Dead to Rights: Retribution Interview

09 Jul 2009 at 17:27:34 by

IncGamers caught up with Imre Jele, Volatile Games' project director for the upcoming third person action sequel, Dead to Rights: Retribution.

Talk to me about Dead to Rights: Retribution. Is it a free-roaming open-world? I've had a bit of a chance to play it, but it seems quite corridor-y.

It is a traditional level-based game. We used ten levels, we put in a lot of small places which you can discover so there's a lot of replay value, but it's not a free-roaming game.

You play as a hard-arse cop with a dog?

Indeed!

So tell us a little bit about story. You've gone back to Grant City – why've you chosen to set it back there again?

We are very cautious when we talk about the story, because that's going to be a very important driving force for the players to go through the game, so we're going to keep our cards close to our chest for the time being. What I can tell you is that Jack Slate is a vice city cop, and in the first level he arrives at the scene of a hostage-taking, and he goes in, he is this hard cop so he's going to go in and it doesn't matter what the officer on scene is going to say - “You cannot go in!” - he goes in; he takes his gun, he takes his badge; he still doesn't care, he still goes in, he kicks some ass, he saves a lot of hostages, but while he's doing so he realises that something bigger is going on, and that “bigger” is a conspiracy against the whole town, the whole city. And throughout the story, his aim is to find out who is behind it, and obviously he's going to take them down in a really, really nasty way.

The storyline is obviously one of the things that has to be the driving force of the game, because you have other games out there that it's very difficult to compete with. Who do you think of as the biggest competitors to Dead to Rights: Retribution when you talk about the game, and in the kind of genre that it's in, because it's a shooter, brawler, kind of cop story-driven, personality-driven story, so where do you think that slots in, and what do you think is the appeal of the game?

That was a very complex question, man! On one hand, I don't think we have direct competition. Which is great! I can tell you, it's fantastic. We don't have any other game which is using the same kind of gameplay – combining hand-to-hand with guns in a way that we do, with an extra AI buddy, Shadow on top of it. No-one is doing it, so it's not like you can say “Oh, that game and this game are so similar.”

Also, from a story point of view, it seems that all games – I was making a joke about that, that everyone is going to Africa and South America – and we decided to stay with Grant City. We found that there are so many more stories to tell there, and we wanted to keep this gritty, neo-noir atmosphere. So I think that, again, there's no competition there. Having said that, though, if you look at a wider range of games, then pretty much every single action game is our competition, because we are fighting for the same customer dollars. So I think it's going to be a tough year for everyone, end of this year, early next year, but I think we're going to stay in there, because we have a system which no-one else had and no-one else has yet. And we're proud of it, actually.

And Shadow's very important to the system, isn't he? How often will you be playing as Shadow, and what will his roles primarily be?

Shadow has two major parts. One is when he's acting as an AI buddy. He's going to be with you throughout most of the story. Not from level one – we introduce him, because it's an origin story, how Jack and Shadow come together, how they start fighting crime together – so we just tell that story, but very early on he joins, and then from there they fight together. As you said we have sections where you can take control of Shadow. It's going to be around ten (maybe more) percent of the game where you play as Shadow. We like to say those sections are our driving sections; those are the moments when you get away from the normal punching-people-in-the-face, shooting-people-in-the-face kind of gameplay. When you play as Shadow, it's all about stealth. It's all about sneaking, it's all about taking enemies down silently. I see two guards talking, one is leaving on a patrol route, so I'm going to check for the other one, bark to draw their attention. He comes to check out the noise, so I can take him out silently, then drag the body somewhere dark to hide it. So, all those sorts of things. I think it's going to be quite a nice variation on the gameplay.

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