TVGB: Now that ties in… well… it’s a little off, but you were talking about a game that’s ten years old, and so obviously you’ve been watching these games for a while. What, then, do you see further down the line? Do you see any aspects that are…
Eric Chartrand: I think we’re going to see a cross between MMO and multiplayer. Right now I think what we have is multiplayer games that follow the pattern set by Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament. It’s a sport. It’s a game where you log in, you’re blue or you’re red, and you fight to win. Even the progression that we have right now in Battlefield and in Call of Duty is still based on your score. You do well, we give you a grenade launcher. And this is good, this works well, but if we look at the way the social aspect is in MMOs, it works differently. Actually it’s the Civilization effect. It’s a Civilization game where you always have something more to do. You want to play more because there’s always one thing more to do. I think in the MMO of the shooter, this is where we’re going to get at some point. I don’t think it’s by a bigger warfare, it’s by, I think, more reason for people to be in the game, or to want to stay connected. You’re at work, it’s noontime, and you’ll want to check online to see what’s happening in the gaming world that you’re going to join back into tonight. That’s where we’re going to go, I think. I’m not saying that the larger the field, then it’s not good. What I mean is that if you don’t get that feeling that you want to connect at night because you have this and this to do. You want to do this objective and this objective. [Otherwise] it’s simply a sport. You log in for the match, and then you log off. But I think the implication of the community, the social aspect, wanting to be there, wanting be part of that experience, is going to mature a lot. And we’ll probably be surprised in the next coming… year. And I have plans for my own games (laughs), we’ll see if it works. But I know where I want to take this game [Army of Two] next, and hopefully it will go in a direction similar to what I just talked about.
TVGB: You definitely see signs of that in games like Brink as well.
Eric Chartrand: Yeah, I think it’s important. You will always get the Call of Duty, which is good, but at the same time you also want that part to get in World of Warcraft. Yes, you’re going to log in tonight at 7 to do Molten Core, and this is the battle… like the Call of Duty part of the game, but it brings everything else because you had to grind a lot just to get that sword and the money. You had to go there with a special quest with a friend and to do something else. And it’s all of this that we need to merge together into the shooter experience. Because shooters are a lot more fun than the button-based, luck-based combat system that we have in MMOs (laughs). So we have a lot more fun killing stuff in a shooter than fighting stuff in World of Warcraft. So why not bring the good part of WoW or similar games to the shooter space?
TVGB: I was also curious about the hardware side of that question. In terms of motion sensing and peripheral-based gaming… do you see that coming to the shooter genre in any way?
Eric Chartrand: For sure! For sure, but this is still in the infancy. I think yes if we talk ten years, twenty years in the future. The image of the future I’m not sure, because you see there’s still this debate between console shooters and PC shooters. The main thing where people on the PC don’t want to jump on the console is the lack of precision that they get when they have the controller compared to the keyboard and mouse. All of those peripherals [that are out now] kind of push you even further into the lack of precise control. And until we get on par with what we have in the keyboard and mouse, then why would you want to switch? It’s a competitive environment… everything that will help you be competitive will be there. So I’m saying were going toward there, but I’m not sure that the next few years will bring that experience to– will bring the level of precision with those peripherals so that people will say “I’m going to leave behind everything I’ve played before just to be in there.” But we are definitely going toward that direction, so yes… I see something.
TVGB: It seems like there is a lot of trial and error right now, like the new Tony Hawk game didn’t get received so well, but musically it seems to be doing okay.
Eric Chartrand: Yeah, like Natal seems fine. I think we can see something in there, I just don’t imagine pointing my finger at a guy [makes motion with finger] and saying “Bang, you’re dead!” and the other guy will then be dead (laughs). So then everyone will be running around going “Bang! Bang! Bang! You’re dead!” Do we’ll see… maybe. Maybe that could be cool. But I think shooters as compare to World of Warcraft… it’s an intense experience. You want to… what you usually do is you aim for the thorax and then you go up to the head, hopefully downing the guy before he’s going to down you. And if you don’t get the feeling, or the precision you need, you’re going to die constantly because of the controller, and then you don’t want to play anymore. So that’s why until we get the precision in controllers, there’s no way to go any deeper than that, because people won’t want it. But we will get there.
TVGB: Going back to Army of Two, I think one of my favorite things was just playing with my friend, failing a lot, talking to him and finding out what we did wrong. What I noticed while I was playing these multiplayer modes is we were doing that during the game instead of between rounds.
Eric Chartrand: That’s the core experience of Army of Two. I think people… We’ve been working on co-op games since 2004. The studio was founded around that core idea. I think co-op is not simply putting two avatars in a single-player level and then saying, “You just play together, side by side, two guns shooting and then you get to the end.” I think it’s much more than that. The co-op experience is about sharing precious moments with someone. Creating the setting for the player to decide on their own, improvise, going in one direction and then succeeding in doing this, but remembering doing that as well. For me, it’s much closer to a [Dungeons & Dragons] experience or tabletop game experience where you remember ten, twenty years after this experience you lived with players. You can talk about that, like you meet people of D&D and they’ll say, “Do you remember that game where we faced that monster? You did that… and it saved my life and then I was able to do this, and then we killed the dragon and survived.” Twenty years after you can talk about that.
Army of Two is about this. It’s about being able to create moments that you live through, that you remember, that you talk about. This goes through the communication. Plenty of single-player experiences are good because, yes, you have fun, see something good, but you don’t share. You look at it, you play it, and a few years later it’s like “Yeah I remember playing that game.” But if you go through Army of Two with a buddy, your best friend, then you’re going to remember lots of little places and little moments. “Do you remember when I dragged you behind cover and there were ten enemies and a sniper? Then I managed to revive you and we killed the sniper, but then I was shot down and then you managed to…” — those are the things that make Army of Two work. That’s what I mean when you say people… I think they don’t understand that to make a co-op game and just put two avatars in a single-player level… it doesn’t work that way. I also think that we’re still learning. It’s a new thing, but I think we’re getting closer to a bonding experience.
And that works in [the game mode] Extraction. Extraction is very different because it’s pattern-based. Enemies spawn in exactly the same place every time. You need to learn it, but by learning of it, you become a master of it. That’s the only way you can survive the sixteen rounds. It’s by repetition, but by that repetition you’ll say, “Next time, we’ll do it this way,” but when you say this, you know it’s going to repeat the same way. You know it’s going to happen the same way, and then you get better at it. It’s more like a ballet, and it works quite well that way. And that’s why, again, it goes towards having people talk about their experience, living it, and then sharing that experience to be able to talk about it later.
TVGB: Yeah, I thought you guys did a great job with Extraction. On that, it’s currently a bonus mode for pre-orders. Will it be available at any point to people who don’t pre-order the game?
Eric Chartrand: Yes, it will be available 30 days later… for free. This game has a bonus mode. We were not expecting to develop this. We were pursuing other roads when we found that this was cool. And we found that Extraction was a cool way to give to our loyal fans that really liked the [first] game. And we wanted to give them a little gift. That’s why it’s for pre-order, because we know our fans are going to pre-order the game. They’re going to get the gift. It’s specially wrapped just for them, so if you want to have it, you can get this gift by pre-ordering it. Otherwise you’ll get it 30 days later for free. And it will be available to everyone. So it’s not something we retain, it’s just something we want to give special people we like, or we know they like our franchise.
TVGB: One last thing I wanted to talk about: One of the ways I really enjoyed the first game was split screen. Just sitting next to my friend and being able to talk to him face to face. Are you still supporting split screen to that extent?
Eric Chartrand: Yes. Army of Two was built around the idea of split screen. The idea was to have the players sitting in the same room and be able to have this experience. When we talked about that in 2004, that was the goal. So for sure we’re going to have it for all the experiences, unless the console changes. But it’s in there in this one for sure. It’s our core experience, it has to be there. And not only that, but you can also play split screen online. Split screen gets rarer and rarer the more we progress, but ours is part of the core experience.
TVGB: I’m really glad to hear that (laughs)
Eric Chartrand: Yeah, we’re not going to cut that. We can’t it’s… it’s our game. It’s funny because the concept we had for the multiplayer was to “expand your couch to the world,” meaning that when you’re playing online versus, and [considering] you’re used to playing on the same couch with your buddy through the single-player campaign, that… you still need to have the same feeling of sitting next to your pal on the couch even though he is miles and miles away. So our tag phrase was “expand your couch to the world” for the versus mode. So basically, it’s in there, it’s ingrained in this concept of our game.
