really, nothing that surprised me. I think everything has their own ideas and their own experience with the game, so we had to take perspective into account and how people played the game into account. It’s definitely a tricky subject, trying to determine those things.

Last question. We now have PlayStation Move and Kinect knocking around, which present interesting possibilities for games, like traditional RPGs, that might otherwise be constrained by the absence of keyboard and mouse. Could you see either of those control schemes being integrated into Dragon Age 3?

I couldn’t comment on that.

Is that “no comment” as in “yes, but we’re not talking about it yet”?

No! It’s as in “I don’t know, I haven’t heard anything about that, and I wouldn’t be privy to that decision-making either”. I work with development teams, I’m not in the senior leadership room. I work more specifically with content teams, the lead designer, so that would be a question for them.

Thanks for talking to us, Robyn.

The game’s out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 8th March in North America and 11th March in Europe.

The Sims: Medieval is a bit of an imaginative leap for EA’s biggest franchise, transferring the property hunts, cartoonified social relations and, of course, blinking thirst and hunger bars of previous games to a fantasy realm redolent of Fable III and Harry Potter. VGD sat down with Aaron Cohen at Wednesday’s EA showcase to discuss the title.

Will there be a Create-a-World option in The Sims: Medieval?

No. What we wanted to do with The Sims: Medieval was to actually create a world that players couldn’t create. We have an amazing art director who’s worked on everything from God of War through Ratchet and Clank to several games within EA Games, and he created this beautiful world.

We acknowledge that we took a little bit of creative control away from the players, but we wanted to craft a world that, as soon as you saw it you knew it was a new base game, it wasn’t an expansion pack, it was striking. And we knew that people would start telling stories in their head as soon as they saw our world. It needed to be evocative, visually stunning. So we created a world crafted by hand.

Piss off a neighbouring kingdom, and its reps may start bothering your townsfolk.

Now, that being said, there’s lots of customisation inside the game. Players who are creative are going to enjoy customising all the interiors, all the clothes, all the heroes. So players are going to have lots of creative control within the game, but not a world-building mode.

There are religions in your game now, which I understand fans have been requesting for a while. Is that a reflection of the fact that the medieval setting is a bit “safer” in PR terms? Does it allow you to handle issues that might cause offence in a modern-era Sims title?

It’s not safer so much as that in medieval times, religion drove people’s daily lives – it’s just what was the foundation. So it’s hard to do a medieval game and not deal with the question of religion. So, we’ve actually dealt with it in a very interesting way in that we’ve added two religions who are very different and often in conflict with each other.

And what’s interesting is that you are actually the God – the God is called the Watcher, both religions worship the same God and that’s you. The Watcher reaches into the world and manipulates the lives of the Sims. The Sims have free will, but sometimes they’re controlled, much as people sometimes feel controlled.

So we’ve sort of established a religion which is almost the establishment of the fiction for the entire Sims – the two religions of the Watcher, if that makes sense.

Wonder if there's a quest to pen a love sonnet?

In terms of the combat and war aspect, how much control do you have? Can you drag-select armies and send them in?

Yes, you can be very warlike and constantly pick fights with other kingdoms. That will have downsides to it – you’re going to have your citizens become unhappy, you’re going to have visiting characters from other territories doing bad things within your kingdom. It’s not a good idea to be constantly at war for any country in reality, but you can do that – it is a player choice and will drive a different kind of story for your kingdom.

What about religious wars?

Oh no, the wars themselves won’t be driven by religion, they’ll be mostly driven by trade, by “you made me mad for this reason” – there won’t be religious wars. The two religions are in conflict but they’re not in physical conflict, it’s more about influence, about how many Sims in the kingdom will convert to one or the other.

Do you worry that the fantasy element might deter some returning Sims players who associate it with statistics and olde worlde dialogue, “heavyweight” role-playing and strategy titles?

The thing about Medieval is that this is for people who like the medieval setting – it’s for people who do like RPGs and strategy games. And I think we found from all the researchers that Sims people, they like the medieval setting too. The medieval setting has been explored so much in popular culture and books, everything from Shakespeare to Tolkein to King Arthur to Robin Hood.

The medieval setting is a rich, evocative setting that people can tell stories with. People like medieval kings, queens and knights. So by marrying the Sims to it we’re just giving people new stories to tell. Sims fans want new stories to tell with their Sims, and there is a segment of RPG and strategy gamer who really enjoy the story-based aspects of those games, will come over and enjoy this as well.

Aaron, thanks for talking to us.

The game’s out for PC and Mac in March 2011.

Despite its plodding structure, obvious inspirations and unimaginative scares, Dead Space remains perhaps my favourite new IP of this generation, thanks in no small part to its starship setting – Silent Hill, Deep Space Nine and Rapture rolled into one vast, alien-infested and eerily drifting package.

The sequel has big shoes to fill, and thankfully it seems to have risen to the challenge, boasting not only a whole new spaceborne environment to tip-toe cautiously across but a team-oriented multiplayer component, pitting human squads against four breeds of oozy, decomposing horror in a race for objectives, items and experience points. We went hands-on with the latter at an EA showcase on Wednesday, and cornered Art Director Ian Milham afterwards to talk shop. Prime your Plasma Cutter and read on.

Hi Ian, thanks for chatting. I’ve just had my first taste of the maps, and I’m wondering if there are any of those graffiti messages in Necromorph-speak from the first game, the ones people could decode using tools on the web…

Let’s put it this way: we always try to put more in the world than can be easily seen at a glance, to reward hardcore people like that. So yeah, there might be some stuff.

Necromorph see human players as glowing assemblages of nerve system.

Great. I also wanted to ask about the mutated soldier Necromorphs who could mess with time. Were they ever tabled for multiplayer?

The Twitchers? Yeah, we considered all of them. I think in that case it was very difficult to balance those guys out, and give an effective counter-strategy. It’s very tricky when you’re working on an asynchronous game like this, where the sides play so differently and have such different goals, to keep it balanced. So no, the Twitchers didn’t make the cut.

Aww. Was the multiplayer component a given from the beginning, or did you come round to the idea during development?

We knew from the start of Dead Space 2 that there was going to be a multiplayer component. The real trick was finding one that was compelling – nobody wanted a cheesy, me-too, tacked-on thing. So finding one that was compelling, and dedicating the proper resources to it, without compromising the single player in any way. So yeah, it’s been going since day one, and has been in addition to our single player development not instead of.

Obviously you’ve done a lot of playtesting. Was there a big surprise during the tests which significantly altered how you approached Dead Space multiplayer?

It didn’t change how we did it, but there was one very pleasant surprise. One question from the start was “Dead Space is known as a scary game – why would you do multiplayer for it, it’s not going to be scary?” What’s been great is to see people play as Necromorphs and try to be scary. They hide in the shadows, they crawl on the ceiling, they jump out at just the right time, they wait for the last guy to enter the room before they strike. It’s been gratifying to see the scariness carry over into the multiplayer.

Humans are better off in close-knit packs. Health refills spill over onto nearby allies.

Will Necromorph players be able to interact with the environment to raise the tension – taking out all the lights in a room, for instance?

Yes, we do have destructable lights in some maps.

How much does multiplayer feed back into the single player?

Our hope with single and multiplayer is that they illuminate each other without being requirements. We want someone who plays the multiplayer right off the bat to be effective and have a good time in it – at the same time, there are links and connections between the two camps. So they do sort of strengthen each other without being actual requirements.

I absolutely loved the Ishimura. Will we be seeing the old ship again at any point in Dead Space 2?

We have not confirmed or denied that the Ishimura will make an appearance. Let’s put it this way: while there’s a lot more variety in Dead Space 2, which I think is a good thing, the response to Dead Space 1 was very positive in terms of the setting, but I think it all felt towards the end a bit samey. Brown spaceship – OK. So we’re bringing a lot more variety this time round, a lot more new spaces, but I will say, without being too specific, that classic Dead Space fans will be very happy with what’s in the game.

We look forward to being very happy then. Thanks again for your time!

Dead Space 2 hits Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on 25th January 2011.