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来源：
http://www.gameinformer.com/News ... 0308.1629.19628.htm
we recently spoke with president of Clover Studios Atsushi Inaba about the developer’s upcoming game, Okami. Find out the latest details about the game, what they think of Nintendo’s use of a wolf character in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, how Viewtiful Joe is headed in another direction, and what Clover is planning for next-gen systems.
GI: As I recall I remember hearing that you guys originally planned for Okami to be more of a photorealistic style. How did you guys end up deciding on the current more artistic style?
Atsushi Inaba: Yes, you’re absolutely right. We did originally start with that idea. A lot of people at Clover had been working on the Devil May Cry series and Resident Evil 4 so we wanted to use that sort of technology to create this sort of world of nature and do it in a very realistic fashion. And we started to, we did try it. We kind of hit a dead end, and we realized what we were aiming for was far beyond what the PlayStation 2 could handle with its specs. So we thought we’d have to ditch that idea. But what can we do? We certainly don’t want to lose this aspect of nature that’s the most important part of the game. What else can we do? What other graphical style can we use for this?
GI: I noticed in some of the video we’ve seen so far there’s a lot of balance between in-game attacks and using the brush as an attack. Are these meant to be comboed together? What percentage do you use each of them?
Inaba: They are definitely used in combination and in tandem. At the beginning of the game most enemies you’ll have no trouble defeating just using regular attacks. And what we’ve shown you in video so far is the power slash technique where you draw a line over them and it cuts them. That can be used as a standard action and combo after hitting them a few times. But there are other ones used in battle we haven’t shown you yet, and there are enemies later on in the game that cannot just be defeated with the attack button. You need to use your head and use very specific Celestial Brush techniques to get them into a position where you can attack them. Sort of a puzzley strategic element comes into play using the brush in battle. You use it quite a bit, but not necessarily just to slash them as you’ve seen in the video so far. It goes deeper than that.
GI: The characters in Okami at this point seem to communicate using text mixed with kind of a Sims nonsense voice over top. What was the reason behind this design choice?
Inaba: There are several reasons. First of all, this game is just huge scriptwise. It would have been physically impossible to cram all of that voice work on one or even several discs. Secondly, when I made this game, when I make any game, I don’t think of just one region at a time. I think about getting the game out to all regions. And recording that kind of voice in multiple languages would just be very costly and perhaps even wasteful. But we still wanted to get across the emotion of someone speaking so we decided to go with the sound effects because it still conveys some sort of emotion without actually being a voice so you get kind of the best of both worlds.
GI: As far as bringing back the “beauty of nature” to the world of Okami, does the game keep track of the percentage of nature that you restore? Will that change anything when players go back for a second play through?
Inaba: There is no type of nature gauge or percentage or anything like that. It’s not that sort of element. It’s not just doing large areas. There are a lot of little hidden areas that you can get to. If you really wanted to restore 100% of the nature in the game I’d be really really careful about the way you played and pay really careful attention to everything. But no, it doesn’t have a percentage or any thing like that.
As far as the second question is concerned, without saying anything specific, I will say that on your second play through there will be certain fun elements that you’ll find. I can’t tell you if that relates directly to your question or not.
GI: Okami seems to be rooted in mysticism and myth. Was it based on a certain mythology or several different ones?
Inaba: Actually it draws inspiration from many different legends and mythological tales and we decided that it takes place in a fantasy universe that happens to be set in Japan rather than the other way around. We didn’t want to confuse anyone by sticking with a very set path from one particular legend. We wanted to just get the atmosphere across from lots of different little ones. So yeah, it’s sort of a mix of all these different legends that has become a new legend called Okami. It draws influence from many smaller tales. But it’s not based on one specific one.
GI: Can you name a couple of these legends that influenced the game?
Inaba: Just to give one example of one of the legends you’ll see in the game, Orochi, which is one of the main enemies in the game, and Susano, one of the main heroic characters in the game, there is a legend of those two waging combat and Susano being victorious over Yamato Orochi, but it’s important to note that what this game has done with both the Orochi legend – and all of the other legends in it – is we’ve taken the names and we’ve taken the general theme but we’ve sort of added our own little spin on it. In the old legend, Susano for instance was a really heroic and powerful character. But in this game you might see that he’s kid of lazy and cowardly and things like this. So we took the names, took the general themes, but we put an original spin on it to create our own legend and our own tale.
GI: Yes, it does seem like these is a mix of comedy and drama in the game. How do you manage to balance out the two?
Inaba: Yeah, there are definitely certain elements of comedy in the game, but it’s important to note that I wouldn’t consider this a comedy game. The focus is not on that. It has a very serious back story. But really we’re just looking to get across the feeling of human warmth. So in this dark world where everything is really bad and nature has been destroyed, how are these various characters dealing with that? And a lot of them are dealing with that by not forgetting to laugh. And it just communicates to you, the player, the warmth of humanity and the way people behave given different circumstances. So there is definitely a comedic element to it. But it’s far from the main focus of the game.
GI: Where did the inspiration for the Celestial Brush to serve as a platforming and attack device come from?
Inaba: I mentioned before that we went from the realistic graphical style to the style we see now, the sumi-e brush style, and once we decided that and we were looking at the game we thought, “That’s not enough. That’s sort of a gimmick if that’s all we do. How can we take this one step further?” Looking at the art style very closely we thought, “What if we let the player take control of a brush and sort of add things – to actually bring them into the art style rather than just have them watch it.” And that’s the inspiration for the Celestial Brush system as it is now.
GI: Did Okami’s highly stylized nature present an added diffi***y in the design process? You couldn’t just take a generic rock or wall texture and slam it in there. Everything had to be “painted” out.
Inaba: Yes, it was very diffi*** making this game. Like you mentioned, in a normal game the textures are very realistic so it’s quite possible to just go outside and take a picture of a rock and then use that texture as is. But we certainly couldn’t do that with this game. Every texture you see has been hand drawn by a designer. And what made it very diffi*** is there are only so many people that can do this kind of art. We pulled them all to the Okami team at a very early stage so even if there are times where the schedule makes it so that we need more people we don’t have much of a choice because those people don’t exist. So, yes, it was very tough to get everything done in time and in proper working fashion but luckily we have such good designers. They really knew what they were doing so they took that challenge and met and exceeded our expectations.
GI: I’m sure you guys get this a lot, but the brush attack seems perfectly suited for the Nintendo DS. Is there any chance that a future version of the game will appear on this system?
Inaba: No, there are no plans to do that. I’ll tell you why. Although the Celestial Brush does very much lend itself to the stylus of the DS, there’s a lot more to this game than just the Celestial Brush. And we feel that the PlayStation 2 controller handles the action segments very well. It might not be as easy to do that on the DS, which is not to diss the DS. But, as of now, there are no plans to convert it to a sequel on that.
GI: Can you describe the team’s reaction when Nintendo first announced that Link would be able to transform into a wolf in Twilight Princess and that it would feature predominantly into the gameplay?
Inaba: Yeah, actually I was at E3 myself and I saw that live with my own eyes. And to be honest, at first I thought, “Those sons of…. What are they doing?” Had we announced it very much prior to that then I would have felt really disappointed as if they were ripping us off, but I think that the timing shows that they may have had that idea before. I don’t think that they’re directly trying to rip us off or anything. As a creator, I’d prefer that they didn’t do that because it kind of takes away some of our thunder. But no hard feelings. I really like Zelda games so I’m cool with it.
GI: What can we look forward to with Viewtiful Joe as far as the next generation is concerned?
Inaba: Joe is certainly far from dead, but I do think that in all honesty people might be getting tired of the side-scrolling 2-D Joe. And I think it might be time to make a brand new Joe that no one’s ever seen before. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it. As far as what hardware something like that would go on, we’d have to think more about the game and get it into a nice solid shape in our minds before we would decide which hardware it was suited for. But I think the next Joe should be very different than the one we’re used to.
GI: Steel Battalion was actually able to turn a profit and perform pretty decently despite the expensive controller peripheral. Is there any chance that we’ll ever see another Steel Battalion, either using the older controller or something completely new?
Inaba: Actually we have no plans regarding Steel Battalion right now. I think if we did just do a sequel and release a new controller – whereas the new controller would be very interesting – it wouldn’t have the same sort of emotional impact that you had when you first played with the original Steel Battalion controller basically because it’s already been done. We’ve already done the big robot game with a new controller so if we were to do something similar as far as a new controller is concerned we’d probably go in an entirely different direction and make an entirely new kind of game and an entirely different kind of controller. But right now we’re not thinking of any sort of sequels or versions of Steel Battalion.
GI: As far as Clover Studios in general, what can we expect out of the company in the future? Have they come up with any specific products for Revolution using the remote control or for PS3 and 360?
Inaba: We have had experience with all three dev kits. We’ve been looking into this. It’s something we’re putting a lot of thought into because Clover is a relatively small studio. We’re reluctant to jump onto a bandwagon right now and put all of our strength behind one platform or another. Right now we have nothing to announce. We are thinking very deeply about what our next step will be and taking our time looking at the strengths and weaknesses of each piece of hardware. At Clover, our main goal is to just make really good games. So we’ll think of a game concept then we’ll decide which of the platforms we think is most suited for the kind of game we want to make.. |
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发表于 2006-3-11 12:11 · 浙江
