Dark Void Interview: The Jetpack’s Blessings and Curses

Morgan Gray’s the senior producer of Dark Void, a job he describes as “everything in the kitchen sink down to ordering dinner in a late night to make sure it all comes together.” So if you want to know why Dark Void — a game of high-flying jetpack stunts mixed with duck-and-cover shooting — was delayed from Winter 2009 into January 2010, he’s the guy to talk to. In a sense, we already knew the answer to that question; Capcom delayed Dark Void to avoid a competitive holiday season, but the delay also allowed the developers to finesse the learning curve and add a new hovering feature. But I enjoyed sampling Dark Void in December and chatting with Gray, who was frank about the ups and downs of giving players a jetpack and letting them fly wherever they please.

GamerCrave: What were the team’s influences in designing Dark Void?

Morgan Gray: We went all the way from film to other games, so like the dogfighting in Crimson Skies, or a franchise I worked on earlier in my career, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter on PC, we felt like those were sort of lacking to the common market. Also, The Rocketeer, and in gamedom, Shadow of the Colossus … We really worked that Z axis that a lot of games just ignore.

GC: Where did the inclusion of Nicola Tesla come from?

MG: We didn’t want Will to have everything he found stolen from the enemies. We liked the thought that humanity could stick it to these bad guys. So at which point we were like, someone needs to invent this jetpack. And almost on a lark someone was like, let’s do a Nicola Tesla level, let’s David Bowie this shit, like, ha ha ha, but then we started doing some research, and actually when our game’s taking place wasn’t too far from when Nicola died, and before he died, he sort of went MIA for a large number of days (I can’t verify this, but there was some hoopla over his missing body and accompanying research papers immediately after death – ed.). No one knew where he was at. So, what if it was an experiment went wrong, and he ended up in the void? We were already playing with conspiracy themes and super science, and we just went, like that, it’s so ridiculous it’s awesome, let’s do that.

GC: You mentioned X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter before. Do you think it’s possible to do a straight dogfighting game like that anymore?

MG: I think that pure flying games require a higher degree of pure positional awareness and dexterity of your mind working with your fingers, and that’s just a higher bar for a lot of people. It’s just a higher skill barrier and learning curve for people. But you know, there’s still definitely an audience for it.

We did realize that flying was going to be the new thing and the ground was going to be familiar, so we start with you crashing into the the void, no jetpack, no helmet, no weapons. We teach you all the tutorials for all the on foot stuff. Then we give you what we call a hover pack, which is in between foot and flying. Only after we give you the skills here do we give you the full flight ability to hit a button and slap it in, so it’s a very ramped tutorialization experience.

GC: Once you get the jetpack, why would you want to stay on the ground?

MG: That’s a good question. I don’t know why you’d ever want to. No, the game does a good job of self-balancing. On the ground I have cover. I can take it slow, I can be safe, I can recharge my health between taking shots, right? In the air, I’m exposed to everybody, however it’s also my most significant advantage, so generally you play the game with a mixture of going between those two worlds, whatever’s the best tactical choice.

GC: It must be tough to do set pieces when players can move anywhere.

MG: Yes, it was extemely difficult, and we were forced to get rid of all our level design tricks of games past. We sort of naively entered into this going, “Jetpacks are cool, let’s make a jetpack game,” but not really understanding the implications to the gameplay authoring and the experience authoring. But it was worth it.

GC: What sorts of old tricks did you have to throw out?

MG: Well I mean, things like, when there are guys on foot, you can do a lockdown by how you spawn enemies and you know the player’s going to be stuck in a spot, and you can’t get past certain guys until they’re dead because he doesn’t have freedom of movement, so it’s easier to get the pacing and the tempo than when a guy can be anywhere doing anything.

Basically we had to walk the walk that we were talking and embrace that, yeah the player’s got a lot of freedom, we may never know what he’s up to, so as opposed to minimizing things like putting fuel on the jetpack or whatever, time to make the AI really smart and open this puppy up and bring on the unique ways the player’s going to play.

GC: Do you think players will sense a clear distinction between dogfighting and ground sequences?

MG: Some of our set-ups are extremely direct, and you’re like okay of course, all my objectives are in the air, but I think that players will realize that between the mixture of hand-held weapons and ground-based installations you can use to knock out things in the sky and your ability to get in the air for ground combat, you’ll end up seeing things in the fight, and trying different ways of taking things out. Like, I hope people do strafing runs of death on guys from the air.

Our focus tests have shown that when people first start playing, they try to treat it like Call of Duty or Gears of War or other cover-based games, so in the beginning portions of the game, we try to leave aerial bread crumbs to help teach them. We started placing enemies on high platforms. We take away aspects of cover to realize, you had to be open, you had to get out and be maneuverable to avoid fire. Leave breadcrumbs of achievements or trophies … which is great, because I generally think of them as a stupid aside, but when you can use achievements or trophies as a way for players to advance in the game in a way that you want them to, that’s a good thing.

GC: Testing must’ve been crazy.

MG: It was. We had a test team, dozens and dozens. You probably heard that we had delayed the release of the game. Originally we were going to come out this winter, but we delayed it out until January so that we had more time to get things right, to nail the vertical combat in-air aspect of using the hover pack, nail the powers and the weapons.

Getting a game late is never bad compared to getting a game early. I don’t think a game is ever ruined by being released late. You can cook for too long, you can probably think for too long, but you can’t make a game for too long. But that may be not true. If you miss a console generation, there’s definitely a window of opportunity.

GC: I’ve got to ask about the Dark Void movie.

MG: Well I can’t tell you any specific details, but I can tell you, about six months ago, we started getting a lot of interest in Dark Void itself, which is cool, but Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, really got into the concept and we talked at length over several months about the game itself, how the game could turn into being a movie, started having different studios taking a look at it. And against anything I ever would have thought, it actually started getting some traction. I kept yelling about why the hell am I down here in L.A. wasting my fucking time, and apparently it wasn’t a waste. So there’s rumors that he’s interested in playing — I’m assuming that (Pitt’s son) Maddox and crew are at the age that they want to see Daddy as a hero. I don’t think they’re watching Inglourious Basterds in elementary school.

Dark Void will be available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC on January 19.