KEY POINTS:
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!
It's an ambitious project. Do you see the game along the same lines as being a blockbuster movie?
Definitely, we've never been short of ambition at Ninja Theory! We wholeheartedly looked at the techniques that the movie industry employs to create really powerful experiences and set out to apply those techniques to our game as best we could. It was that philosophy that allowed us to bring the talents of Andy Serkis, Nitin Sawhney and WETA into play. In the end we had enough performance footage to make an entire movie and enough music for there!
The story revolves around an ancient sword. Tell us more about the main characters and the significance of the sword.
The Heavenly Sword is a sword that was forged for a God. King Bohan, a maniacal despot played by Andy Serkis will stop at nothing to get his hands on it leaving a trail of destruction and death in his path. To protect the people that she loves, Nariko, a beautiful red-haired girl wields the sword knowing that ultimately the sword will destroy her in return. An adopted sister Kai supports Nariko as she sets off on her mission to learn more about the sword and it's powers and ultimately put an end to Bohan's reign.
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.
Take us through some of the weapons available to players.
One of the really cool features of the game is that if you kill a character with a weapon you can pick up that weapon and use it against other enemies. For example picking up a sword and throwing it to hit a commander right between the eyes.
We also added some more interesting weapons to the mix, so in certain scenarios you are able to pick up and fire an ancient firework based bazooka. When playing the secondary character Kai she has a self loading repeating crossbow that allows you to fly each bolt to the target using the PS3's motion sensing SIXAXIS controller. It's all very satisfying.
What were the key criteria in approaching the game, besides being original?
I'd say the top 3 items were:-
To develop the best fighting game that allowed combat to scale from 1 on 1 fighting through to 1 against hundreds.
To create an experience and storyline in which the player felt immersed with believable and appealing characters.
To create a showcase title for PS3 and push all areas of development to new heights.
Have you been able to break new ground in the challenge of showing emotion in players?
I truly believe so. The performance capture of the actors was all handled at Weta in Wellington. We were able to capture the facial expressions, body movements and vocal data of up to 5 actors all at the same time. A first for games and movies. The capture system really liberated the actors under Andy's direction to give a really powerful and convincing performance which was in turn captured in extreme detail.
In conjunction with a really powerful rendering system on PS3 we were able to replicate the actor's expressions extremely well. It's the subtle movements such as a lip tremble that makes for really convincing and believable expression.
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.
The early demo looks stunning including the amazing detail. Graphics have come so far recently. Is there a limit to how realistic games can get? What examples can you give of the eye candy achievable through being designed for PS3?
I really don't believe that there is a limit to how realistic a game can get. Look at film. At the high end the rendering techniques that they require uses hundreds of processor cores cranking calculations for many hours to produce a single frame of the movie. In games we have a small number of processors (admittedly far more than we had in the past :) to generate a frame every 30th of a second. To do that we have to be much more cunning about the techniques we use and generally we end up with approximations of the techniques used in film. We'll learn new techniques and new hardware will come along allowing us to improve even further.
To see some of the eyecandy PS3 allows, just look at the skin detail of Nariko's face when the game boots. It's incredibly realistic, down to the tiniest pore.
Have you already started working on a sequel?
No we haven't.
So we are looking forward to seeing more goodness from the game as the demo was stunning and you could replay it until you found the nice combination moves and that tricky debris sweep - which looks awesome. Look for 'the making of' featurettes (for lots of Andy Serkis) and five episode-like animations describing the main character Nariko's history on the Playstation store.
Will it sway you to consider buying a PS3?
