Ted Price talks Resistance 2, new novel, and Resistance movie possibilities

GamePro talks to Ted Price, CEO of Insomniac Games, about all things Resistance 2, including a new novel and a possible film based on the hit PS3 shooter series.

How close is Resistance 2 to going gold?

It's very close to being finished; what you're seeing today is not actually the most recent build...we're hard at work back in Los Angeles finishing up, fixing the last few bugs, and putting some polish in before it gets shipped.

What would you say is the biggest improvement you've implemented in Resistance 2 over Resistance: Fall of Man?

There are a lot. But I think the thing people will really see at first is the difference visually -- we've had time to improve our engine and introduce some new graphic techniques that help us create more detail, more scale in the environment, and simply make the environments more believable.

What made the game most appealing to me when I first saw it at E3 was its switch to an American setting as opposed to the European-set campaign in Fall of Man. What was the thought behind brining the story onto American soil?

That was a big goal of ours right after we finished Fall of Man, the question "where do we go next?" The overwhelming answer was "America." Because for those of us who live here it's interesting to take some environments, see what we think they look like in an alternate 1950s timeframe, and then have fun with the Chimeran invasion...take America apart via the Chimera.

The Leviathan attacking Chicago was obviously the big tease you showcased at E3. Was that just a hint of a focus towards these types of large-scale set pieces?

There are set piece moments in the game, but that's the largest enemy you will fight in the game. Our goal, though, was to keep the gameplay varied. I think first-person shooters sometimes have the bad reputation of having players fight the same type of enemy over and over, so we wanted to make sure that fans of Fall of Man would be satisfied with yet more variety, new Chimera to fight, and a lot more pacing -- highs and lows -- that keep the game feeling fresh as they're moving through it.

Resistance 2's campaign mode features some larger-than-life boss battles. But the 300-foot Leviathan is confirmed to be the game's largest enemy.

Resistance 2's campaign mode features some larger-than-life boss battles. But the 300-foot Leviathan is confirmed to be the game's largest enemy.

Could we potentially see Chimera taking down the Golden Gate Bridge?

(laughs) There's a lot of destruction in the game, but I'm not going to go into specifics.

How about influences or inspirations? For example, did you take a look at last year's Area 51 title from Midway -- not a fantastic FPS, but it did have some cool aliens-on-American-soil moments?

We were already well into production when that came out, so we weren't influenced it by it. It was fun to see it, and see how they approached the whole "America under invasion" idea. But I think we were happy to see that we're two very different games.

The coolest thing about that title was when you were taking out aliens in familiar environments like trailer parks...

Yeah, we love that vibe...that whole "aliens in America" vibe. It's got a universal appeal, I think. I say this being a hardcore, biased gamer, so I don't know if it has universal appeal...I hope it does (laughs.)

Any other specific pop-culture inspirations you drew from -- Independence Day, War of the Worlds...any specific films or books?

Many of us at Insomniac are huge sci-fi and fantasy fans. We're also alternate history fans, so various alternate history books, movies, and any movie with aliens in it -- we've seen them all. But our goal is always to create a unique twist. When we came up with the Chimera for Resistance 1, the idea was to build a race that could continue to evolve, which is what they do in Resistance 2...there's this open ended aspect to the Chimera that we enjoy using to surprise the player.

And the story from Resistance 1 segues...

Seamlessly. We begin Resistance 2 with the ending movie of Resistance 1, so it goes right into the story.

Can you talk about the change in approach you've taken in telling Resistance 2's story?

In Resistance 1 the story was narrated by Rachel Parker, who was an intelligence officer in Great Britain, and Nathan Hale really didn't speak that much. The feedback that we got was that people wanted to know more about who Nathan Hale was, they wanted to hear the story from his perspective. So that's what we've done...we eliminated the narration, and the story's told exclusively from Hale's perspective. He also becomes much more of a leader and a hero in the game. He has much more authority, and he uses it. At the same time this answers questions about who Hale is, what's going on with this virus that he as, and it also answers questions about the Chimera and why they're here.

Storyline takes a front seat in Resistance 2's new campaign mode. The game is told through the perspective of Nathan Hale, not a third-party narrator.

Storyline takes a front seat in Resistance 2's new campaign mode. The game is told through the perspective of Nathan Hale, not a third-party narrator.

And this is all told through cinematics?

Either third-person cinematics where we are actively seeing Hale carry out various things, or it's being done real-time in-game...we have a lot of in-game storytelling as well.

Would you say you put more time into creating the story for Resistance 2 than for Fall of Man?

We took a hell of a lot of time with the story. We fleshed out the back-story even more, we spent more time in discovering who Nathan Hale is, and we also spent more time with the secondary characters, the Sentinels Warner, Capelli, and Hawthorne. Those guys all have their own unique personalities, and it was fun to develop those as well as create some conflict between them and Hale.

Was it a goal right from the start to create an entirely separate co-operative campaign?

It became more viable when we decided we were going to do eight players. We realized that you couldn't easily take an eight-player team through the single-player environment...it just doesn't work. Not only will they not fit in the spaces that are designed for single-player, but you've also got to have a lot more enemies on-screen to keep the players involved. If you fight against the same characters that you'd fight in single-player, you're going to have seven players sitting around kind of picking their noses, wondering, "What am I supposed to do?" So we were able to do this in large part because of the tech teams advances, and our ability to have a lot more sophisticated AI on the screen giving the players a big challenge.

Q&A continued on the next page.

Comments [27]

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jugghead

Wow Nate gets thrown from a building, through a building, and lands on another building, then picks up his rocket launcher like its nothing. Wicked.

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