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[GuardianE]

I think I proposed the "Dante Must Style" naming convention first in a "what would you want to see in Devil May Cry 5?" thread . DahBomb's wishlist included pretty much everything everyone had suggested and then some, though. The man is thorough an ripe with ideas, and it's really awesome that NT took that list to heart. I only hope that Capcom does the same with a DMC5. Must Style had conceptual roots stretching back to DMC3, too. I still hope Must Style ends up making it to DMC5. Instead of S-rank or above for damage, I'd prefer a damage modifier depending on Style, with a damage floor at 0 for anything below A.

Thanks for the contribution and information, TribladeX. It's always insightful to hear from members of a development team. I'm glad to hear that you were checking GAF and other sites for input and feedback on the game, and that's certainly evident for how much of an improvement DE really is. I had a few questions that weren't included in Sesha's exhaustive list. If you can't answer them or don't have time, that's totally cool, but I figured it's worth a shot. Just some things I'd love clarification on:

Who came up with most of the boss designs?

Who came up with how Devil Trigger initially worked?

Who came up with the color coded enemy types?

Who proposed ditching manual lock on?

Was Vergil always planned to be the final boss in the original script?

The early reveal trailer had DmC Dante using the environment and "interactables" to attack, in the vein of Onimusha 3. This didn't make it into the final game. Was this idea scrapped because it didn't work in the general gameplay flow (which I agree with) or something that you couldn't get functioning correctly?

How was play testing conducted prior to DmC launching? We heard stories of NT bringing veteran DMC players to test the game, but nothing in detail and no names of players. What were the conditions, and would it be possible to drop names?

What were the discussions about redesigning DmC Dante after the initial reception from the debut trailer? Who pushed for changes that we saw in DmC Dante's design (smoking, muscle build, overall dirty and grit)?

Itsuno briefly mentioned in an interview that he would ask NT to include taunts after so many requests from fans. We continued to not see taunts in DE. Was that a conscientious decision or omission due to budget/time?

 

[TribladeX]

Part #2

What was the process behind adopting the new control scheme, meaning the angel/demon system, the dedicated dodge button, gun moves be tied to the gunfire button?

Man, that's an insanely long story. I'm just going to skim the basics here. The main drive behind the Angel/Demon modes being on the triggers was to make it a lot more accessible than the Style System from DMC4. And it had already been proven to work in Heavenly Sword (or so I was told). However, that was not the first variation of the system and we went through dozens of ideas for months before finally arriving at the system that's there today. And even then, some people loved it, some people didn't. I feel like we could have kept going with the controls forever though.

Things like the dedicated dodge button just came from months of experimenting with different ideas (I think we also borrowed heavily from Bayonetta too).

Kind of a addendum to the above, but was there a desire from Capcom to do away with the style system, or at least simplify it, in general? Or, assuming it was Capcom pushing for it, was it because it was a different universe that they wanted the way Dante's powers/skills worked played out to reflect his character/background?

The main thing from Capcom is they didn't want to influence Ninja Theory at ALL. They wanted to see what we came up with and have it presented to them. One of the things that they said was NOT to borrow from the previous Japenese games but to come up with a Western take on everything. So they never said "Don't use the style system", and we did talk about it for a while, but it was clear that if you were going to reboot the game and make it more accessible, there was no way it was going to work like it used to. So we basically took the best elements from the different styles and put them where they seemed to fit best.

Was there a conscious decision bring back the old Quicksilver and Doppelgänger styles by turning them into Dante's and Vergil's Devil Triggers?

Dante's DT absolutely was not based on Quicksilver. QS did appear briefly in a VERY early design spec (we're talking late '09 here). Other than that, it never appeared again.

Vergil's DT though, yup: The designer who built him was directly influenced by the Doppelganger ability. I believe (not 100% sure about this) that part of the thinking was: "Well, Dante can't have it - let's give it to Vergil".

Was there ever any discussion about adding command inputs to the launcher command?

If you mean things like holding lock-on and pulling backwards? Then yes, huge discussions about it early on. Basically it was deemed too 'hardcore' though, so we returned to DMC1's implementation. That's actually been one of the most positive things I've seen people say about the game (that the accessibility of the launcher and juggling is really empowering), although I know the die-hard fans won't agree.

I really wanted to get "lock-on -> away + attack" re-implemented for DE, but it wasn't agreed upon and didn't happen.

Could you tell us if anything changed conceptually about the story, characters, combat, etc. between the initial reveal at TGS '10 and the first gameplay trailer? Obviously the first few trailers we saw were very early and we kinda got a glimpse into what happens during a development process, but I wonder if the reception to the first trailer impacted that process at all. The TGS teaser implied that the story would be even more harsh in tone, with Dante being captured and tortured, and that it would explore more of Dante's past.

Yeah, it changed lots. I don't have the specifics, but you can see in the concept art that the early game had three versions of Dante (child, teenager, adult) and you were going to play through each version. I have NO idea how that was supposed to have worked, or even why it got dropped though (I imagine having three combat characters to implement probably had a lot to do with it). There was a lot of stuff about Dante's backstory in some of the early concepts, but that got dropped along the way (I don't know why).

But yes, the reaction to that first trailer absolutely impacted the process. There was no way it couldn't. But it didn't mean a completely re-design to the game, just putting emphasis in different places.

Were Lady or Trish ever suggested to appear at any point?

Nope, not that I'm aware of.

Could you share any particulars about Itsuno and team's involvement during development and about Itsuno's "teaching program", so-to-speak? Anything we haven't heard in interviews, like ideas he might have supplied.

They visited Ninja Theory about three days each month and had big reviews of the game. I was only ever in one of those meetings (extremely nerve-wrecking) which was to show them the progress on the secret missions and get feedback (there wasn't much, if any). But I've heard people who did work with them a lot talking about their experiences and it sounded amazing. Occassionally you'd suggest something and someone would reply that it was a bad idea, based on feedback they'd gotten from Capcom (and it was always something you'd completely get and immediately understand why it was better). They'd have all these little bits of insight about what worked and what didn't work in the previous games. That stuff was apparently all really useful.

But that was really all it was (feedback and advice). They didn't have a team of developers working on the game, for example.

The DmC comic focused on Vergil suggests that Mundus and Sparda were two of four demon lords, which sounds like an old fan concept based on DMC2's story, and was never hinted at in the actual game. Was this a story idea that was meant to be explored more but was consciously left out?

I honestly have no idea about that.

Are there any notable things that were left on the cutting room floor, either early or later on? Levels, enemies, bosses, weapons, modes, etc.

In the original DmC, there was a puzzle in the plaza level (mission 3). It was a big head with a vision cone that would reset you if it caught you. It was pretty cool. But when it got focus tested, it was a disaster. Nobody could solve the puzzle and defeat it. So they tweaked it. Same thing. More tweaks. Same issues. Then it got removed.

There's usually stuff like that in every game. That's the one I remember the most though, because the idea was really cool.

Was there any feedback or ideas you wanted but weren't able to implement into DmC DE?

I actually implemented a system to skip the slow walk sections in missions 5 and 12. For some reason, between me leaving the project and the game shipping, it got removed. To this day I have no idea why.

I also started working on two new secret missions in my free time (there wasn't time to do them in the production schedule). One was a whack-a-mole type game (with baby rages that popped out of the ground). I actually had that one working, but it was ropey to say the least. The other one was a Bob Barbus laser wall avoiding mini-game type thing, but I never found the time / motivation to build that one.

There was also a version of the Killing Face fight that I thought was better than version we ended up shipping, but Rahni didn't like it. She (rightly) thought that people wouldn't understand what the boss was doing. But we didn't have the animation resources to make it obvious what actually was going on, so had to scrap the whole idea.

Apart from those, there's a huge list of stuff we could have done (aforementioned Dojo customisation, for example). But we could have been there forever, really

Are there any ideas or changes you guys wanted to make for DmC2, if there was any?

DmC2 never got discussed. And even so, who knows where that could/would have gone. I'm sure everyone has vastly different opinions about what DmC2 would have been.

Any hint as to what DmC2's story would have been?

Nope, sorry - no idea. I imagine there was a rough plan for what happened next, but I never got to see any of it, if it did indeed exist.

 

[TribladeX]

Thanks for the contribution and information, TribladeX. It's always insightful to hear from members of a development team. I'm glad to hear that you were checking GAF and other sites for input and feedback on the game, and that's certainly evident for how much of an improvement DE really is.

You're welcome, and thanks

I think I proposed the "Dante Must Style" naming convention first in a "what would you want to see in Devil May Cry 5?" thread . DahBomb's wishlist included pretty much everything everyone had suggested and then some, though. The man is thorough.

Yeah, I have no idea about it's real origins. I first spotted the idea in Dahbomb's post and thought "That's a great idea - we need that". If you did have part in it's inception, then: Thanks

Who came up with most of the boss designs?

It's all over the place. Succubus (internally named 'Poison', and before that 'Jack') was the first boss by a long way and was a template for a lot of the others. But she went through dozens of iterations over multiple people and ownership before she became what she is today.

The other bosses were dealt with by various other people. Nobody worked directly on more than two bosses across the entire project. Tameem and Capcom probably had final say on the bosses, and they probably came up with the core idea / style of the boss, but most of the individual ideas came from whoever was working on them at the time.

Who came up with how Devil Trigger initially worked?

I honestly don't know where the DT idea came from. It kinda just existed one day and didn't change much. I've never been a huge fan of it, TBH (again, my opinion). But then I'm a huge fan of the older gamers, so I found that the old DT was more to my liking.

Who came up with the color coded enemy types?

I first saw that on a design email that was cycling the office. Apparently (this is from a second-hand source) Capcom had requested an idea in the vein of making the enemies weaker/strong to particular weapons/modes and that was the system that a group of people came up with. Not everyone liked the idea, of course.

Who proposed ditching manual lock on?

I actually think that went really early and I think it came from Capcom (90% sure about that). I think they were looking at other games in the genre (like God of War) and making comparisons and wanted to see how the game would work without lock-on.

We actually put lock-on back in at one point near the end of development but it was removed on request.

Was Vergil always planned to be the final boss in the original script?

I honestly don't know. I didn't see the script until somewhere in 2011 (it was vastly different back then) and I think that, yes, Vergil was the boss then.

The early reveal trailer had DmC Dante using the environment and "interactables" to attack, in the vein of Onimusha 3. This didn't make it into the final game. Was this idea scrapped because it didn't work in the general gameplay flow (which I agree with) or something that you couldn't get functioning correctly?

There was a lot of stuff that didn't work. I personally spent about 6 months work on the ability to throw cars with Demon pull, but it just didn't work. It was hard to target anything and the physics involved caused all kinds of hell for the enemy path finding. So it was scrapped.

I imagine the other ideas all went the way of the Dodo for similar reasons.

How was play testing conducted prior to DmC launching? We heard stories of NT bringing veteran DMC players to test the game, but nothing in detail and no names of players. What were the conditions, and would it be possible to drop names?

Once we had a vertical slice, we got friends and family members in time and time again to play through various levels. We used the results of those tests to improve the accessibility of the game. Later, yes: I heard a lot about bringing various people in (I was really hoping to get Dahbomb in personally, but I heard mention of that falling through). Someone did come in and Rahni spent a few days with them talking about the combat (I wasn't involved in any of this). I can't remember who it was. I also don't know who was invited or how they chose those people.

Capcom also ran a MASSIVE (5,000 of so people) focus test and sent us back an insane amount of date. We used that to further streamline various aspects of the game.

In DmCE we got Sam D into the office for a couple of days and got his feedback about some of the changes to DE. A lot of his feedback was along the lines of "It's brutal"... So we knew we were on the right track

What were the discussions about redesigning DmC Dante after the initial reception from the debut trailer? Who pushed for changes that we saw in DmC Dante's design (smoking, muscle build, overall dirty "homelessness")?

I don't have all of the information about the entire story here, but Dante slowly evolved over the course of the entire project. The trailer didn't instantly change anything (and Dante already looked different by the time the trailer launcher). Capcom initially pushed back on a very 'DMC' Dante though (white hair etc). They specifically wanted to see something different. And then as the project continued, he slowed blended back towards old school Dante.

The smoking thing is interesting. I don't know why it was removed, but we had to have specific Japanese versions of the concept art removing smoking and nudity. So maybe that had something to do with its removal.

Itsuno briefly mentioned in an interview that he would ask NT to include taunts after so many requests from fans. We continued to not see taunts in DE. Was that a conscientious decision or omission due to budget/time?

Oh, yeah - I'd forgotten about taunts. If there was ANYTHING I could have added to DmC, it would have been taunts. I've always felt that the game is lacking without it.

I remember in one discussion about it, someone mentioned that taunts didn't fit the game's narrative ("Oh no - Kat's in trouble" - Dante: "WOOOOOOOOOOO!"). But I (personally, opinion) think we could have pulled it off without it being cheesy.

Later in DE I really pushed to get taunts in, but we didn't have the animation resource to add them and it was felt that we couldn't do it justice, so we shouldn't do it at all. Shame really.

 

[Narroo]

Part #2



Man, that's an insanely long story. .

Thanks for coming, you're great!

I do have one question: Did Capcom literally say "Make it Western" with regards to gameplay? And if so, how did you feel about that?

What does "Make it Western" even mean for an extreme 3rd action game?

 

[GuardianE]

Thanks again, TribladeX. A lot of great information in there.

That would have been soooo hype if DahBomb made it out there. It's too bad that it didn't work out logistically. I think he would have provided some valuable insight.

Interesting about the lock-on removal coming from Capcom, but I suppose not too surprising. There were certainly goals to God of War-ify the series, as seen through interviews with various Capcom folks, and making the game more accessible.

I personally think that weaknesses could be implemented in ways that weren't so stifling, as the color coded enemies. DMC as a series isn't new to enemy weaknesses in the forms of elemental damage in DMC3. I feel like it was taken to an extreme that didn't quite fit the mold and design template of DMC's combat overall.

Also, just curious, did NT have any input into Superbot's implementation of DmC Dante into Playstation All Stars Battle Royale?

 

[Jawmuncher]

Thanks again, TribladeX. A lot of great information in there.

That would have been soooo hype if DahBomb made it out there. It's too bad that it didn't work out logistically. I think he would have provided some valuable insight.

Interesting about the lock-on removal coming from Capcom, but I suppose not too surprising. There were certainly goals to God of War-ify the series, as seen through interviews with various Capcom folks, and making the game more accessible.

I personally think that weaknesses could be implemented in ways that weren't so stifling, as the color coded enemies. DMC as a series isn't new to enemy weaknesses in the forms of elemental damage in DMC3. I feel like it was taken to an extreme that didn't quite fit the mold and design template of DMC's combat overall.

Also, just curious, did NT have any input into Superbot's implementation of DmC Dante into Playstation All Stars Battle Royale?

Any info on that would be amazing. Since the selection process of characters and the like that we know of is slim.

 

[Seyavesh]

Haha, funnily enough I could have sworn I got that idea from previous games (DMC3/4, notably), and/or Capcom mentioned that it was there. At the time I remember thinking "Right! That why you feel so empowered at high ranks, but so sluggish at the lower ranks"... But people seem to think we invented the idea, so who knows But either way, when I suggested it to Rahni, she thought it was great and had it implemented into the combat system.

you were probably thinking of dmc3 where it becomes easier to mash out crazy moves at higher ranks- it's really noticeable with moves that keep on going when you mash them more as getting out stuff like point blank's second and third shots are (i think?) humanly impossible at lower ranks but still technically possible to achieve

 

[TribladeX]

Thanks for coming, you're great!

Haha, thanks

I do have one question: Did Capcom literally say "Make it Western" with regards to gameplay?

What does "Make it Western" even mean for an extreme 3rd action game?

Pretty much, yes. They literally wanted to see a Western developer's take on their Eastern series. I think (again, my opinion) that they felt that there was something about DMC that wasn't appealing to Western audiences like other games in the genre (e.g. God of War) and they didn't know how to correct that.

So they didn't want to interfere with NT's take on the series, because they felt that by doing so they would end up back where they started. However, when NT proposed a very 'DMC' looking game, Capcom shot it down. They absolutely did NOT want us to make their same game again.

And if so, how did you feel about that?

Conflicted

I love DMC, so the entire of DmC was a nightmarish, stressful rollercoaster for me. Obviously I had stuff that I wanted to improve in the series (I managed to achieve some of that, see my other posts), however this wasn't how I imagined it happening at the time. You guys saw what the game could have been in the initial trailers - but there were waaaaay crazier ideas that never came to light that I (personally) felt were way worse. I remember seeing some of the early versions and being, like "That is NOT Dante/DMC at ALL". The worst one for me was seeing Ebony and Ivory turned into a single, tiny 6 shooter pistol. Ebony and Ivory are some of my favourite weapons ever and they were being reduced to something completely uninteresting. So I just had to grin and bear it, hoping that it would work out.

The day that first trailer got released and then reading hours of fan hatred? That was the most depressing day of my then 12 year career.

 

[TribladeX]

Also, just curious, did NT have any input into Superbot's implementation of DmC Dante into Playstation All Stars Battle Royale?

I've heard VERY little about this. In fact, I was surprised when Dante turned up in that game. I had NO idea it was happening.

However, I heard later that we sent them a bunch of assets as they existed at the time. So I imagine they used those, took a look at what we were doing and translated it as best as the could into their own game. We probably made changes later that conflicted with their designs though.

AFAIK, nobody from Ninja Theory ever provided ANY work towards that game though.

 

[Soriku]

How lengthy is the DE?

 

[TribladeX]

you were probably thinking of dmc3 where it becomes easier to mash out crazy moves at higher ranks- it's really noticeable with moves that keep on going when you mash them more as getting out stuff like point blank's second and third shots are (i think?) humanly impossible at lower ranks but still technically possible to achieve

The crazy combos were another thing all together, actually. Back in early 2010, Rahni and I were looking at DMC4 working out metrics for the combat and (for example) we were looking at the million-stabs attack. I remember desperately trying to convince her that you could do a very long, 10 second extended attack with it, but we just couldn't ever pull it off. It was only later that I found Dahbomb's DMC3 FAQ which explained the concept of 'crazy combos' and I finally understood what was happening.

But absolutely, I heard of the speed increase from somewhere else. We did not just think "Eureka - let's do a speed increase". Maybe, possibly, Capcom suggested it to us as something they'd done previously, but never implemented... but I'm really not sure at this point.

 

[SkylineRKR]

DmC Definitive is a very good game. I didn't like the 30fps vanilla game on Ps3 and definitive edition improvements sort of confirm that their original vision was flawed or lacking. Turbo mode + 60fps is god damn good.

I think I only rate DMC3 higher. And perhaps 4 SE slightly.

 

[Sesha]

Thanks for all the amazing info, TribladeX. Like everyone else that's chimed in I love hearing about this kind of stuff. It was obvious someone from Capcom or NT was following GAF, because a lot of the changes made post-demo and to DmC DE were way too specific, and I'm really glad you did. Must Style, for example. I remember Rahni said that Must Style came from a mod, which I knew wasn't true. I've even seen people that hate DmC suggest that, probably hearsay based on Rahni's comment.

It sounds like you and Rahni were responsible for suggesting or implementing a lot of the things I liked in DmC, and I'm massively grateful for that (Secret Missions, the S-rank speed increase and Must Style in particular). You have no idea. Speaking of Rahni, going by interviews, it seemed like over the course of the development that she went from someone very clueless about the DMC school of combat design to a real powerhouse in that regard. I'm really anticipating seeing what she does in the future, and I suppose that now applies to you as well.

It's a bit surreal hearing about Capcom making really bad decisions like dropping lock-on and the color-coded enemies. I wonder if Itsuno had any part in those decisions. I hope not.

Man, that's an insanely long story. I'm just going to skim the basics here. The main drive behind the Angel/Demon modes being on the triggers was to make it a lot more accessible than the Style System from DMC4. And it had already been proven to work in Heavenly Sword (or so I was told). However, that was not the first variation of the system and we went through dozens of ideas for months before finally arriving at the system that's there today. And even then, some people loved it, some people didn't. I feel like we could have kept going with the controls forever though.

Things like the dedicated dodge button just came from months of experimenting with different ideas (I think we also borrowed heavily from Bayonetta too).

It's easy, especially for a fan/observer, to be really sure of how something should have been implemented, even though during development everything isn't necessarily perfectly planned out beforehand.
As for Bayonetta, it was obvious it was an inspiration. Happily so, as Bayonetta still is a landmark title in the genre.

Dante's DT absolutely was not based on Quicksilver. QS did appear briefly in a VERY early design spec (we're talking late '09 here). Other than that, it never appeared again.

Vergil's DT though, yup: The designer who built him was directly influenced by the Doppelganger ability. I believe (not 100% sure about this) that part of the thinking was: "Well, Dante can't have it - let's give it to Vergil".

That surprises me a lot. Dante's DT being a time slow and Vergil's being Doppelgänger seemed like an obvious decision to implement the styles.
Good on Vergil's designer. I wouldn't be surprised if Vergil had Doppelgänger as an ability in future iterations.

But that was really all it was (feedback and advice). They didn't have a team of developers working on the game, for example.

What you're saying confirms what we know based on interviews with Itsuno. Some DMC fans seem to believe that Itsuno and the DMC team ghost-directed DmC or that Itsuno was directly responsible for Vergil's design as a whole as a way to rationalize the additions to DMC4SE.

DmC2 never got discussed. And even so, who knows where that could/would have gone. I'm sure everyone has vastly different opinions about what DmC2 would have been.



Nope, sorry - no idea. I imagine there was a rough plan for what happened next, but I never got to see any of it, if it did indeed exist.

I kinda figured. Capcom talked a lot about their future plans for the franchise, their grand outsourcing plans and of working with Ninja Theory but it seems they made a complete right swerve after the results of their 2013 fiscal year came in. Not that I blame NT or anything. A lot of DMC fans are still afraid that DmC2 is happening. Typical grief-type response. Burned once, etc.

As for Boss Rush mode, believe me, I know that it's more complicated than so. Probably why DMC4SE didn't have it either. Fingers crossed for DMC5





I have a couple more questions, if you don't mind. Like before, ignore every question that is too sensitive.

When did Capcom initially contact NT regarding DmC?

When did pre-production begin and end? When did full production begin?

How much of the full game was in place conceptually from the beginning of full production?

Who other than Itsuno and Alex Jones from the Capcom side was involved, if you can say?

Regarding lock-on, do you know why was Capcom was so adamant on there not being a lock-on in the vanilla game but suddenly turning around for DE? Was it based on feedback? It seems strange billing the Definitive Edition as "definitive" when they steadfastly rejected a key feature of the remaster for the initial product.

Where did the changes (I call them changes even though they're not really that. But you know what I mean) to the upgrade system (moves being tied to upgrade points instead of a currency like Proud Souls, upgrade points being tied to gaining Red Orbs, being able to try out moves before buying) come from?

However, I heard later that we sent them a bunch of assets as they existed at the time. So I imagine they used those, took a look at what we were doing and translated it as best as the could into their own game. We probably made changes later that conflicted with their designs though.

Speaking of. Dante uses Twosome Time both in PSABR and the initial TGS teaser. Was that an idea that was planned but dropped?

Regarding the above, was Royalguard or any other of Dante's classic moves considered but dropped?

Were any particular weapons designed by anyone in particular? Same for the actual implementation. Aquila, for example.

Overall, are you satisfied with how DmC and DE turned out? Any major regrets or things you're really happy with?

Say you were involved in either DmC2 or DMC5. Anything in particular you would have wanted to implement (assuming no opposition and that you had the time and resources for it)?

Edit: Oh, and I almost forget. What was the inception/who came up with the very extensive stat-tracking system that's found in the menu, the one that tracks everything from steps, to moves performed under various conditions, enemies killed and how, death suffered and how, various damage values? That was an amazing idea and many here have gushed endlessly about it since the release of the game, and sadly it's not really something that was brought up in reviews or later discussions about the game elsewhere.

 

[Dahbomb]

DmC DE is mechanically the best action game by a Western studio. In my eyes it's not even close. You can push the mechanics surprisingly far and the game's difficulties at the high ends accommodates for it. I hope after some time has passed people will come back to it and realize its worth. I am really glad that game was made.

Will post a bigger response in a bit, busy right now.

 

[CrackPebbles]

Just wanted to say thanks for all the info TribladeX. It's nice to have some more insight on the games development and how subsequent improvements in DE were materialized. I really appreciate you answering all these questions.

 

[Seven Force]

As someone that didn't really care for the original release but actually really like the Definitive Edition (mainly for all of the changes), those are some pretty insightful bits of info. Thanks, TribladeX.

 

[GuardianE]

I love DMC, so the entire of DmC was a nightmarish, stressful rollercoaster for me. Obviously I had stuff that I wanted to improve in the series (I managed to achieve some of that, see my other posts), however this wasn't how I imagined it happening at the time. You guys saw what the game could have been in the initial trailers - but there were waaaaay crazier ideas that never came to light that I (personally) felt were way worse. I remember seeing some of the early versions and being, like "That is NOT Dante/DMC at ALL". The worst one for me was seeing Ebony and Ivory turned into a single, tiny 6 shooter pistol. Ebony and Ivory are some of my favourite weapons ever and they were being reduced to something completely uninteresting. So I just had to grin and bear it, hoping that it would work out.

The day that first trailer got released and then reading hours of fan hatred? That was the most depressing day of my then 12 year career.

Well, it sounds like we should be grateful that someone like you was on the team.

 

[Mizerman]

Conflicted

I love DMC, so the entire of DmC was a nightmarish, stressful rollercoaster for me. Obviously I had stuff that I wanted to improve in the series (I managed to achieve some of that, see my other posts), however this wasn't how I imagined it happening at the time. You guys saw what the game could have been in the initial trailers - but there were waaaaay crazier ideas that never came to light that I (personally) felt were way worse. I remember seeing some of the early versions and being, like "That is NOT Dante/DMC at ALL". The worst one for me was seeing Ebony and Ivory turned into a single, tiny 6 shooter pistol. Ebony and Ivory are some of my favourite weapons ever and they were being reduced to something completely uninteresting. So I just had to grin and bear it, hoping that it would work out.

The day that first trailer got released and then reading hours of fan hatred? That was the most depressing day of my then 12 year career.

Heh.

I respect your passion and I'm glad that you were on that team in hindsight.

 

[Sesha]

Echoing GuardianE and mizerman, it was clear members of the dev team were passionate about the franchise, and as we know from certain interviews that Capcom pushed for a way more radical direction than I think most people wanted, so we feel lucky and are very thankful in that regard.

I'm also incredibly glad it was NT who handled the design of DmC DE and not some other developer.

 

[TribladeX]

Thanks for all the amazing info, TribladeX. Like everyone else that's chimed in I love hearing about this kind of stuff.

Again, you're welcome. I wish there were more opportunities to share stuff like this and wish bigger companies would be more open about their development. Now that I've gone indie, I actually get to talk about everything I'm working on constantly from day one and it's refreshing.

I remember Rahni said that Must Style came from a mod, which I knew wasn't true

Rahni knew/knows that 'Must Style' came from a suggestion from you guys, so if she actually said it came from a mod in an interview, it was probably just a mix-up with the 'Gods Must Die' mod for DMC4. Probably an innocent mistake.

...it seemed like over the course of the development that she went from someone very clueless about the DMC school of combat design to a real powerhouse in that regard.

She certainly wasn't clueless. Although, sure, nobody at Ninja had ever worked on a game with the combat pedigree of the DMC series and so we all went through a huge learning experience, that doesn't mean there was a lack of ability or talent. Some of us (Rahni included) had worked on combat games before.

Sure, teams like Capcom and Platinum are incredible at making games in this genre and of course a lot of that is down to their experience. But that doesn't mean other teams wouldn't be able to replicate those games if they were given the opportunity. Part of the problem with DmC was that we weren't trying to make a typical DMC game initially. As much as that will upset a lot of people who love the older games, the mandate was to produce a game that could be played by non-DMC players and open it up to a much bigger market (remember the whole thing about it selling 5 million copies?). It took a lot of time just to work out what the core game really was, before we started nailing down the finer details. And it's those details that are really important here. Some of which aren't even obvious on paper.

Take jump cancelling for example. Something that was originally a bug in the genre that eventually became a staple feature. When you first encounter it, it's kind of mind blowing. For example, we had animators on DmC who hated seeing their animations, which they'd spent weeks working on, being constantly interrupted by this 'bug'. A couple of them even called it out to be removed from the game because they felt it was destroying the game's asthetic. But try explaining what jump cancelling is and why it improves combat gameplay, and it's actually quite difficult. Once you 'get' it, you start to understand how much freedom it can provide to a skilled player, and then you start looking at things differently. But you can't put it on the box as a feature and expect 10 million people to buy the game because of it. It's completely limited to a fraction of your potential player base. And DMC is FULL of these subtle features.

The style rank is a great example of this. I'm really proud of the work I did on that system, in both versions of the game, but for different reasons. In vanilla DmC, the mandate was to make a system that any regular Joe could understand and enjoy. And we achieved that. I know we achieved it because I've had people tell me that they didn't understand what was going on with the older games, but the new system made complete sense and empowered them. But obviously that alienated the hardcore fan base - something we knew was going to happen. For DE, the mandate changed to 'make it appeal to the hardcore' and we rebuilt it (we even went back and tweaked the 'normal' version of it too). But people on the web have always just jumped to the conclusion that we didn't know what we were doing with DmC and, sure, you would be correct in arguing that platinum would probably have done a better job at nailing a DMC-type style rank system, but that's not what we were asked to do, so that's not what we delivered.

It's a bit surreal hearing about Capcom making really bad decisions like dropping lock-on and the color-coded enemies. I wonder if Itsuno had any part in those decisions. I hope not.

You've got to realise, these aren't necessarily 'bad' decisions. It's all extremely subjective. Sure, you could argue that in retrospect it wasn't the correct one, or not the one you would have made yourself etc. Hell, I know I'd have made different choices along the way, but I can't guarantee I would have made a better game in the process.

It's easy, especially for a fan/observer, to be really sure of how something should have been implemented, even though during development everything isn't necessarily perfectly planned out beforehand.

And it's not just planning. Remember for publishers this is a business first and foremost. It's all great saying "Put lock-on in, the fans love lock-on", but if it's considered you're talking about .5 million fans, it's not really much of an incentive to continue down that path. If someone thinks that the removing lock-on is the magic sauce for combat games that will suddenly start making them sell 20 million units, that's exactly what they'll do. Even if it doesn't seem like the best decision for the hardcore fan base. And of course, if such a game did sell that many units, you can guarantee that the entire genre will go down that path too.

What you're saying confirms what we know based on interviews with Itsuno. Some DMC fans seem to believe that Itsuno and the DMC team ghost-directed DmC or that Itsuno was directly responsible for Vergil's design as a whole as a way to rationalize the additions to DMC4SE.

Nope, not all. They literally advised. Like I said in other posts, they actually didn't want to interfere. I heard of people asking them how they'd do something and they'd respond "How would you do it?", or something like that.

I kinda figured. Capcom talked a lot about their future plans for the franchise, their grand outsourcing plans and of working with Ninja Theory but it seems they made a complete right swerve after the results of their 2013 fiscal year came in. Not that I blame NT or anything. A lot of DMC fans are still afraid that DmC2 is happening. Typical grief-type response. Burned once, etc.

Well, like I said above - it's a business. Fans had issues with DMC4, they didn't buy huge numbers of DMC:HD or DmC etc, Capcom aren't exactly going to be jumping to make more of them. Who knows if they plan to make DMC5 any time soon. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if we don't see it for a very long time.

When did Capcom initially contact NT regarding DmC?

I don't know. I was told about DmC on the first day I arrived at Ninja (August 2009) and there was already tons of concept art scattered around in 'the secret wing'. So I guess sometime early 2009? But I don't really know.

When did pre-production begin and end? When did full production begin?

Pre-production was already going when I joined, so I don't when it begun. And my memory's too fuzzy as to when it ended. It felt like forever

How much of the full game was in place conceptually from the beginning of full production?

I honestly couldn't say. You could almost say that DmC had an identity crisis for a long time, so I don't think it really had a point where it really stopped being in concept and just got made (not until much later anyway). There probably was a technical date (i.e. on the schedule) when pre-production ended, but I don't think there was a point where we knew exactly what the game was until much later.

Who other than Itsuno and Alex Jones from the Capcom side was involved, if you can say?

I don't know any of their names, unfortunately. In the meeting I was in that one time, I got introduced but I can't remember any of them. There was about 4/5 of them though, including their translator.

Regarding lock-on, do you know why was Capcom was so adamant on there not being a lock-on in the vanilla game but suddenly turning around for DE? Was it based on feedback? It seems strange billing the Definitive Edition as "definitive" when they steadfastly rejected a key feature of the remaster for the initial product.

This goes back to the business thing again. Look at it from their point of view: Why doesn't DMC pull the numbers they don't think it should? Is it the lock-on that makes it inaccessible? So they try it without lock-on. Then it doesn't sell like they'd hope and the fans beg for lock-on. So, OK, let's put lock-on back in and see if that sells more units.

I don't know how well DE sold (I left before we made an royalties from it) but I'm betting not enough that Capcom is convinced that those changes pulled in more players. *shrug* only time will tell when we see what (if anything) they do next.

Where did the changes (I call them changes even though they're not really that. But you know what I mean) to the upgrade system (moves being tied to upgrade points instead of a currency like Proud Souls, upgrade points being tied to gaining Red Orbs, being able to try out moves before buying) come from?

The 'upgrade points' are literally proud souls with a different name. All we did was streamline the system by removing the currency value and replacing it with a metre that fills up (or levels up if you like). It's exactly the same system under the hood as DMC4 though.

Upgrade points aren't tied to Red Orbs at all. They have nothing to do with each other. Yes, I think (and I'm not 100% sure if I'm remembering this correctly) you earn the same quantity of both. But it's not 'you earn X red orbs, so you get Y upgrade points'. It's you earn 'X style rank, you get Y of BOTH'. Once you max out the upgrade points, we just give you the extra points as red orbs instead (something I don't think DMC4 does - you just continue to earn proud orbs for no reason, something we changed).

Speaking of. Dante uses Twosome Time both in PSABR and the initial TGS teaser. Was that an idea that was planned but dropped?

I have no idea. One thing I will say -- and this goes for all games in general, not just DMC / NT's games -- is that those early trailers are what's intended to be the final game. They're not a direct lie, as such, and the intention is to make the game look and play like that, but it never turns out that way. Stuff doesn't work, or not as well as you imagined. Or there's no way to execute the ability on the controller. Or people just can't perform the move. Or a million other reasons.

Regarding the above, was Royalguard or any other of Dante's classic moves considered but dropped?

Royal Guard, not really. Blocking yes. But only conceptually.

One experiment I did back in 2010 was to count up Dante's unique moveset. I don't remember the number, but it's something like 270 moves. And again, we were trying to simplify the whole thing, so there was no way most of those were going in. We spent a long time trying to map out groups of moves onto buttons on the controller. Mostly failing to come up with anything that worked for ages.

Were any particular weapons designed by anyone in particular? Same for the actual implementation. Aquila, for example.

All Rahni. Design, implementation. Even naming them, I believe. She's Australian - apparently 'Kablooey' is a word over there? Who knew.

Overall, are you satisfied with how DmC and DE turned out? Any major regrets or things you're really happy with?

As I've said before, it's a difficult thing for me. I'm a big DMC fan and when I joined the project I wanted to keep all of the craziness of DMC and the amazing combat and then fix the other stuff that I hated. Some of that I achieved (secret missions, the fair item system etc), but a lot of it wasn't in my control. And again, subjectively I probably wouldn't have taken the same path Capcom/NT did.

Getting to go back and fit up bits of DmC for DE was great, and I was really proud of the results (especially hearing the most diehard fans like Dahbomb say that some of it is the best in the genre - very proud there). In fact, my favourite change in DE was taking Vergil and adding the chains of helm-breaker attacks. I always felt that it was a travesty that an iconic attack like that from DMC3 was missing in DmC (I suggested it for the original game, but it was too late and there wasn't time).

Say you were involved in either DmC2 or DMC5. Anything in particular you would have wanted to implement (assuming no opposition and that you had the time and resources for it)?

I don't think I actually want to even go down that path any more. A group of four of us from Ninja (three of us have since left) got together a couple of years back to make a side-scrolling DMC-like combat game (ironically DmCE came up about 2 months in and I switched to working on that non-stop and we never got back to it). I really want to get back to the idea sometime soon though. If nothing more to prove to myself that I can do something great with the experience I gained making DmC.

Edit: Oh, and I almost forget. What was the inception/who came up with the very extensive stat-tracking system that's found in the menu, the one that tracks everything from steps, to moves performed under various conditions, enemies killed and how, death suffered and how, various damage values? That was an amazing idea and many here have gushed endlessly about it since the release of the game, and sadly it's not really something that was brought up in reviews or later discussions about the game elsewhere.

That's me. I love stat tracking stuff. I think every game should have it. I love going in and seeing that I've killed 33,000 fodder drones.

Unfortunately it's a bloody nightmare. It took months and months to get correct. People really like it, huh? I've literally never seen anyone mention it To the point where I don't consider it worth doing any more. Glad to know it had some love though. Will have to revisit the idea in a future project.

 

[TribladeX]

Will post a bigger response in a bit, busy right now.

I now live in fear of this impending post

I know, coming from you, it will be epic in scope and it's bonkers how time consuming answering all this stuff is ;-)

 

[TribladeX]

Just wanted to say thanks for all the info TribladeX. It's nice to have some more insight on the games development and how subsequent improvements in DE were materialized. I really appreciate you answering all these questions.

You're welcome

As someone that didn't really care for the original release but actually really like the Definitive Edition (mainly for all of the changes), those are some pretty insightful bits of info. Thanks, TribladeX.

No problem

Well, it sounds like we should be grateful that someone like you was on the team.

Hehe, thanks

Heh.

I respect your passion and I'm glad that you were on that team in hindsight.

Cheers

Echoing GuardianE and mizerman, it was clear members of the dev team were passionate about the franchise, and as we know from certain interviews that Capcom pushed for a way more radical direction than I think most people wanted, so we feel lucky and are very thankful in that regard.

I'm also incredibly glad it was NT who handled the design of DmC DE and not some other developer.

I've always wondered what DmC would have been if it had been handed to a company who didn't have a single employee that had ever played a DMC game (or worse, that all hated the original games)

 

[ZeroX03]

Thanks for this TribladeX. Really interesting stuff to read. I don't really have any questions, but I do want to echo that it's probably the finest Western character action game to date and the jump from vanilla to DE turned a good game into an amazing game. I hope the team at NT are aware that while they may not have made an amazing Japanese Devil May Cry game, they made an amazing game period.

 

[OniBaka]

Wow thanks TribladeX with all the insight of development of DmC. You've answered most questions that I wanted to know and there were a lot of things DmC did better than the originals did.

After hearing all this I feel like going back to DmC DE.

Edit: Didn't know Rahni was Australian, its great to see a fellow Australian create something like that.

 

[Warxard]

Is Rahni the combat design lead for Hellblade?

Sounds like a young gawd in the making if she managed to do DmC

Thanks for the info, Triblade. From a fan of DMC including the reboot, you've managed to make a swell little game

 

[TribladeX]

Thanks for this TribladeX. Really interesting stuff to read. I don't really have any questions, but I do want to echo that it's probably the finest Western character action game to date and the jump from vanilla to DE turned a good game into an amazing game. I hope the team at NT are aware that while they may not have made an amazing Japanese Devil May Cry game, they made an amazing game period.

Again, you're welcome.

Also - this is a really interesting point that's come up about a billion times before: I don't think anyone in the World -- whether it's Capcom, NT, hard core DMC fans, people who hate DMC, but love DmC etc -- would argue that if DmC (especially DE) had been released as a standalone, new IP, that it would have been incredibly well received as a great DMC-type game alternative.

Turns out DMC fans are a... passionate bunch ;-)

Wow thanks TribladeX with all the insight of development of DmC. You've answered most questions that I wanted to know and there were a lot of things DmC did better than the originals did.

After hearing all this I feel like going back to DmC DE.

You're welcome. And great to hear: Stuff like that is always encouraging to hear

Is Rahni the combat design lead for Hellblade?

Sounds like a young gawd in the making if she managed to do DmC

Thanks for the info, Triblade. From a fan of DMC including the reboot, you've managed to make a swell little game

I can't really talk about Hellblade (mostly because I don't know that much about it any more than anything else). But, no - it's public knowledge that Rahni's on another project. NT release development diaries about Hellblade from time-to-time. If you go back to the early ones, you can get a feel for who's doing what on that project.

 

[Guess Who]

Wow, this thread went places. Great places.

Thanks a ton for sharing all that info, Triblade. I think a lot of people have long wanted to know exactly what went down behind the scenes with DmC and you've provided some tremendous insight into that. You should contact Gamasutra and see if you could have a DmC postmortem published, haha.

 

[Warxard]

AHHH, thank you.

One last thing: who suggested the Training Room mode? Since DMC3 I've always wanted one so I was surprised to see it in DmC.

 

[Linkark07]

If you have this in your backlog, give it a chance. It's worth it.

Have it on my backlog with the DLC too but need to find the time. Plus, I still don't know if I should play it in English or Spanish as Danté, el Exterminador de Demonios.

 

[GuardianE]

Take jump cancelling for example. Something that was originally a bug in the genre that eventually became a staple feature. When you first encounter it, it's kind of mind blowing. For example, we had animators on DmC who hated seeing their animations, which they'd spent weeks working on, being constantly interrupted by this 'bug'. A couple of them even called it out to be removed from the game because they felt it was destroying the game's asthetic. But try explaining what jump cancelling is and why it improves combat gameplay, and it's actually quite difficult. Once you 'get' it, you start to understand how much freedom it can provide to a skilled player, and then you start looking at things differently. But you can't put it on the box as a feature and expect 10 million people to buy the game because of it. It's completely limited to a fraction of your potential player base. And DMC is FULL of these subtle features.

* * *

Well, like I said above - it's a business. Fans had issues with DMC4, they didn't buy huge numbers of DMC:HD or DmC etc, Capcom aren't exactly going to be jumping to make more of them. Who knows if they plan to make DMC5 any time soon. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if we don't see it for a very long time.

* * *

That's me. I love stat tracking stuff. I think every game should have it. I love going in and seeing that I've killed 33,000 fodder drones.

Unfortunately it's a bloody nightmare. It took months and months to get correct. People really like it, huh? I've literally never seen anyone mention it To the point where I don't consider it worth doing any more. Glad to know it had some love though. Will have to revisit the idea in a future project.

Jump cancelling actually wasn't a bug. Itsuno mentioned in a DMC4SE stream how it definitely exploded into something beyond original expectations, but the intent was always to be able to use enemy step as an animation cancel for new combos. You could argue that shotgun hiking in DMC1 is a bug, but that's mostly because of how the shotgun works on aerial enemies than anything else.

What you described from the animators is probably one of the biggest fears that fans of DMC had when realizing that the next title was going to go to NT. The mentality of superficial animation might be prioritized over combat options and substance. And this is difficult to relate to someone without any experience in character action or fighting games, and without someone to act as an advocate for these things, the game would have turned out much much worse.

* * *

Capcom was satisfied with the sales of DMCHD, which recently became a Platinum Title at 1,000,000 sales, and DMC4SE, which was lauded in their recent fiscal reports. DMC continues to be in the top 6 franchises for Capcom in terms of sales/title ratio. I would expect a DMC5 sooner rather than later.

* * *

Additional stat tracking in general is definitely revered by the hardcore here. It made it to our DMC5 Wishlist to Capcom as a result. That aspect was absolutely appreciated, even if its not often mentioned. So, kudos to you on that because it was a huge improvement.

 

[Moon_frogger]

Definitive Edition was a much better game. Vanilla was flat out bad with some of the worst boss fights in action games (Don't care how they look, it's about how they play.).

Sure was funny seeing the DmC fanbase try to rationalize admitting that the DE was a far better designed game while also having to acknowledge that literally every change that was made came out of those 'white hair whiners' that criticized the original release so much.

huh that's pretty funny to me because I've only ever played the normal version and I love it to pieces. Considering that the original version was also universally praised by critics and the DE is pretty much noted for adding better graphics I call shenanigans on your suggestion that the DE turns it from a bad to a good game. Pretty sure you're exaggerating, especially with your super salty tone.

 

[GuardianE]

huh that's pretty funny to me because I've only ever played the normal version and I love it to pieces. Considering that the original version was also universally praised by critics and the DE is pretty much noted for adding better graphics I call shenanigans on your suggestion that the DE turns it from a bad to a good game. Pretty sure you're exaggerating, especially with your super salty tone.

Vanilla DmC had problems. I personally never take critical perception as the actual barometer of a game's quality, especially for something that revolves around gameplay as much as a character action game. It's like listening to most reviews for fighting games. Largely worthless. Bad to good, mediocre to decent. Whatever you want to call it, Vanilla DmC was filled with problems that were rectified due to fan feedback and people like TribladeX's willingness to listen to that feedback. There were significant design flaws, but these issues are largely for people who actually delve deep into the mechanics of action games. Just because these problems didn't bother you, doesn't somehow make them not important.

The existence of DE does nothing but highlight the flaws in the original.

EDIT: And I see that PeterVenkman already replied to you earlier in the thread to highlight some of the issues.

 

[Dahbomb]

I was definitely one of the people who enjoyed the excessive stat tracking. I have it as a requested feature for DMC5.

At the very least it's an accurate counter for damage values in the game and other stuff. There's no other way to actually give value to attacks outside of hitting enemies a lot and watching life bars go down (which wasn't even available in the original DmC because there was no lock on and health bar reticule).


Thing is that no one mentions the stat tracking because it's pretty much never mentioned in the game. You have to search the options yourself. I accidentally found them just perusing through the options and then was blown away at all the minute stats it covered.

 

[lowhighkang_LHK]

Thanks for all the informative responses TribladeX.

I have said this since day 1 really but what you guys succeeded in doing was allowing the free-form stylish combat the franchise is known for and help bring it to a level that had an easier and lower barrier of entry so that everyone could enjoy it.

You guys basically out-did God of War. Easy to grasp combat mechanics but offers a level depth far beyond it.

This is evidenced by the sheer number of great combo videos being showcased online. I'm wondering if you or any other of the staff have seen them and what you guys think?

Anyway, it may have taken a re-release on next-gen consoles but I think at this point it's safe to say the game has sold what it should have to begin with. I remember Capcom putting out a press-release saying they were very pleased with the DE's performance. It's also Capcom's most successful game on Steam and it's obviously a well-regarded game critically looking at it's high metacritic. I also think there is a lot of things implemented that Capcom could take notice of when and if they make a Devil May Cry 5. Level design/pacing/secret missions/training mode/UI/ and the overall friendly and well thought out menu structure. Sometimes Devil May Cry 4 just feels like a really awesome combat simulator and not much else.

I hope you're still in the game's industry and working on cool projects. Let us know about it if you can!

 

[Mizerman]

huh that's pretty funny to me because I've only ever played the normal version and I love it to pieces. Considering that the original version was also universally praised by critics and the DE is pretty much noted for adding better graphics I call shenanigans on your suggestion that the DE turns it from a bad to a good game. Pretty sure you're exaggerating, especially with your super salty tone.

Using critical reception solely to judge quality of a game is flawed at best.

 

[Warxard]

huh that's pretty funny to me because I've only ever played the normal version and I love it to pieces. Considering that the original version was also universally praised by critics and the DE is pretty much noted for adding better graphics I call shenanigans on your suggestion that the DE turns it from a bad to a good game. Pretty sure you're exaggerating, especially with your super salty tone.

Definitive Edition has turbo mode.

Better than Vanilla

 

[ZeroX03]

Original DmC isn't a bad game. It still has better combat than most any other Western action titles. DE's tweaks are heavily weighted toward enthusiasts as is, it doesn't change something like the solid pacing.

DE turns it from good to great.

 

[Son Of Sparda]

Wow, those are some really interesting details about behind the scenes of DmC's development. Thanks TribladeX for taking the time to reply here, I think we all really appreciate it.

I had a couple of question myself, though I understand if you don't have the time to answer them, so it's cool either way.


-In regards to Sparda and Eva, was there anything else that you guys initially had planned to add to their characters in the game (like more cutscenes, story events, lore, etc) but eventually couldn't and had to change/remove later on?

-And this one is for you. Assuming that Capcom were to make DMC5, which character would you (as a fan of the series) like to see take the main role in it?



Thanks again for all your hardwork on DmC and DE and for all the info that you've provided us here. If anything, you just proved how clueless I were when I debated that adding "Training" or "Boss Rush" modes to 4SE would have been easy and wouldn't need much time/resources.


EDIT: Reading through this thread just reminded me that I REALLY need to pick up DE at some point. The change log to Vergil's boss fight alone seems to be good enough to warrant buying the DE.

 

[the_batman]

the music is boss.

 

[TribladeX]

Wow, this thread went places. Great places.

Thanks a ton for sharing all that info, Triblade. I think a lot of people have long wanted to know exactly what went down behind the scenes with DmC and you've provided some tremendous insight into that.

Again, you're welcome

You should contact Gamasutra and see if you could have a DmC postmortem published, haha.

Hah, I think this about covers it for my 'post mortem' ;-)

Besides, I think someone who actually lead the project should be responsible for doing that. Whether you'd get an honest, in depth look at what you consider to be the major problems with the product... who knows. I wouldn't count on it though ;-)

AHHH, thank you.

One last thing: who suggested the Training Room mode? Since DMC3 I've always wanted one so I was surprised to see it in DmC.

Funnily enough, it definitely wasn't me. In fact, being honest about it, I actually argued against the idea. In my eyes the bang-for-buck value of the training room wasn't worth the amount of effort that it was going to take to create it. And that feeling only got worse when they actually started implementing it and all hell broke out. Not to mention, one of my main counters against it was that we already allowed the player to respec Dante at any point in the game, so it's not like you ever had to commit to a single upgrade (same in DMC4).

One of the big problems with the training room is that it has to be present in every single level in the game, so that you can quickly jump to it. You can't unload the currently loaded main level and load the training room instead, because then you lose all of the current state (or, you have to save the current state, which can cause another tier of hell). So someone had to go through every level, place a training room sub level somewhere in the corner where it couldn't interfere with the main sub level (which it did - that post-process white light effect bled into some of the other sub levels, for example). Then they had to write logic to teleport the player there and back again, coders had to write stuff to change Dante's current upgrade status to a new set of attacks, we had to spawn a new enemy, with new conditions and so on and so on and so on! Not to mention it took a chunk of the PS3s limited (and so valuable) memory to have the thing sitting there the entire time.

But it was Rahni in both cases who argued for the existence of the thing. As someone who doesn't play these games at the highest difficulty level, I think she felt that the value of it was worth the time to implement. I think the idea originally came from Bayonetta and she felt that it added a lot to the game and it was sorely lacking in DMC.

Jump cancelling actually wasn't a bug. Itsuno mentioned in a DMC4SE stream how it definitely exploded into something beyond original expectations, but the intent was always to be able to use enemy step as an animation cancel for new combos.

Ah, well - fair enough. I'd always heard it was originally a bug, but I stand corrected. Either way though, it's not an easy sell to someone who doesn't get it on paper.

What you described from the animators is probably one of the biggest fears that fans of DMC had when realizing that the next title was going to go to NT. The mentality of superficial animation might be prioritized over combat options and substance. And this is difficult to relate to someone without any experience in character action or fighting games, and without someone to act as an advocate for these things, the game would have turned out much much worse.

I think the fears are genuinely justified, but it's (and I touched on this in one of my other replies) not just about lack of experience. That's actually a big misconception.

For example, we were literally counting frames in DMC4 at one point. I can tell you now that Dante's jump cycle consists of an initial input frame, followed by a single frame squat (compression), then two frames of extension as he propels himself into the air, before he goes back into a compression pose again for frame #4. I can also tell you that he jumps roughly 5-6m (per jump) into the air and that the double jump is exactly the same height as the base jump. And I do can that from memory. There are hundreds of things that I obviously don't remember any more...

However, I can relay that information to an animator and they'll either be completely on board with the idea and will make something that looks and feels very much like DMC, or they'll have some idea of their own. There's always a struggle there between gameplay and art. That's just a given. The big problem, though, always occurs if the direction is different. If the direction coming down is "Make it grounded, weighty, believable", that's what you're going to end up with, unless someone steps in and fights the decision. But with a game as big as DmC, you've got people fighting the DMC front, people fighting to do something new, people wanting to leave their mark, direction from management at NT and direction from Capcom, all fighting to be dominant.

At one point in development, the game was certainly a lot weightier than it ended up shipping (we're talking really early here). But it didn't play as well and most poeple agreed it should be changed (I think especially Capcom, who felt it strayed too much from DMC). And then as the project moved further along, more and more and more stuff fell back in line with what you'd expect from a typical DMC game, but with a more accessible approach (that was the direction).

But my point is that you can't just write it off as "difficult to relate to someone without any experience in character action or fighting games", because if they're being told to make something different, that's what they're going to have to make. If the original direction from Capcom was "Make DMC but with a more grounded story"... Well, we'll never know how close we'd have come to pulling that off.

Capcom was satisfied with the sales of DMCHD, which recently became a Platinum Title at 1,000,000 sales, and DMC4SE, which was lauded in their recent fiscal reports. DMC continues to be in the top 6 franchises for Capcom in terms of sales/title ratio. I would expect a DMC5 sooner rather than later.

Fair enough. We can only guess as to what's happening internally in Capcom. People have long made the argument that Capcom had no reason to reboot DMC at all because DMC4 should more copies that the previous games. But while the numbers are technically correct, there's so much other stuff going on in the background that it makes it really hard to predict what they're going to do next.

Additional stat tracking in general is definitely revered by the hardcore here. It made it to our DMC5 Wishlist to Capcom as a result. That aspect was absolutely appreciated, even if its not often mentioned. So, kudos to you on that because it was a huge improvement.

Cool, thanks - As I mentioned before, I really value stat tracking in games, because it's fun to look back and see what you have (and haven't) achieved. However, it never occurred to me that people were using the system to track damage values. That's really interesting to know and has made me re-evaluate it's usefulness in future endeavours

--------

That's all I've got time for right now as I've got a busy day planned, I'm afraid. I'll get back to the rest as soon as I get a chance - I may have a window around 1am where I can get a few more answered.

 

[myco666]

Noisia made the boss themes for sure. Most of the soundtrack was done by him, but I know Combichrist did a good amount as well. I'm sure Combichrist handles some of the battle themes in between for sure.

Weird. I was under the assumption that Andy did most of the soundtrack. I guess it is just me remembering better the songs that had him yelling haha.

 

[Narroo]

Again, you're welcome. I wish there were more opportunities to share stuff like this and wish bigger companies would be more open about their development. Now that I've gone indie, I actually get to talk about everything I'm working on constantly from day one and it's refreshing.



Rahni knew/knows that 'Must Style' came from a suggestion from you guys, so if she actually said it came from a mod in an interview, it was probably just a mix-up with the 'Gods Must Die' mod for DMC4. Probably an innocent mistake.



She certainly wasn't clueless. Although, sure, nobody at Ninja had ever worked on a game with the combat pedigree of the DMC series and so we all went through a huge learning experience, that doesn't mean there was a lack of ability or talent. Some of us (Rahni included) had worked on combat games before.

Sure, teams like Capcom and Platinum are incredible at making games in this genre and of course a lot of that is down to their experience. But that doesn't mean other teams wouldn't be able to replicate those games if they were given the opportunity. Part of the problem with DmC was that we weren't trying to make a typical DMC game initially. As much as that will upset a lot of people who love the older games, the mandate was to produce a game that could be played by non-DMC players and open it up to a much bigger market (remember the whole thing about it selling 5 million copies?). It took a lot of time just to work out what the core game really was, before we started nailing down the finer details. And it's those details that are really important here. Some of which aren't even obvious on paper.

Take jump cancelling for example. Something that was originally a bug in the genre that eventually became a staple feature. When you first encounter it, it's kind of mind blowing. For example, we had animators on DmC who hated seeing their animations, which they'd spent weeks working on, being constantly interrupted by this 'bug'. A couple of them even called it out to be removed from the game because they felt it was destroying the game's asthetic. But try explaining what jump cancelling is and why it improves combat gameplay, and it's actually quite difficult. Once you 'get' it, you start to understand how much freedom it can provide to a skilled player, and then you start looking at things differently. But you can't put it on the box as a feature and expect 10 million people to buy the game because of it. It's completely limited to a fraction of your potential player base. And DMC is FULL of these subtle features.

The style rank is a great example of this. I'm really proud of the work I did on that system, in both versions of the game, but for different reasons. In vanilla DmC, the mandate was to make a system that any regular Joe could understand and enjoy. And we achieved that. I know we achieved it because I've had people tell me that they didn't understand what was going on with the older games, but the new system made complete sense and empowered them. But obviously that alienated the hardcore fan base - something we knew was going to happen. For DE, the mandate changed to 'make it appeal to the hardcore' and we rebuilt it (we even went back and tweaked the 'normal' version of it too). But people on the web have always just jumped to the conclusion that we didn't know what we were doing with DmC and, sure, you would be correct in arguing that platinum would probably have done a better job at nailing a DMC-type style rank system, but that's not what we were asked to do, so that's not what we delivered.



You've got to realise, these aren't necessarily 'bad' decisions. It's all extremely subjective. Sure, you could argue that in retrospect it wasn't the correct one, or not the one you would have made yourself etc. Hell, I know I'd have made different choices along the way, but I can't guarantee I would have made a better game in the process.



And it's not just planning. Remember for publishers this is a business first and foremost. It's all great saying "Put lock-on in, the fans love lock-on", but if it's considered you're talking about .5 million fans, it's not really much of an incentive to continue down that path. If someone thinks that the removing lock-on is the magic sauce for combat games that will suddenly start making them sell 20 million units, that's exactly what they'll do. Even if it doesn't seem like the best decision for the hardcore fan base. And of course, if such a game did sell that many units, you can guarantee that the entire genre will go down that path too.



Nope, not all. They literally advised. Like I said in other posts, they actually didn't want to interfere. I heard of people asking them how they'd do something and they'd respond "How would you do it?", or something like that.



Well, like I said above - it's a business. Fans had issues with DMC4, they didn't buy huge numbers of DMC:HD or DmC etc, Capcom aren't exactly going to be jumping to make more of them. Who knows if they plan to make DMC5 any time soon. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if we don't see it for a very long time.



I don't know. I was told about DmC on the first day I arrived at Ninja (August 2009) and there was already tons of concept art scattered around in 'the secret wing'. So I guess sometime early 2009? But I don't really know.



Pre-production was already going when I joined, so I don't when it begun. And my memory's too fuzzy as to when it ended. It felt like forever



I honestly couldn't say. You could almost say that DmC had an identity crisis for a long time, so I don't think it really had a point where it really stopped being in concept and just got made (not until much later anyway). There probably was a technical date (i.e. on the schedule) when pre-production ended, but I don't think there was a point where we knew exactly what the game was until much later.



I don't know any of their names, unfortunately. In the meeting I was in that one time, I got introduced but I can't remember any of them. There was about 4/5 of them though, including their translator.



This goes back to the business thing again. Look at it from their point of view: Why doesn't DMC pull the numbers they don't think it should? Is it the lock-on that makes it inaccessible? So they try it without lock-on. Then it doesn't sell like they'd hope and the fans beg for lock-on. So, OK, let's put lock-on back in and see if that sells more units.

I don't know how well DE sold (I left before we made an royalties from it) but I'm betting not enough that Capcom is convinced that those changes pulled in more players. *shrug* only time will tell when we see what (if anything) they do next.



The 'upgrade points' are literally proud souls with a different name. All we did was streamline the system by removing the currency value and replacing it with a metre that fills up (or levels up if you like). It's exactly the same system under the hood as DMC4 though.

Upgrade points aren't tied to Red Orbs at all. They have nothing to do with each other. Yes, I think (and I'm not 100% sure if I'm remembering this correctly) you earn the same quantity of both. But it's not 'you earn X red orbs, so you get Y upgrade points'. It's you earn 'X style rank, you get Y of BOTH'. Once you max out the upgrade points, we just give you the extra points as red orbs instead (something I don't think DMC4 does - you just continue to earn proud orbs for no reason, something we changed).



I have no idea. One thing I will say -- and this goes for all games in general, not just DMC / NT's games -- is that those early trailers are what's intended to be the final game. They're not a direct lie, as such, and the intention is to make the game look and play like that, but it never turns out that way. Stuff doesn't work, or not as well as you imagined. Or there's no way to execute the ability on the controller. Or people just can't perform the move. Or a million other reasons.



Royal Guard, not really. Blocking yes. But only conceptually.

One experiment I did back in 2010 was to count up Dante's unique moveset. I don't remember the number, but it's something like 270 moves. And again, we were trying to simplify the whole thing, so there was no way most of those were going in. We spent a long time trying to map out groups of moves onto buttons on the controller. Mostly failing to come up with anything that worked for ages.



All Rahni. Design, implementation. Even naming them, I believe. She's Australian - apparently 'Kablooey' is a word over there? Who knew.



As I've said before, it's a difficult thing for me. I'm a big DMC fan and when I joined the project I wanted to keep all of the craziness of DMC and the amazing combat and then fix the other stuff that I hated. Some of that I achieved (secret missions, the fair item system etc), but a lot of it wasn't in my control. And again, subjectively I probably wouldn't have taken the same path Capcom/NT did.

Getting to go back and fit up bits of DmC for DE was great, and I was really proud of the results (especially hearing the most diehard fans like Dahbomb say that some of it is the best in the genre - very proud there). In fact, my favourite change in DE was taking Vergil and adding the chains of helm-breaker attacks. I always felt that it was a travesty that an iconic attack like that from DMC3 was missing in DmC (I suggested it for the original game, but it was too late and there wasn't time).



I don't think I actually want to even go down that path any more. A group of four of us from Ninja (three of us have since left) got together a couple of years back to make a side-scrolling DMC-like combat game (ironically DmCE came up about 2 months in and I switched to working on that non-stop and we never got back to it). I really want to get back to the idea sometime soon though. If nothing more to prove to myself that I can do something great with the experience I gained making DmC.



That's me. I love stat tracking stuff. I think every game should have it. I love going in and seeing that I've killed 33,000 fodder drones.

Unfortunately it's a bloody nightmare. It took months and months to get correct. People really like it, huh? I've literally never seen anyone mention it To the point where I don't consider it worth doing any more. Glad to know it had some love though. Will have to revisit the idea in a future project.

If you're not tired of answering questions yet (This has gone on for awhile; threads like these are why I signed up for Neogaf in the first place!):

Do you know who were the ones asking for things like the removal of lock-on and other gameplay changes to broaden the demographic? Were game designers, business men, or both? It sounds like they were doing design-by-committee/design by focus testing.

 

[TribladeX]

Whatever you want to call it, Vanilla DmC was filled with problems that were rectified due to fan feedback and people like TribladeX's willingness to listen to that feedback. There were significant design flaws, but these issues are largely for people who actually delve deep into the mechanics of action games. Just because these problems didn't bother you, doesn't somehow make them not important.

You know, it's funny actually. Watching the chain of events unfold with DmC has been... weird. What I'm about to write is totally my own opinion about what happened / my own interpretation, and I'm actually struggling to work out how to word what I'm trying to say here... but at a very high level, things sort of went like this:

The original trailer came out. A lot of people made an outcry about it clearly not being the Dante they know/love. A lot of other people raised valid concerns about potential gameplay changes etc. The press picked up on the outcry, but only covered it at the simplest level (mainly the white hair issue). Then it all went a bit mental-

People started arguing about there being bigger issues with the game than Dante's non-white hair, while other people argued that the people talking about white hair were missing the point. But the more these two things happened, the more it appeared to validate what the press were saying and so the more heated the arguments got. And the more heated the arguments got, the more it started to appear that Neogaf (and the internet as a whole) were just bitching about -- what appeared internally to the people that make the decisions -- basically nothing. And I think they started to ignore the entire community as a result.

I continued to read what I could online (which was becoming dozens upon dozens of pages daily, mostly arguing the two different sides of the coin) and although it was getting harder to find decent, valid arguments for/against what we were doing with the game, they did exist. Although I can't speak for him, I reckon this is where the reactions to the fan base from people like Tameem, actually came from: i.e. 'Screw the fans - we don't care etc'.

But like I said, there was genuinely good information to be had, but it was nearly impossible to be found. And even to this day, people still bring up the white hair argument ("Fans don't know what they're talking about - it's just his hair colour, dude"), but anyone who takes the time to really dig into things will find that, really, that was only really an initial reaction to the character design, which lasted days, at most. But because the community continued to argue and whine, all of the valid concerns got lost in the noise. Which is a huge shame, really.

I do feel that if the community had a clearer, more unified voice, more stuff that only made it into DE, may have been there at launch. But we'll never know now, unfortunately.

At the very least it's an accurate counter for damage values in the game and other stuff. There's no other way to actually give value to attacks outside of hitting enemies a lot and watching life bars go down (which wasn't even available in the original DmC because there was no lock on and health bar reticule).

Yeah, I covered this in my previous post, but I never even considered that as a valid use case for the system. If I had, I might even have considered pushing to have the stats available from the pause menu (they're live updated, so there's no reason for it not to happen.

Thing is that no one mentions the stat tracking because it's pretty much never mentioned in the game. You have to search the options yourself. I accidentally found them just perusing through the options and then was blown away at all the minute stats it covered.

Yeah, now that you mention it, I don't think there was even a loading screen tooltip that mentioned the stats. I guess that just shows how unimportant most people consider them to be.

Thanks for all the informative responses TribladeX.

You're welcome

I have said this since day 1 really but what you guys succeeded in doing was allowing the free-form stylish combat the franchise is known for and help bring it to a level that had an easier and lower barrier of entry so that everyone could enjoy it.

You guys basically out-did God of War. Easy to grasp combat mechanics but offers a level depth far beyond it.

Nice to hear

This is evidenced by the sheer number of great combo videos being showcased online. I'm wondering if you or any other of the staff have seen them and what you guys think?

Yup, definitely. I haven't really been following any of them for a while now, but after DmC's launch various people around the office (the ones who knew what was going on in those videos) would be sharing them. The best ones would get sent around the company (and you'd get lots of people commenting that they had no idea what was going on, or asking if a particular string of attacks was a bug).

There was one particular combo video (I can't remember which now) that had my mind blown. I think I watched it about three times, then my flat mate (who also worked on DE) and I would play it back in slow motion, jaws on the floor, trying to work out how they were pulling off some of the moves.

When we started working on DmCE, we took a bunch of those videos and had a discussion about what was a genuine bug that needed fixing, and what was cool and should stay. A couple of things broke the game a little, but were so awesome in combo videos, we left them in intentionally.

Sometimes Devil May Cry 4 just feels like a really awesome combat simulator and not much else.

I've heard this mirrored elsewhere, but I actually think at times that DMC would be a lot more successful as a £15 Xbox Live or PSN 'arcade' game, where it's basically just an extended bloody palace mode. I.e. focus on the combat and the systems that drive combat and scrap the level structure of the game (i.e. half of development).

Although having said that, my personal own dream DMC game is a non-linear, procedurally generated, mission based game (I still want a narrative because I love seeing Dante doing amazing stuff - the post Vergil 1 boss fight cutscene in DMC3 is still my favourite gaming cutscene ever), where the player as Dante has to accept missions and go off and accomplish them for rewards. In my head, you'd get told what was involved (simple task: Kill 10 fodder drones) but would get offered bonuses for doing it in particular ways (Don't touch the floor, or complete it in 3 minutes, or complete it with X weapon only). And it would just continue on forever.

I hope you're still in the game's industry and working on cool projects. Let us know about it if you can!

I'm not in the mainstream industry anymore, no. I left to do my own stuff (I got to the point where I got sick of the entire idea of 'AAA' development and realised that I would have to branch out on my own if I wanted to make games in the way I wanted to - being able to talk to the community is one aspect of that).

But yeah, my flat mate (ex Ninja Theory QA member who did a lot of the enemy wave rebalancing on DE, and generated all of the mission rank par scores too) and I left in May last year and formed a small, two-man indie company called 'TriCat Games'. Right now we're just making small mobile games, but if we manage to keep the thing going and make some money along the way, we're hoping to develop bigger games in the future. If you're more interested, feel free to Google us. We're both on Twitter and, although we don't have any sort of community (yet!), we're running an 'open development' concept throughout everything we do.

Wow, those are some really interesting details about behind the scenes of DmC's development. Thanks TribladeX for taking the time to reply here, I think we all really appreciate it.

As always, you're welcome

-In regards to Sparda and Eva, was there anything else that you guys initially had planned to add to their characters in the game (like more cutscenes, story events, lore, etc) but eventually couldn't and had to change/remove later on?

Nothing that I'm aware of. I think their back-story always followed a similar path to what it ended up being at release. And I don't know if there was a plan to extend that back story in a sequel, or anything. I think the story was always aimed at being Dante's story primarily.

-And this one is for you. Assuming that Capcom were to make DMC5, which character would you (as a fan of the series) like to see take the main role in it?

Dante. It's always Dante for me. Developing DmC / DE I gained a big appreciation for Vergil and I enjoyed playing Nero a lot in DMC4, but for me it was always Dante. He's still one of my favourite characters ever. But for me, I don't actually want to see his complexity raised any further (reduced if anything). I'm not in the god tier of players that make these combo videos and, although I've 100%'d (all achievements) DMC 1, 2, 3, 4, DmC and DE, I did so by sticking to (mainly) Sword Master and Rebellion when playing DMC4. I just can't (and don't have the interest) in going to the level required to master Uncle Dante. Despite the respect that I have for the people who can really show off with Dante, the more biased towards the hardcore players the game becomes, the less appealing it becomes to me.

Thanks again for all your hardwork on DmC and DE and for all the info that you've provided us here. If anything, you just proved how clueless I were when I debated that adding "Training" or "Boss Rush" modes to 4SE would have been easy and wouldn't need much time/resources.

It's nearly impossible to understand just how much time even the simplest thing can take to actually produce sometimes until you've been there. And even then, you can still underestimate tasks by a significant amount.

The change log to Vergil's boss fight alone seems to be good enough to warrant buying the DE.

I'm glad to see that change log having that sort of impact. Like the stats thing, I really love detailed patch notes in games. So I kept a huge log of every single minor change I made to DE as I went along. Unfortunately, a couple of months before the end of my work on DE, I had a big list of changes stored in my todo list as tasks that had been marked off as 'complete' and someone else wiped the entire lot. So those logs aren't even 100% complete. There's all kind of extra niggles that didn't make it onto there. I think there are many extra tweaks to the Vergil boss fight that didn't make that list.

I think a few notes also got reduced in complexity (I had some more detailed numbers in certain places, as they got 'tidied up' before being released to the community).

Weird. I was under the assumption that Andy did most of the soundtrack. I guess it is just me remembering better the songs that had him yelling haha.

Noisia definitely had a big part in the sound track. You can look up the official OST to see which band provided which tracks.

Do you know who were the ones asking for things like the removal of lock-on and other gameplay changes to broaden the demographic? Were game designers, business men, or both? It sounds like they were doing design-by-committee/design by focus testing.

Specifically, no. And I'm not sure I could call names out, even if I could be sure. The vast majority of the time when you'd ask about why you were/were not doing something, you'd hear 'Capcom'. But I don't know where the line is drawn there, or even if that was always true, or not.

 

[direct_quote]

Fair enough. We can only guess as to what's happening internally in Capcom. People have long made the argument that Capcom had no reason to reboot DMC at all because DMC4 should more copies that the previous games. But while the numbers are technically correct, there's so much other stuff going on in the background that it makes it really hard to predict what they're going to do next.

I always felt that because the main DMC team (Itsuno and Co) were working on a Capcom's next potentially big IP (Dragon's Dogma), that Capcom wanted to get the DMC brand out there in some form. So going with the whole westernizing philosophy being pushed at the time they outsourced it.

I think if DMC4 wasn't rushed as a result of moving to multiplatform development that the franchise might have been in a stronger position and Capcom would have been working ASAP on DMC5. DMC4 still did better than DD's though, so Capcom fucked up...

 

[Dahbomb]

But with a game as big as DmC, you've got people fighting the DMC front, people fighting to do something new, people wanting to leave their mark, direction from management at NT and direction from Capcom, all fighting to be dominant.

That sounds like the core issue that plagued DmC all this time.

I can definitely see things being problematic when Capcom was presented a prototype and they were like "that's too much like DMC, change it" or "that's not enough like DMC, change it".

You know, it's funny actually. Watching the chain of events unfold with DmC has been... weird. What I'm about to write is totally my own opinion about what happened / my own interpretation, and I'm actually struggling to work out how to word what I'm trying to say here... but at a very high level, things sort of went like this:

The original trailer came out. A lot of people made an outcry about it clearly not being the Dante they know/love. A lot of other people raised valid concerns about potential gameplay changes etc. The press picked up on the outcry, but only covered it at the simplest level (mainly the white hair issue). Then it all went a bit mental-

People started arguing about there being bigger issues with the game than Dante's non-white hair, while other people argued that the people talking about white hair were missing the point. But the more these two things happened, the more it appeared to validate what the press were saying and so the more heated the arguments got. And the more heated the arguments got, the more it started to appear that Neogaf (and the internet as a whole) were just bitching about -- what appeared internally to the people that make the decisions -- basically nothing. And I think they started to ignore the entire community as a result.

I continued to read what I could online (which was becoming dozens upon dozens of pages daily, mostly arguing the two different sides of the coin) and although it was getting harder to find decent, valid arguments for/against what we were doing with the game, they did exist. Although I can't speak for him, I reckon this is where the reactions to the fan base from people like Tameem, actually came from: i.e. 'Screw the fans - we don't care etc'.

But like I said, there was genuinely good information to be had, but it was nearly impossible to be found. And even to this day, people still bring up the white hair argument ("Fans don't know what they're talking about - it's just his hair colour, dude"), but anyone who takes the time to really dig into things will find that, really, that was only really an initial reaction to the character design, which lasted days, at most. But because the community continued to argue and whine, all of the valid concerns got lost in the noise. Which is a huge shame, really.

I do feel that if the community had a clearer, more unified voice, more stuff that only made it into DE, may have been there at launch. But we'll never know now, unfortunately.

That's pretty much how it went down.

It was really hard to discuss this game rationally at the time.

Also you have to realize that the DMC fanbase covers a lot of different types of fans. There are fans who like the characters, the stories/universe, the game play, the aesthetics etc from casual players who play the game once on the easiest difficulties to hardcore players who play the game for years. So the whole re-designed Dante thing affected some people more than others. It didn't affect me as much as the game play because let's be frank here... Dante has been re-designed to some extent in just about every DMC game. Every DMC game has some form of "this new Dante looks stupid, bring back Dante from DMCX". I wasn't even worried about the white hair because the clues were all over the trailers that he will end up with white hair in the end.

In the end the biggest issues with the game initially were the lack of lock on, lowered framerate and changes to combat. These things were fixed in DmC DE which made the game a lot better in my eyes. Some people have issues with the stories/characters still and those things can't be changed in an update but those same people love other action games with just as ridiculous stories/characters.

 

[GuardianE]

You know, it's funny actually. Watching the chain of events unfold with DmC has been... weird. What I'm about to write is totally my own opinion about what happened / my own interpretation, and I'm actually struggling to work out how to word what I'm trying to say here... but at a very high level, things sort of went like this:

The original trailer came out. A lot of people made an outcry about it clearly not being the Dante they know/love. A lot of other people raised valid concerns about potential gameplay changes etc. The press picked up on the outcry, but only covered it at the simplest level (mainly the white hair issue). Then it all went a bit mental-

People started arguing about there being bigger issues with the game than Dante's non-white hair, while other people argued that the people talking about white hair were missing the point. But the more these two things happened, the more it appeared to validate what the press were saying and so the more heated the arguments got. And the more heated the arguments got, the more it started to appear that Neogaf (and the internet as a whole) were just bitching about -- what appeared internally to the people that make the decisions -- basically nothing. And I think they started to ignore the entire community as a result.

I continued to read what I could online (which was becoming dozens upon dozens of pages daily, mostly arguing the two different sides of the coin) and although it was getting harder to find decent, valid arguments for/against what we were doing with the game, they did exist. Although I can't speak for him, I reckon this is where the reactions to the fan base from people like Tameem, actually came from: i.e. 'Screw the fans - we don't care etc'.

But like I said, there was genuinely good information to be had, but it was nearly impossible to be found. And even to this day, people still bring up the white hair argument ("Fans don't know what they're talking about - it's just his hair colour, dude"), but anyone who takes the time to really dig into things will find that, really, that was only really an initial reaction to the character design, which lasted days, at most. But because the community continued to argue and whine, all of the valid concerns got lost in the noise. Which is a huge shame, really.

I do feel that if the community had a clearer, more unified voice, more stuff that only made it into DE, may have been there at launch. But we'll never know now, unfortunately.

I think that's accurate, and I appreciate your perspective looking at it from the other side. As a fan, it's difficult to maintain rationality when talking about the potential destruction of the classic series, and quite frankly there was just a lot of white noise in the reactions. Insults were slung from games journalists, and cherry picking extreme examples of fan dissent. And there were extreme fans that I'm sure made threats over Twitter and Youtube comments, which is certainly unacceptable.

"White hair lol", while a superficial issue, is still an issue for some people. It shouldn't be used in any real objective debate over value, but it could be a reason why someone wouldn't spend money on a game. And that's perfectly valid. A person should be allowed to spend their hard earned money on what they choose to, and it was games journalists to demonized consumers for making that choice.

And while I'm sure it was frustrating to read that feedback and uproar, Tameem did himself a severe disservice by saying "screw the fans." It only ended up exacerbating the issue, in my mind, and left a lot of ideas that no one picked up on.

I maintain that all the voices, however vitriolic, were important. If people were empassioned to act irrationally, it's because the classic series was something important to them. After all, DMC is a series worth fighting for, and Itsuno has gone on record stating that DmC would have been the de facto series moving forward should it have been met with success. This would have left the classic series to something like mobile games and spinoffs... a worst case scenario in my mind. So, while I empathize with trying to sift through the white noise to find usable feedback, I can't help but believe that the fan reaction was necessary and important.

But at the end of the day, the direction wasn't your call. And I'm sure (I hope) the dev team was divided on it as well. And I'm sure Capcom was divided on it. The game ended up creating a lot of tension and division among people that supported this series on both the development side and the consumer side. I'm glad that you were able to learn a lot from the experience, and that you'll be able to funnel that experience into whatever future projects you have.

 

[direct_quote]

In the end the biggest issues with the game initially were the lack of lock on, lowered framerate and changes to combat. These things were fixed in DmC DE which made the game a lot better in my eyes. Some people have issues with the stories/characters still and those things can't be changed in an update but those same people love other action games with just as ridiculous stories/characters.

I think my concern more or less about DmC was that it was just retreading previous DMC games in terms of mechanics and story. The game certainly added some new mechanics to DMC like dodge permanently being one button (and dodge offset for demon dodge), and added more emphasis on air combat with angel and demon pulls, but it was basically NT figuring out how to make a DMC game from Itsuno and Co. I really wanted to see an evolution of DMC combat and mechanics and not a retread (or attempt to retread). And possibly see an advancement in AI for the DMC series, instead of most enemies being combo fodder.

 

[TheAssist]

It's fine.

It just shouldn't have existed at the expense of the original series.

the original series probably wouldnt exist anyway.

 

[A.Romero]

Have it on my backlog with the DLC too but need to find the time. Plus, I still don't know if I should play it in English or Spanish as Danté, el Exterminador de Demonios.

El idioma original es usualmente mejor. Además este juego es particularmente gracioso en los diálogos.

Only in neogaf a casual lttp thread ends up visited by a dev and provides lots of useful information.

I'm amazed and makes me appreciate the game even more.

Thanks for the contributions!

 

[Seyavesh]

Dante. It's always Dante for me. Developing DmC / DE I gained a big appreciation for Vergil and I enjoyed playing Nero a lot in DMC4, but for me it was always Dante. He's still one of my favourite characters ever. But for me, I don't actually want to see his complexity raised any further (reduced if anything). I'm not in the god tier of players that make these combo videos and, although I've 100%'d (all achievements) DMC 1, 2, 3, 4, DmC and DE, I did so by sticking to (mainly) Sword Master and Rebellion when playing DMC4. I just can't (and don't have the interest) in going to the level required to master Uncle Dante. Despite the respect that I have for the people who can really show off with Dante, the more biased towards the hardcore players the game becomes, the less appealing it becomes to me.

i'm curious if you think having that level complexity is irreconcilable with having appealing gameplay for folks who don't dive deep into the game's mechanics- i kinda get that vibe with the last sentence there and am wondering if i'm reading that right.

it's one of the things that i think dmc3 did extremely well- even with added style switching (via a mod) the inherent strength of the styles by themselves makes it so that there's not a requirement to really feel as if you need to make the most out of style switching while also maintaining the depth and complexity that defines the DMC series combat (arguably even moreso than 4)