Doom_Bringer
Banned
Some minor talk about Lair and a lot of talk about history of Factor 5.
"There is picture that shows developers working and play testing Lair. They seem to be using the current Dual Shock controller, at least for development on the dev kits they have."
Silverthorn @ PS3 forums
THE ART OF LAIR
We had a chance to see the realtime demo of Lair running up close, and it's easily one of the most impressive displays of visual technology we've seen yet from a next-generation game. Most impressive are the individual beads of water you can see drop and cascade along the scales of the two dragons doing battle in midflight. In fact, even Ken Kutaragi, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, was shocked to see this particular special effect. You can also pick out muscles, bone, and transparencies in the wings. Actually, the entirety of the dragon models looks spectacular, as it should seeing as how Phil Tippett, the man responsible for designing the dragon featured in the movie Dragonheart, lent his talents to Lair. The models he created for the game were scanned in, allowing the game's artists, sitting in the room pictured here to add multiple layers of detailed textures to the dragons.
"There is picture that shows developers working and play testing Lair. They seem to be using the current Dual Shock controller, at least for development on the dev kits they have."
FACTORED IN
HOW FACTOR 5 WENT FROM BUILDING ITS OWN DEVELOPMENT KITS TO BECOMING A PREMIER PLAYSTATION 3 DEVELOPER
Moving on Up
The office building at Lucas Valley Road - which houses developer Factor 5 - looks fairly inconspicuous from the outside. The cement exterior conveys the sense that there are a bunch of accountants or desk jockeys inside, whittling away at stacks upon stacks of forms and other paperwork. Little would you know that it's quite the opposite on the inside, where a team of nearly 100 people - including programmers, artists, designers, and other talented individuals - is working on one of the most high-profile games for the PlayStation 3 launch: Lair. The crazy thing is, Lair isn't getting all this attention simply because of its subject matter or because of some license that would automatically guarantee it massive amounts of hype. No, Lair is high profile because Factor 5 is high profile.
This is the same developer that ostensibly got the most out of the GameCube hardware - or at least more than most other developers - with its very first game - a launch game, in fact, by the name of Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader. It's the same game that propelled Factor 5 into the spotlight and made the company synonymous with technical wizardry. How many other developers do you know who produce work that gets compared side by side with that of Industrial Light & Magic?
But it wasn't always this way. As with most developers, Factor 5's foundation was laid in garage development, when the company started out as Factor 3. "We started in high school in the late '80s. We wanted to do something cool on computers because we couldn't really do anything on consoles at the time," says Julian Eggebrecht, president and creative director of Factor 5. "This was all in Germany, and we started work on the Commodore Amiga. There weren't any games specifically written for the hardware - they were all shoddy ports. We met on the weekends and all huddled together in a living room and [got to work on these games]."
One of the team's first projects was a clone of the popular shooter R-Type, but it would quickly move on to more ambitious projects, such as Turrican, that were influenced by a number of other popular games at the time." It was partly influenced by Metroid, but the main influence for Turrican comes from Super Mario Bros.," Eggebrecht recalls. "In Germany, the Nintendo sold about 0.5 units [laughs], and I'm sure Nintendo wouldn't contest that because the [NES] simply wasn't aimed toward the German market. So, the concept behind Turrican was, why don't we take the jumping in Super Mario Bros. - which was so much fun - and merge it with an arcade game from Data East, along with Contra and Metroid?"
Turrican went on to be incredibly successful in Europe - so successful that Factor 5's publisher, Rainbow Arts, asked if the team could also do a version of the game for home consoles. "That was always our dream," says Eggebrecht "That's when we started to get [international] recognition, and around that time Sega was one of the first companies to realize that the European market was huge, but Nintendo didn't wake up [to that fact] until later. So our publisher asked us to do a Genesis version and a Super Nintendo version of the game."
Instead of taking the easy route of just asking Sega and Nintendo for development kits of their respective systems, Factor 5 did what any other technologically savvy developer would've done - it just built its own. "It didn't exactly cross our minds to contact them," says Eggebrecht. "But we had a buddy in the German secret service and we basically told him [to] hack it, and we came up with our own development kits. We wrote all the tools, the compilers, and handlers."
It's that kind of motivation and effort to really get to know hardware that's been Factor 5's hallmark, but the company really wouldn't begin to hit its stride until its relationshiops with LucasArts and Nintendo were well established. While LucasArts and Factor 5 were growing their relationship, it became immediately clear that for it to grow any further, Factor 5 had to move to the United States. The problems with staying in Germany while developing a game such as Rebel Assault for the consoles were not only caused by the time difference between Germany and the California-based LucasArts, but also by the massive amount of data being used for the game - a full 650 megabytes to be exact, which may not seem like all that much these days, but it fills nearly an entire CD, and back then the Internet just wasn't fast enough to transfer files that big back then. FedEx bills started to pile up because it was the only practical method to send builds of the game back and forth. It got to be too much, so LucasArts told Factor 5 to pack up and move on out to sunny California to continue its work on the the Star Wars franchise and build its reputation as a developer even more.
"LucasArts was nice enough to say, 'Why don't you transfer your whole company over [from Germany]?'" Eggebrecht recalls. "At the time, we only had 10 people - it's one thing to come over separately, and another to bring the entire company over." Fortunately, Factor 5 managed to get all of its equipment over in just two containers, but the days of less thean 20 employees and very little equipment would soon be over.
The Star Wars Years
The idea for the first in a series of Star Wars games from Factor 5 didn't come from some sort of divine vision or anything glamorous like that. Rather, it was mostly based around the idea of a fractal landscape generator (essentially an easier method for generating landscapes), which is pretty much the reason you would expect from a technologically oriented team. "We did a lot of research into that," says Eggebrecht. "They said, 'OK, you want to work on Star Wars, but be careful with it,' and they knew we wanted to do a game based on all of the [trilogy's] greatest moments."
LucasArts' response to that second bit of information wasn't as positive. The publisher told Factor 5 that no one wanted to play a game based on all of the greatest moments in the original Star Wars trilogy, arguing that those movies were too old for anyone to really care about. "So we kept Rogue Squadron as close to the movies as we could," says Eggebrecht. "But we used our original story and had a lot of back and forth between here and LucasArts, so the game came together really in the last minute."
Still, it's worth pointing out that Factor 5 wasn't all about pushing the limits of the hardware it was working on. The first Rogue Squadron game also demonstrated the team's ability to address the inherent problem with flight simulators - namely, how inaccessible they can be. Roge Squadron's simplified controls and flexible camera system opened up 3D flight games to an even broader audience thean Nintendo's own Star Fox games did, becoming not only a multimillion seller in the process, but one of the best-selling Nintendo 64 games of all time.
The sequel to Rogue Squadron would follow a similar path but on a different console. By the time the GameCube was announced, Factor 5 had solidified its ability to work with hardware more efficiently than most developers could. While still finishing the Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo game for the Nintendo 64 and the PC, Factor 5 was already starting to work on the sequel to Rogue Squadron. "We were dying to work on the [original trilogy] again," says Eggebrecht. "But work on [Rogue Squadron II] was totally clandestine. Nobody knew about it except for LucasArts President Simon Jeffries, and we got out demo together of the flyby [scene]."
It's this flyby of the Rebel assault on the Death Star that launched Factor 5 into the spotlight. People were so completely shocked by the quality that they compared it to work done by Industrial Light & Magic for the Special Edition versions of the original Star Wars films. It was that good. "We did the same thing," says Eggebrecht, referencing a picture-by-picture comparison. Even the special-effects team working on the films was impressed. In fact, in the DVD version of the original trilogy, many assets from Rogue Squadron II, including the Yavin hangar and several of the ship models, were used in the menu screens.
The Rise of Lair
Making the jump from the GameCube to the PlayStation 3 is about as drastic as it gets. While the GameCube is a powerful machine in its own right (as shown by Factor 5's work on Rogue Squadron II and Rogue Squadron III), its power was tapped fairly early in the console's life cycle. The PlayStation 3 is a different beast in that it will take some time to first get to know the system and then to max out its power - a challenge perfectly suited for Factor 5. But the developer had some opportunities to prepare along the way. "We were using the Xbox for a while as a transition to the new consoles, because the Xbox had some featuers that the GameCube didn't have because of the Nvidia card," says Eggebrecht. "We knew what the next generation was going to be about, and as a member of the development community, we were expecting the worst, but the dream came true. [The capabilities are] exactly what we were prophesying."
From there, Factor 5 went back to what it has been about since the beginning. Instead of waiting, the team goes ahead and starts learning about new hardware on its own before it is even really revealed. This more than likely has come in handy during the development of Factor 5's PlayStation 3 launch game, Lair. But there's more to making a launch game than just being first. It's an opportunity to make a statement as a developer - a statement Factor 5 is more than prepared to make. "The gameplay has to be very intuitive and accessible. Yes, we have a certain emphasis on graphics, but graphics alone won't do it." says Eggebrecht. "Also, you have to find a balance between physics and gameplay, so you need to choose your battles wisely. That's the thing bout launch titles - if you don't pick you battles right, [then you will encounter problems]."
Can Factor 5 upstage itself and bring a whole new level of visual quality to consoles? The answer is simple. The shift from the hard lines and metallic surfaces of Star Wars to the organic look and feel of the dragons from the Lair demo presents the team with all-new opportunities to reveal levels of detail that were previously unattainable on consoles. "It comes down to subject matter. There's a reason why [Lair] is what it is,"Eggebrecht adds. "that's where the jump in graphics is going to happen."
Ultimately, the decision to become a PS3 developer boiled down to finding the best fit. "It came down to talking to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, but Sony just [made the most convincing argument]," Eggebrecht says. "I'd love in the future to work on another Star Wars title, [but] working on an original IP is so much more exciting. It was tough finding a publisher, but Sony was totally cool about it."
Silverthorn @ PS3 forums
We wants it, We needs it, the precious...
