Health bars seem to be a dying breed in modern games. Have you ever considered adding Twisted Metal to the list of games that utilize recharging health?
Scott Campbell: One of the core mechanics that has made the franchise successful is the pickup game. When youre running low on health, that becomes the mother of all pickups. Part of what many players will do, myself included, is explore the level and create kind of these high-speed battle circuits that incorporate where the health pickups are and just the satisfaction of getting in that circuitry and going into battle and going out to repair your car. I dont know, I still find a lot of fulfillment when Im a couple pixels of red away from dying and getting that last health pickup. I think its just such a core mechanic to the game. The other cool thing about the health semi is that you can destroy it just like any other vehicle.
David Jaffe: And it can ram you, too. You come around a corner looking for health and youre not paying attention, it can ram you and take half your health. I love health packs, I love health bars...for this game. Im not saying I dont appreciate the value that regen health brings to an FPS. Because you dont have the fidelity of motion of a human character, the moment-to-moment interaction in a Twisted Metal game or any other kind of vehicle game is relatively simple. Your death comes less from crouching and strafing and looking up and hiding in a corner and waiting for someone to come around the corner to shoot you. It comes more from the weapons, the mechanics of the weapons, and using the environment. We have health semis in the new game that you can chase down like Knight Rider or Spy Hunter and you have this jostling battle with a guy youre trying to kill whos about to leap in the back of a semi truck to take 100% health and youre trying to use freeze missiles and ram him to stop him before he gets in there. Without those semi trucks, without health packs, without ****, youre about to kill me in Last Man Standing, Ive gotta race across the level to get health...without that, we really lose those opportunities to create that back-and-forth, cat-and-mouse tug of war that I feel represents so much of what the classic Twisted Metal games were in split-screen. Weve talked about regen health every now and then, but for me it comes at too much of a cost.
We explored for a while hey, maybe we should do more of a traditional loadout. Pick a shotgun and a missile, thats your loadout. It is a much simpler experience, you can put control in anybodys hand. Unlike Twisted Metal, which has always had a little bit of a learning curve since youre dealing with a lot more things you can do, it comes at too great of a cost to the core formula. Suddenly youre only doing the same thing over and over versus hey, now Ive got a sniper rifle. Now Ive got a swarmer missile. Now I have a remote control car. Every time you get that, it allows you to change tactics and change the way you play. There are some things that I think people would call antiquated that I still look at with the Twisted Metal series and say this is such a core aspect of its DNA that if we lost it, wed really lose a lot of the heart and soul of what makes the game great.
