Dark Void Interview

With so many gameplay elements to contend with, how are you structuring Dark Void?

The game starts by staging out the experience. We realise that flight is new for most people, so one of the things you first get when you get your jetpack is the ability to hover, but not flight.

Then we transition you on to flight but with no weapons. So there’s this constant feeling of being weak and fragile. When you finally do get weapons, they’re underpowered. So then comes in the idea of hijacking UFOs, because you need something with a little more metal, with heavy weapons to take out mini-bosses and do environmental damage – things that would take a long time and are high risk in the jetpack alone.

When you’re in your jetpack you’re quick you’re fast, but you’re not doing as much damage as if you were in a UFO. However, most of the game is probably going to need you to be quick and fast.

You could play this entire game and never once hijack a UFO. We give you the objectives and the goals and give you as much freedom as we can to figure your own path.

Capcom games are renowned for being rather tough, so how are you approaching the difficulty level in Dark Void?

It is pretty easy to acknowledge that flight is difficult, so we tried to make things a little easier in terms of the flight spaces. However, we’ve tried to ramp up the difficulty on the ground. We’re not trying to make the hardest game in the world, because we want you to move through the whole experience. We want you to have a fun action romp. We’ve tried to skew it toward speed: you’re a daredevil and we want to encourage you to do daredevil things, and if the game tries to punish you all the time then you’re not likely to go for it.

Why did you decide to rule out multiplayer?

Multiplayer is huge and everyone likes playing games with friends, but if you look at the multiplayer community at any given time it only supports three games. A game will come out and only a small number of people will play it, then there will be a game that is a colossal success and everyone will rally around it. The examples are obvious. I believe multiplayer could be really fun, but unless you think you can take on those big franchises, you’re losing focus on what you really can do, which is craft a really good single-player experience.

What’s your response to the critics’ reception of Dark Void?

It’s interesting. If you see a screenshot of Dark Void you still have no idea what it’s about, if you see a video of one of the gameplay elements – on foot/cover – you still have no idea about the jetpack. I appreciate rounded looks at Dark Void, that’s when people get a better understanding. I think so far we’ve got guarded optimism from the critics, which I’m happy with.

This is a new IP for Capcom, how hands-on have you been with developer Airtight Games?

It’s definitely been a high-level collaboration. I don’t want to say we’ve been hands–on, ’cause that sort of implies riding a horse. But things are resolved from both houses. The department directors at Capcom are going up to Redmond pretty much every week. It’s important for all of us that we get this right.

Has it been tough for you to reconcile the differences between Eastern and Western approaches to game design?

Yeah, it has been a difficult balance because you run the risk of doing a caricature of what a Japanese game aesthetic is, and that ultimately diminishes the game. I think the similarities between Western and Japanese games are more than people usually think. The biggest one for us is the lead character. Western games usually give you a blank slate of a character – Gordon Freeman, Master Chief – but in Japanese games we are giving you a character to ‘play’. It’s a nuance, but it is very important. You never are Dante, you are playing Dante, or playing along with Dante. So with Will, in Dark Void, we really defined the character, which is counter to the Western aesthetic.

I think, as designers, we grew up playing Japanese games so we are much more used to crossing that bridge.