Enslaved: Odyssey To The West Interview

01 Jun 2010 at 13:19:10 by Tim McDonald

IncGamers' Tamer Asfahani recently got the opportunity to chat to Ninja Theory's Tameem Antoniades, designer of forthcoming third-person action-adventure Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Read on for info on the game's inspirations, visual style, combat, and the potential for a franchise.

How did you approach Enslaved, initially?

From the beginning of the project, what we wanted to do was look at everything we did on Heavenly Sword, look at the things we did really well – like the facial technology; the things worked really well – and the things that didn't work well, or that we wanted to build upon. So we've kind of listened to a lot of the criticisms of Heavenly Sword and I believe we've improved in every aspect, in terms of game length, in terms of the variety of gameplay, and we've really worked well with people like Andy Serkis, Nitin Sawhney, Alex Garland, and everyone's in it for one reason, and that's to make it an emotive experience that matters to you when you play it.

Enslaved has a very striking visual style. How did that come about?

I guess a lot of it's from our influences – things we like. Like, for example, we like colour. [Laughs] That's why Heavenly Sword was so colourful, and that's what Enslaved is colourful. But how do you make post-apocalyptic colourful? We watched a programme called Life After People, which imagined “What would the world be like if people disappeared today?” And it's amazing how fast nature reclaims our cities, and it's amazing how quickly the things that we think are permanent in civilization just crumble and go away. And what that gives you is an opportunity to make amazingly beautiful landscapes, full of colour – like Miyazaki movies – with a lot of nature in there, but then there's the threat of all these old machines left from wars long-forgotten that are still deadly. If you trip them, they wake up, and they kill you. Going on a journey across these landscapes is kind of bittersweet; it's kind of like, “What are we to the world?” in a way. There's no big ecological message to it, there's just a nice contrast.

The feeling of nature and humanity and industrial machinery and stuff - there's just something about it. There's more of a mood that I take out of it rather than the specific stories. For this game, the story's based on Journey to the West, which is a 400-year old classic Chinese novel. It's been adapted into Monkey, the TV series in the 80s, and all kinds of Damon Albarn operas. There's something enduring about that story, and those characters in that story, so we just wanted to add our own twist to it – our own interpretation.

How did your work on Heavenly Sword inform the decisions you made about the combat in Enslaved?

The combat system is very different from Heavenly Sword. Heavenly Sword was all combat – the whole game was built around it, and in this game, it's a component. So there's a lot of clambering and platforming, a lot of puzzle solving with Trip, and there's combat, so it's about a third of the game.

We wanted to make it accessible, and accessible doesn't mean making it easy. It means not focusing on having hundreds of combos that you memorise, but making every move simple to pull off. You've got your normal attacks, your heavy damage attacks, blocks, counters, evades, you've got a stun attack so you can stun some enemies and incapacitate them while you take out others, wide attacks so that if you're surrounded you knock away all the enemies apart from the one you're targeting. And then you've also got the takedowns. Trip can scan enemies for weaknesses, and if an enemy has a certain weakness, you can try and get to them first. Instead of going all-guns-blazing and taking on four or five guys at the same time, why not clamber around the back to that one guy who's got a weakness where you can rip off his gun, use that to then mow down the others, and be more efficient about it? Or get Trip to cause a distraction, flank the enemies... So at the base level there's a good core combat system, and on top of that there's a more tactical element. I think games should be as much about mental agility as much as they are about physical dexterity.

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