Exclusive Army Of Two: The 40th Day Interview Pt 1

The first Army Of Two was a new IP at a new studio – is it easier having a starting point and working on the sequel?
Having come from working on engines before, the starting with the engine is night and day. When you can actually already talk about the design and the gameplay instead of ‘let’s make some stuff up’ and when the engine actually gets here it won’t do any of the things that we wanted! So I think it’s been a lot easier in the sense that it wasn’t as terrifying a question of whether anything could ship. The first version of anything on new tech is, can we get a game made? With this the question has been, can we get a great game made? I think everyone was really confident from day one that we could make a good game, but the audience already has perceptions that it’s ‘okay’, but how do you take that and surprise people and say, ‘No, this can be awesome.’ If you think about some of the biggest brands and games I love – your Burnouts, your Resident Evils, your Tekkens – the first ones were a 71 [%]. They weren’t great, but now Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games I’ve ever played and Burnout Paradise is phenomenal and Tekken 3 blew me away back in the day and is still amazing. Because of the budgets you don’t always get the chance to climb that ladder and people forget that the other versions of those games were in the seventies and it’s only once they got going that now they’re powerhouse franchises because they have all that knowledge and learning.

Did the original Army Of Two get different responses from different parts of the world?
Hugely. It was interesting for me as I came in as an external party, which was good because I had personal relationships with lots of the team members but I hadn’t worked on the last game, so I was able to give my gut response to different parts and look at the feedback hopefully reasonably objectively. When you work on a game it’s hard sometimes to distance yourself from the sheer volume of hard work that it was, so you take everything very personally. It was good for me to be able to come in and be objective.

I think the first game was very interesting because it did some things amazingly well. I think the core fantasy just nailed it, which is why it was such a big seller – it’s done 2.6 million now, which means it outsold Bad Company, it outsold Dead Space two to one. It was a huge success, but obviously there were creative flaws. Some of those were admirable flaws, which came from taking risks. You go out and try to do something new, they wanted to do a buddy cop sort of film – that sort of Eddie Murphy style – but what you realise when you try to do it is so much of that is based on the actors’ personalities and it’s easy for people to be like, ‘Eddie Murphy, he’s funny. Bruce Willis, he’s funny’, but when it’s you and the character says something that’s inappropriate, it’s like, ‘Wait, hang on. I don’t agree. I don’t like the Wu Tang Clan.’ So it’s very personal and I think that’s a really interesting learning in terms of making co-op games that are story based because you see something different. But the reactions were very different. In the US, for instance, there was barely a comment about the tone and the sales were much stronger in the US and Mexico and places like this than in Europe, where Europeans took issue with the tone, which was interesting because I think it was a very American tone.

It’s interesting considering most American things travel pretty well to Europe and especially the UK…
I think, again, it’s a positive and a negative. It’s something you don’t want to lose in that it got a reaction. It’s so easy to make a bland, irrelevant game. Imagine all the shooters that came out in the last year, I couldn’t even name most of them but at least with Army Of Two one of the fascinating things is that people have an opinion about it. I really didn’t want us to lose that, so when we were looking at the tone, that’s why you heard us talk a lot about choice. Some of the biggest criticisms were that it’s not funny enough, they’re not talkative enough. So you’ve got criticism coming from both sides. So the only reasonable response was to let you push it in that direction, so try to make the game ask questions all the time. There are hostage scenarios – what kind of guys are you? There are these co-operative choices – do you care? There’s a ‘rock, paper, scissors’ button – do you use it?

So, it’s the opportunity to apply your own personality to the characters?
I hope so. I spent my last six years at Maxis, I was on Sims and Spore. One of the things I took from that was this idea about the player driving the story, the player driving the narrative and the player being in control of their own game, which is the thing that we do in gaming the best. Telling a linear story we’re actually crap at. The best story in a game is a terrible movie, it’s made up for by the fact it’s an awesome game. We’re terrible at telling stories, we kid ourselves that we can tell stories. They’re awful, they’re cheesy, they’re shallow, they’re weirdly paced, they have bad endings that are always blowing things up or punching people – we’re not good at that. So lean into this idea that the real narrative is, ‘You and me – what do we do?’ Also, if you ask players – and we saw this at Maxis and you even see it in shooters, which is why I think it’s very applicable – ‘What was the story? What happened?’ they don’t tell you the story, they tell you what they did. So their story is their story. So as much as possible we’re still pretty linear in the single-player experience, so we try to branch it out – ‘Do we go left or right, do we go up or down, do we stick together or do we split up?’ – but it’s still reasonably linear. But let people make their own story.

So is it an easier challenge, rather than going for the Citizen Kane of games, to work in this B-movie, action movie-style area of games?
I dunno. The B-movie stuff I actually think is really tricky because I think it’s much easier to be serious. I think if you’re telling a story, like a war narrative, jokes are really hard because they’re so personal. I actually think it’s trickier in a weird way. If you look at the first Army Of Two, one of the things that people didn’t like was the ambiguity. Europe hated the idea of ambiguity – ‘No, there are good guys and bad guys.’ And I actually thought, ‘That’s really boring!’ I think the problem was that people didn’t like the guys and then it got translated to some other stuff.

Is it difficult to do comedy in games?
Yeah, comedy in games is really hard, especially because comedy in games is really slapstick. What do people laugh at? They laugh at hedgehogs and they laugh when someone comes round the corner and gets a fright. So you laugh at the really early comedy, the physical stuff. Telling verbal jokes, the stuff that I liked that we did, we found one kind of joke that would work really well, but of course you only find these things three quarters of the way through development and you can’t put in as many as you want. But there’s a bit in the game where you have to carry a bomb, which means you can’t shoot, so the other guy has to help. But you pick it up and we thought, ‘It’s actually a really big thing, what if you could take cover behind it?’ but then someone else was like, ‘You’re taking cover behind a bomb!’ So then we decided to write a line. So one character says, “Are you taking cover behind a bomb?” and the first guy says, “Stop drawing attention to it!” And it works because I, as a player, did something, the game saw it, I knew it, it joked about it and I thought it was clever. It lets the player in on the joke.

What do you feel about the resurgence in third-person games?
I really like it because it gives you the opportunity to do character. I’m a big anti-plot guy in games, but I’m a big character and scenario fan. Our scenario is the world is collapsing around you and we wanted it to feel like a natural disaster. I think setting is epically powerful because it helps to frame the story that we’re telling as players, but character is also cool because it lets you be ‘that guy’. The faceless character works in FPSs, but really it’s hard for you to impose any character on that, but when you put a third-person character in there people are like, ‘Okay, I’m that guy,’ whereas when it’s first-person I’m just me, always me.

You mentioned the carrying a bomb moment. I know there were a lot of specific co-op moments, like the parachuting in the first game, but is there anything that you’re particularly proud of that didn’t make the cut?
There were a couple of things that didn’t make the cut. One was, in all these games you can get downed and then healed, so I thought it’d be a really nice twist if in a certain part of the game one of the players gets downed and it just looks normal, and the other guy goes over to heal him, but when he hits the heal button the first guy says, “No, it’s not gonna work this time. It’s real bad.” (Laughs) So we had this moment and instead of going back to the game, which is what you thought, you get a nice surprise because we go to a shoulder carry and you’ve both got pistols and you had to stagger. We had it working at three quarters and when you drew a line of where you thought the quality of the game was you hit that point and went, ‘Oh, that’s clunky and weird looking and broken.’ So we hit that deadline where you have to shit or get off the pot and we were like, ‘Right, no.’ It was lucky because we saw it in another game two days later. We were like, ‘Yeah, good, cut it. It’s not even fresh now.’

With this more tongue-in-cheek approach, were there any really off the wall co-op moments?
No, we didn’t go that way. I think there’s definitely a game in there that doesn’t take itself too seriously without going cartoony, but we were responding heavily to the feeling that people thought it was gay, which I loved. There was this Christian site which listed all the games that a good Christian shouldn’t play and Army Of Two was on there. I was worried it was because of the violence, but it was actually the ‘homosexual undertones’. And I thought, how amazing because nothing happens, it’s just two guys who shoot together and are very, very shirtless.

Is the ‘bromance’ thing a reaction to the whole homophobic thing online, from gamers who are at that kind of age where they’re not used to other things yet?
I think the players loved it. I don’t think we got one negative comment about the bromance from players, but we got stuff from the press and only the press in Europe. Europeans were like, ‘We don’t do that’ whereas Americans, whether it’s because of sports teams or fraternities, half of them didn’t even see it.

So, is there any way you could factor in a polite British handshake for us?
(Laughs) Well, we did expand on that. We had the rock, paper, scissors, which I think is hilarious and if you keep hitting positive or negative they scale. So the first positive is ‘nice job’ and the last one is a bit humorous. I did want to do one where you hit A 50 times and they make out, but I was told no.

We just want that discovery. I remember when I was a kid we were on Amiga games and there were so many games that were essentially broken, but they were so full of oddness. So many games now because we spend so much money – the budgets of $20/30 million are terrifying and the marketing budget of the new Call Of Duty is $55m – you get this fear, you get the corporation behind you who are terrified. That means you can’t chuck the little bits in, so one of the things I’m proudest of in this game – because we’re out here in the middle of nowhere in Montreal, far away from HQ – is that we did stuff like that. We still have the funny gestures, we have the rock, paper, scissors because I think we’re not going to win on budget, but we can win on freshness. We can take those risks that maybe other people aren’t going to take. They’re not gonna have a high five button in Call Of Duty.