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 DmC
E 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.