Just Cause 2: Lead Designer Interview

05 Mar 2010 at 15:10:53 by Bill Vaughan

IncGamers took some time out to go and see Just Cause 2 recently at Avalanche, and was lucky enough to chat with the game's lead designer Peter Johansson.

We saw Just Cause 2 at E3, and the big thing that we got from there was the vistas and the open-world, no loading times, no draw distances... how has that panned out?

At E3 we basically showed a part of a mission – actually the first mission that we finished in the game. We've been working on since then, filling the rest of the world with stuff to do, as that's been one of the main priorities for us this time around: to really make sure that the game world is just packed with stuff for you to do.

That was a bit of a criticism from the first game.

That was the most important thing that we wanted to improve. More variety, more stuff to do into the game, so that's why we put a lot of things in there and basically redesigned the mission structure  completely to give you, as a player, more freedom to work out your own path through the game. That's been a really important area.

The open-world genre this year seems to be a big thing – Just Cause, Red Dead Redemption, and a few more. What defines Just Cause 2 and what makes it different?

I think it's important for all the games in the genre to find their own style; their own flavour and their own direction, and we're happy with how we've achieved that in Just Cause. We feel like we've injected some well-needed fun into the genre. That's important, and we're not taking ourselves too seriously so we can have these insane stunts and a lot more freedom than most other games in the genre, so that's been an important area for us.

A lot of the focus today has been on the game itself, but also on the 3D gaming aspect. From a PC perspective, sometimes PC users feel like they've been short-changed with regards to games and DLC and release times. How important was it for you to get the PC community on board, and how important is 3D gaming to a PC user?

The PC version of the first game was a bit of a port, actually, so it maybe didn't get the proper attention that it should've gotten, but this time around it was important for us to really create and take advantage of the features we could when it came to the PC version. Of course, you have normal, fully configurable controls, and stuff like that, but if you have a high-end PC you can really make the game look even better than you can get on the console – if you've paid a lot of money for a high-end PC, that's what you're after, right? Of course, the 3D stuff is really cool. It's actually the first time today that I've played the final version of it. It's really interesting, so it's a great experience for me, as well, actually! [Laughs] Of course, it's still a hardcore thing, the 3D. It's niche. I think it's going to take a little while before it becomes a huge market, but it was important for us, as we want to be at the forefront of technology with our engine and it was something we were really keen to jump onto and try out.

Is the PC version built from scratch for the PC?

It's based on the same engine – the Avalanche engine – which we can port to PC, but then it takes advantage of the benefits offered by high-end PCs as well. Use of shaders, the view distance – we can get objects at even higher detail at longer distances. We can have higher resolution shadows as well, and of course we have the new Nvidia features like the water, GPU accelerator, and it looks really, really cool. Depth of field stuff... There's some really cool things there that will only work on PC. That's how our engine works: we adapt it to every game we do. We're not using the exact same engine; we adapt it for the game, and for PC we can adapt it to take advantage of the PC.

Will there be any dedicated or exclusive stuff for PC users that console users won't get?

Content-wise it's going to be the same.

You've presumably thought about DLC already. Will PC users be getting the same DLC?

I'm not allowed to talk about DLC stuff, unfortunately. We have the Premium DLC that you get from pre-ordering the game...

But you have got a DLC strategy?

Yes. We're going to offer a lot of DLC after release.

Is there anything in the game that you wanted to put in initially that you had to take out because there's no room, no time, or the technology wasn't advanced enough...?

There's always stuff like that when you finish a game, and I think that's really interesting with Just Cause, because it gives us as developers a lot of freedom to come up with all sorts of insane ideas.

You haven't answered my question...

[Laughs] I know, I was trying to dodge it! There are a lot of different ideas, of course. A bunch of ideas.

Just the one. The one that you maybe really wanted to see...

There's more stuff that we can do community-wise, with our online presence. A lot of people ask about multiplayer; we're not doing it for Just Cause 2 because we felt it was extremely important for us to make the best single-player core experience that we could, because otherwise there would be no use doing a multiplayer version anyway – people would just try it out and then move onto other games. I think there, we have an area we can improve, so we have a bunch of ideas. If I were to brainstorm a list, I could get a huge list in ten minutes which is really cool and which I think speaks to the strength of the franchise.

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