Questions such as:
What was inspiration behind Swarm?
What was the biggest challenge in designing a game?
How would Hothead Games survive a bee attack?

To find out the answers to these and other equally important matters…watch the video below:

For a little taste of the game, here’s the trailer:

Swarm is due for release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in Q1 2011 – make sure you keep and eye on D+PAD Magazine for our full review.

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D+PAD: Criterion adopted a pioneering business model for Burnout Paradise by deciding to continually improve the Burnout experience via major title updates and deliver regular, free content in the months following its release. Why did you decide to adopt such a model?

Pete Lake: As with everything we do in Burnout we want to continually change people’s expectations. With our DLC we wanted to go beyond just another car or piece of track. We wanted to offer people new experiences within the same known world, alongside continuing to build our community and develop even stronger ways of communicating with them.

Do you think that giving away so much content for free was a success, and do you think such a model is sustainable?

I believe it was a success. How many other games are people still playing and getting excited about a year and a half after their original release? Our numbers back this up too; we can see that when we released Bikes (our free content upgrade) last September, we had more people playing our game online than we did at launch.

After having offered free content for so long, why did you decide to start charging for DLC? Will you be offering any more free content in the future?

As you stated in the previous question, at the end of the day this is a business model. We have to find the right balance between free content to reward our community and premium content which expands the game in incredible new ways. Who knows if this will continue into the future, I really hope it does. Games deserve to live longer than their box life.

Has the premium content been as successful as the team expected? Are you able to talk specific figures?

I can’t talk specific figures with you but the content has been an incredible success. I’m really proud of our decision to continue to offer variety in every downloadable offering we have created. The Boost Specials appeal to some of our more hardcore community while the Toys and Legendary Cars are there for the people who just want to have fun. Spreading our ideas like this allows us to offer something for everyone who loves Burnout.

Some critics may argue that some of this content – the pass-the-pad multiplayer incorporated into the Party Pack, for example – should have been included in the game originally, and that these regular updates, as well as the Ultimate Box rerelease, may suggest that Criterion weren’t happy with how Paradise was in its original state. Is that the case?

Absolutely not, the whole studio here at Criterion was incredibly happy with the original product we shipped. What you see over the next year is us continuing to develop the product live. Most of the ideas we have developed could not have been thought about until we had shipped the game and seen how people like to interact with it. Videogames are an interactive, live media which needs to react to its audience. We’ve had a great opportunity to do this with the DLC we have created. It has not been about ‘fixing’ the product but evolving it to entertain an ever changing audience.

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D+PAD: What were the biggest challenges the studio faced when creating the character of Cole McGrath and the world around him? Do you think Cole can hold his own against the Clark Kents and Peter Parkers of the comic book world?

Bruce Oberg: From the very beginning, we wanted to create a realistic superhero. What would an everyday guy do if he got super powers? That was our driving question. One thing we were pretty sure of was this: the first thing he did would not be to go out and buy tights. Cole is his own man and what he becomes is really up to the player. We were not trying to place the player in the shoes of someone with a philosophy or an agenda. We wanted Cole to change and grow based on the choices that the player makes themselves.

D+PAD: Being a superhero game, can we expect to see plenty of over-the-top villains?

Bruce Oberg: At the beginning of inFamous, Cole delivers a package that blows up and destroys a big chunk of downtown Empire City. Somehow, Cole survives and emerges with the ability to control and channel electricity in many ways. Trouble is, that same blast gave powers to other people in the city, and they have their own agenda. Cole has to discover how to control his own powers, while figuring out who was behind the blast and what the other super-powered people have in mind for the city.

D+PAD: One of the more interesting aspects of inFamous seems to be the way the game approaches the concept of morality. Does choosing to play as good or bad become particularly significant as you progress through the game?

Bruce Oberg: Cole can choose to act in good or evil ways all the time in inFamous. The game tracks the player’s choices and measures them in an on-screen karma meter. Cole’s karma then affects everything in the game: his appearance; how the city reacts to him; how his powers grow and change. Different parts of the story are revealed depending on your karma during the game.

D+PAD: Cole has the ability to manipulate electricity. Can you tell us about how this affects inFamous’s gameplay?

Bruce Oberg: Electricity is almost another character in inFamous. Empire City is a gritty urban environment, and there are electrical opportunities everywhere. Cole can pull juice from tons of things in the world, like light poles and cars and junction boxes. And many things can be electrified in interesting ways (e.g. you can zap a puddle that an enemy is standing in to take him out). As the game progresses, Cole learns to use electricity in many ways, including shock grenades, a polarity shield, and eventually static thrusters for gliding through the world.

D+PAD: Will Cole have access to any other superpowers?

Bruce Oberg: Cole is a conduit for electricity, but there are other conduits in Empire City, and their powers are quite different from Cole’s.

D+PAD: You’ve hinted that players will be able to customise Cole in different ways. Are these differences purely cosmetic, or will players be able to customise Cole’s abilities like in an RPG?

Bruce Oberg: You’ll be able to choose when and how you upgrade Cole’s powers. It’s not a fully fledged RPG, but players will be able to make their own decisions about growing Cole’s abilities.

D+PAD: With his ability to scale buildings, Cole has been described as an ‘urban explorer’. Did you draw any inspiration from Assassin’s Creed or Crackdown when developing the character and the way he moves around Empire City?

Bruce Oberg: We created Empire City from the ground up to be a climbable, explorable, urban playground. In addition to art teams creating the buildings and environments, we had a special team devoted just to making the world climbable. If it looks like you can grab it, you can climb it. This makes the city a true 3D environment, because moving vertically is so easy.

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D+PAD: Heavy Rain is a brand new IP for Quantic Dream, but just like your previous title, Fahrenheit, you’re looking to break boundaries with storytelling in video games. How do you go about starting a project like Heavy Rain? Do you look at what worked well in Fahrenheit and expand upon those elements, or is it a completely different process?
David Cage: After Fahrenheit, we spent a lot of time reading critics’ opinions and listening to gamers. We also had many things we were not happy with and that we wanted to rethink and change. At the same time, we did not start thinking of Heavy Rain as a sequel, but I had the feeling we found something with Fahrenheit that I wanted to explore further. These ideas of letting the player tell the story through his actions using Bending Stories, of considering the experience as an emotional journey with moral choices, of having short and varied scenes, of moving the challenge from the controller to the mind of the player, all these were interesting concepts that could significantly be improved. But we also had many new ideas that we wanted to implement regarding gameplay and a new technology that allows us to improve the quality of the immersion.

If I had to summarise my motivation for Heavy Rain, it was to create an emotional simulator, use all means to make the player feel something, making an experience rather than just another video game. To achieve this goal, I thought that Fahrenheit opened the way, but that there was much more to do.

Heavy Rain is looking to blur the line between video games and movies. Were you inspired by the work of any particular film creator/director for Heavy Rain, or is the game entirely your own vision?
You are always inspired by other people’s work, not only movies, but also books, TV series, comics, paintings, art in general. Heavy Rain is a dark thriller and I am sure people will find connections with some films we all liked like Silence of the Lambs or Seven. I also really liked a Korean movie call Memories of a Murder and other Asian films. I like Asian cinema, but I also appreciate some Spanish or Spanish-speaking directors like Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Alejandro Inarritu (21 Grams, Babel) or Alejandro Amenabar (The Others).

What’s really different for me on Heavy Rain is that it is the first script I’ve written for a game that refers to things I have personally experienced in my life. In most other art forms this is quite usual, but it was something weird to do for me in a video game. Most games talk about rookies going to the battlefield or heroes fighting against the forces of evil, situations that few people actually experienced in their own lives, so they can only try to figure out what it means for their characters.

Heavy Rain is of course not based on my private life, but it is based on emotions that I have experienced myself, which will – I hope – support the story I want to tell and make its emotions more believable. I think our media is now mature enough to tell more personal stories, and I hope that more game designers will start talking about more personal things, because this is how other art forms reached maturity and more complex and interesting forms.

This is probably my main expectation from next gen games. Rather than displaying more polygons or having a physics engine, they should start to offer meaning.

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Overkill is the first game in the House of the Dead series to be developed exclusively for a home console. Does that affect how you go about developing a game in a genre typically intended for an arcade audience?
Neil McEwan (Lead Producer): Definitely. We looked at the original game and the Wii remakes and went to the arcades to play House of the Dead 3 & 4 exclusively for hours at a time. We made notes and dissected what those games are all about – we were referencing 2 & 3 all the time – so we had a good basis on what was cool about these games, what was fun about shooting zombies and expanded on that from there.

Jonathan Burroughs (Lead Writer): One of the things about arcade games is that they can be quite punishing, that maybe they’re designed to relieve you of your money. Boss fights in particular can spring on you unexpectedly and involve new mechanics meaning you’re not quite sure what to do initially. So, I think the most obvious way we accommodated the home player is through the separation of the story mode and the Director’s Cut. The story mode is quite lenient, you’ve got infinite continues, although the punishment of losing points means you can’t upgrade your weapons quite so quick. And then the Director’s Cut is more like the arcade experience, it’s a bit more hardcore and you have a limited number of lives, so I think that split is the main thing we’ve integrated for a home audience.

Neil: Yeah, adding the combo counter as well which leads to rewards, upgrades etc. gives further replayability. And because it’s not trying to get people to put another 50p in it all the time, we can add moments in levels that are frantic, and then a bit of downtime, so the pacing is very different to a typical light gun shooter. We had lots of debate over the length of the levels before deciding on the 10-15 minute mark. That’s quite long for a level in this genre, but we thought that felt right.

House of the Dead already has a huge fanbase behind it, but the Grindhouse/Tarantino vibe is a very different approach and one that may upset a few fans. Why did you decide to mix it up for Overkill?
Neil: Overkill is the first time House of the Dead has been developed outside of SEGA Japan, so we wanted to make it relevant to what was going on today and make it more contemporary. I think the Tarantino and Rodriguez movies made that pastiche, zombie-thing cool again, and it was a good starting point for us. We played around with a lot of different themes, but the pulp, Grindhouse stuff was a great well of reference that we could draw from; the music, types of characters, locations, the boss types and the gore, all that was ideal.

Jonathan: And I think as a westerner, playing House of the Dead has always come across as slightly weird, slightly cheesy – maybe intentionally so – but it’s always felt a bit lost in translation. With the Grindhouse theme we can be cheesy but self-knowingly so, and so I don’t think we’re changing the franchise, but making it quite relevant.

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D+PAD: In your presentation you stated that one of the things Halo meant to you was an epic story. Obviously in the FPS Halos you play predominantly through the eyes of a single character, which makes it easier to tell an involving story. With an RTS it’s a little bit different, and Ensemble seem to have put emphasis on CGI cutscenes in Halo Wars. Does the story play out purely through those?
Graeme Devine: There are CGI cutscenes throughout, but if the story was told purely through them it would kind of suck. Most of the writing and most of the story is in the gameplay itself. There’s many minutes of CGI but many more minutes of actual gameplay. The Halo FPS games are all about one person, Master Chief, so when we approached the story writing for Halo Wars, it’s all about the crew of the Spirit of Fire, it’s about multiple characters. The same way that you play as multiple characters on the ground, you have multiple characters which are in the story, with multiple abilities mirroring the RTS counterparts.

How difficult was it crafting a new Halo story?
Really difficult! You’re going into a story that’s very well known by the fans. We put out that X06 trailer and at the end we gave the Spartans Battle Rifles and we got nailed to the wall! We gave them Battle Rifles and they didn’t get given Battle Rifles until 2552, and oh my goodness this is 2526 and what the hell are you doing?! So the fans are very aware of the story and the IP and are extremely aware of all the events and how they play out. So adding in a new story set twenty years before [the events of Halo: Combat Evolved] meant we had enough space because it’s a very different time in the actual Halo universe. It’s good to be able to tell a story with a different set of characters at a different time in the conflict.

Can you talk about some of the challenges in getting an RTS to work on a console?
The first thing we did was spend the first year working on those controls. We took Age of Mythology and before there was any Halo IP involved or the thought of any IP at all, we started taking away all the interface and so forth that’s at the top and bottom of every RTS game simply because it must be there. We took all of that out and started thinking about what we wanted to do with a console RTS game, and then we started to think about the actions of what we wanted to do – I want to control a unit, I want to control an army and I want to move a unit and I want to move an army – instead of thinking about porting the PC experience. The only way to be successful with the controls was to do a complete reset. But thinking about the actions was very important and we always said that the finish line would be when it was more easily controlled on a console controller than on a keyboard and mouse.

The original Gears of War was massive, and when a sequel comes along people expect it to be doubly awesome. Where do you start with it? Do you just take it and make it bigger and better?
Yeah, we were originally saying the bigger, better, more badass thing which was marketing speak, and ultimately became a parody of itself which is why we want to reinforce that the game is more epic, yet more intimate. We all kind of got together and went through a process of working out what would be new in Gears 2, what would be better than the original, and we came up with a huge list and talked about it for a week. Maybe the campaign would be a little longer, and we knew that we had a better story and would have new weapons, different multiplayer modes and Horde.

I think getting Josh Ortega on board helped a lot in having a fresh perspective on existing characters, and smaller things like having Steve Jablonsky who did an excellent job on scoring, not only on the battle music, but the in-game music as well. We got a very talented writer and composer, and hopefully we’ve built a package that people will play for years to come.

What was the most important thing you wanted to improve upon from the original Gears?
Well in regards to doing something that has a little bit of heart in there, the campaign and the story were the obvious ones. At the same time though I was dying to get back in and tweak the cover system. When I played the first game I thought we did a really good job, but then there were so many little problems with it too. You’d be running and accidently slam into a wall, or you’d dive towards cover or launch a swat turn and you couldn’t interrupt it, whereas you can now. And when you got knocked down I wanted to crawl around and all that stuff. We’ve tweaked all of those things to a very high level and that’s what I‘m really happy with.

Back to the script writing and the directions that the plot took. How much control did Josh have and what was the direction he took with the universe you created?
Basically the way we do the process is, I come up with a two page treatment and then Rod and Mike tear it to shreds, and then I do another treatment and another until we have something that feels like a solid outline of the game. So we have a two page outline of all of the levels and then Josh comes in and that’s the way that Gears 2 panned out. We’re all just learning as we go, the process is continuing to evolve but, erm…Josh is a very charismatic guy, he’s a force of nature. You know he’d battle and push so that we got the product and, more specifically, the best narrative in the end.

Is there anything particular that he pushed for that was maybe a challenge?
I can’t answer that without spoiling any of it to be honest. You know, narrative-wise we’ve taken some risks and we’re doing some things that I haven’t ever seen in a video game before.

D+PAD: The original MotorStorm took place entirely in Monument Valley, a real world location but with fictitious tracks created specifically for the game. You’re taking MotorStorm onto a tropical island for the sequel, but is it based around a particular real world location?

Nigel Kershaw: Not directly, but we did send a group of (lucky) people off to Hawaii to gather all sorts of video and photographic reference, just as we did with Monument Valley. So our process has been exactly the same.

DP: What sort of locales can we expect to see within the island environment and how many tracks are Evolution aiming to have in the final release?

NK: We are building 16 tracks, which is twice as many as the initial release of MotorStorm. Each track has its own distinct look and feel, so it’s going to take a while for somebody to really get to know all of them.

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