Darkwatch: Interview with the Vampire Cowboy
PS2
Developer: Guerilla | Publisher: SCEA | Release Date: Fall 2004 |
Jericho Cross has "adult relationships" with the two ladies in his life--Tala and Cassidy. Kinky.Gamestar: So how did you guys come to decide on 1879 as the year in which the game is set?
Paul O'Connor: That's a really interesting period, but we didn't want to set it so far ahead that we couldn't do a sequel, and at the same time we didn't want to set it too early; in the 1820's or the 1849 gold rush because the themes haven't been developed, and it would be hard to justify the technology in the game. Darkwatch technology is well advanced of historical technology, but you don't want to stretch it too far.
GS: There are some vehicles that you can control I gather?
PO: In Darkwatch tech, you have weapons with high rates of fire, bigger ammunition capacities, steam wagons... you get to pilot a steam wagon, which is actually an internal combustion engine. It's a fast dune buggy-like car. You have specially armored trains, secret bases around the West. So you can see that the Darkwatch technology is in excess of the actual technological timeline might be, but from 1879 to 1920, the era tech isn't as great a leap.
Chris Ulm: We justify it because they're on diverging paths. Darkwatch is dealing with vampires--and they're used like buffalo. They use the undead elements, their tomes and so forth, so the tech is infused with mysticism.
GS: So they use the vampire skin for armor and things like that? CU: Exactly. And for the Coyote Steam Wagon they use the vampire bones, so that's how we were able to justify this higher octane crazy engine.
GS: So it's really a parallel universe.
CU: Yeah.
PO: And if Darkwatch is as successful as we hope it will be, we have a background figured out from the origins in pre-Roman times to the near future, so we can tell stories about Darkwatch from all eras, but The West was where we wanted to start. It's a great place for a shooter, it's underdeveloped as an environment, it accepts the horror elements we wanted to put in due to the isolation. It's a great place for a man alone with a gun.
GS: But it originally started out as a more pure Western game?
CU: When we first started Sammy Studios, there were three different ideas that we were playing around with in the very early stages, and one of them was a straight Western about a ne'er-do-well train robber named... (laughs)
PO: Chaz Bartlett.
CU: Yeah, Chaz Bartlett. And it's still deep in the code, so you can still see things calling out for Chaz because that was the original name for the character. It looked more like something from Pixar in the earliest derivatives of the project. What happened is as we developed it more, we wanted to go in a darker direction and we also wanted to make sure that the gameplay was closely tied into the story, and we started finding all kinds of opportunities like vampire powers: vampire jump, vampire sight?so the story and the gameplay stated working together towards a much darker direction. And when Paul came on board, it took another leap and that's where we got the name Jericho Cross.
PO: It got really dark at that point. What we tried to do is get the character and story in line with the player expectations. So, the original character design for Chaz Bartlett was kind of an Eastern dude who was a card cheat. He was like Maverick [a TV show later remade movie starring Mel Gibson]. He wasn't very good with his gun. He kind of talked about himself being the fastest gun in the East, and when he came out West was a fish out of water. And if we were doing a movie, that would be a great place to start; with a character that's been bitten and transformed into this monster. But we thought that's kind of orthogonal to what a player is going to want in terms of their experience. Are we going to say that you're this kind of incompetent, vaguely bumbling sort of comic relief character and put you in this game when you're running around with a thunderbolt in your hands and you're killing things, and you're powerful and potent? We said, "Why are we going to fight against that? Let's get these two vectors lined up.? That caused us to both correct the action direction and bring the character in line.
CU: That's kind of the way development works here. We wind up going around starting with some initial conceptions and then start fine tuning it. And the one thing I really like about Jericho is he's got a really deep back story. We know the character well.
PO: We had that initial back story for Chaz and that did us fine for the first three to six months, but nobody got hung up on it. And then as story elements fit, you enhance them, and if they don't fit, you throw them out or rework them. It's organic. No one section dominates the other.
GS: So aside from the Western theme, how are you going to try to distinguish Darkwatch from the other vampire games that have come out?
CU: Well, he's a vampire outlaw. In most vampire games you deal with just being a vampire and those abilities. It's sort of "enough" to be a vampire. In our game he's got a technological and a gunslinger aspect, so we've got all these things working together to make this very potent outlaw eternal killer.
GS: Earlier, you mentioned in passing the open-endedness of the game. How does success or failure, good decision or bad decision, affect the game?
PO: We handle it on a couple of different levels. On the lowest level, our system takes into account what your reputation is, so it will change the reaction of characters. Townsfolk may be afraid of you or they may look upon you as a savior at a given time depending on your rep.
GS: So, they'll help you or not?
PO: Yeah, run in fear, or alert the town watch, or give you clues or even support. One level up from that we've got branching content, so there will be moments in the game where you'll have to chose between being a good guy or a bad guy. There's one sequence where the sun is coming up, and you have limited powers in daylight, although the full light of noon could kill you. Your powers are already diminished, the bad guys are chasing you, and your bad inner nature is saying let's go find a cave and hide, but your good side is saying there are some Darkwatch agents out there that are under attack and they need help, so you need to make a choice at that point: are you going to save your own skin, or are you going to be a hero and help your buddies? Those choices have lasting influence in the game.
On the next level up from that, we've got a system built in that judges your reputation based on how you, as a vampire, choose to feed. You go through the game absorbing blood clouds from dead enemies, and those power up your abilities like stealth. But there are also times when you come upon innocent blood and that can excite a bloodlust in you that confuses your reason and causes your sanity to start draining away. If you lose that struggle, you become a creature of the villain, of Scourge, the creature that bit you to begin with.
It's a very personal experience because you have to get in close to them, grapple with them, and feed off their bodies. The choices you make when the chips are down determine whether you're good or evil, and that affects the whole spectrum of powers that you can get. There are quote-unquote "good vampire" powers and "evil vampire" powers.
GS: Can you give an example?
PO: In the early stages there's a stealth power and a freeze time power. With the freeze time power you can move through the world with some kind of discretion and decide who you're going to kill and who you're going to save. Invisibility is a little sneakier, and they both build to different climaxes. So, the way the system is set up is that at any given time during the game, the player can get a little bit of one side, or a little bit of the other, or they can explore one trend all the way to its conclusion and the ultimate powers at the end of it. But you won't be able to see all the powers for both sides in a given game.
CU: What we tried to do, is when you think about the reputation system, you think about adding that level of RPG to a shooting game. We didn't want to have a true RPG engine because that's very slow paced, kind of "talk to everybody." We wanted to keep the pace really fast, so it's all tied in, from the game player?s standpoint, to what kind of powers you can use in the game. The enemies in the game have different vulnerabilities. What powers you have ultimately become kind of a game choice: Do I use this power, or that power? Do I try to melee, or do I use my vampire jump? We're trying to give the player a lot of interesting choices.
PO: We want to have you chose between two good things. That's hard, right? So, even though we characterize things as good and evil... it's not a case of punishing you for going evil and rewarding you for doing good. While we as creators have a point of view about what is right and wrong, the game is morally ambiguous in that it allows the player to make that decision.
CU: You want to eat everybody in sight? More power to you, but you're not going to get the "good" powers. But there's also some replayability in that you can go through and try it from the other point of view.
PO: And this ties into the theme that Jericho Cross is a bad man, an outlaw at the beginning of the game, and he has every incentive to get worse, but you can also go on a path of redemption.
GS: Let's talk a bit more about the mature nature of the game story. Obviously there's plenty of violence because it's a shooting game.
PO: There are also adult relationships, frankly, between your character Jericho and two women in his life. There's Cassidy Sharp who's a Darkwatch agent, and there's Tala, who's also a Darkwatch agent when you meet her, but who has a lot of her own ambitions, and isn't always on the level with you.
Jericho does have a sexual relationship with one of the characters. What we're doing isn't pornographic, it's not smirky, it's not prurient, it's there because it's part of the story, and the sequence where Jericho has this "night of passion" has lasting consequences because of what happens to her. And that's something you have to deal with in the latter half of the game. Likewise, yeah, there is violence and bloodshed and death, but that's something that the player determines the level that they want to indulge in. And there's dismemberment and blood clouds and the rest of these things, but we confine that to our undead characters. The player can be cruel to the human characters if he wishes, but that's something that we don?t overtly reward.
So even though we're doing a mature content game, we didn't see any sense in doing a "soft M" (ESRB rating). It made no sense at all to make a game that aimed at the teen market and slipped into M because of one or two pieces of mature content. Even though we're doing a hard M, an adult game, we're doing it with what we feel is taste and restraint, and using those story techniques where it's appropriate, and where it's not appropriate, we don't do it. So it's not really the equivalent of R-rated entertainment.
CU: Our test is always, whether we're doing a gameplay feature, mechanic, special effect, or particular movie, is, is it really necessary to tell the story that we want to tell? And in the case of The Night of Passion sequence, it's critical because it leads to the events that conclude the game.
PO: Our market is 18 and older. That's who this game is intended for and in addition to all the other risks we're taking with Darkwatch: we're splicing genres, we're a new company, we're doing a multiplatform release, we're doing an original property, and we're also saying we're doing a game that's intended for the adult market because our understanding is that there are a lot more adults playing PS2s and Xboxes than there are kids. And we hope that they respond to content that's made for them.
CU: And the other thing to is looking at what is happening with pop culture with a show like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, it's the same thing. They have adult relationships that are within the construct of the story and that are very important to all the characters. It's not just about her beating up vampires. Same thing here, it's not just about Jericho Cross beating up vampires.
GS: How do all these plot themes, the setting, and game mechanics, fit into the graphic design in the game?
Farzad Varahramyan: In the DNA statement, we really tried to figure out who these guys were, and that would help us determine the visuals, for example, is the Darkwatch as vicious and as cruel as the vampires that they're hunting? So, for example, if they catch a vampire, they're going to use it like the Native Americans used the buffalo: every part. They're going to flay the skin off and use it for armor and grind the bones for fuel. They'll use the vampires' optics for nightvision. Stuff like that.
We also wanted to make sure that our game had a very distinctive look and had a lot of sex appeal to it in the characters, but also in the weaponry, costumes, and machinery. For gameplay reasons, you don't want to be shooting a six shooter pistol because you'll be reloading every four seconds, so all the Darkwatch weapons have multiple magazines built-in. Our pistol, for example, our standard weapon, blows a cartridge that has four tumblers, so every time you finish firing six shots, the whole tumbler gets ejected and replaced by another. That's a gameplay reason, but it also allowed us to create a very interesting weapon. All of the Darkwatch weapons are to dispatch vampires and the undead so they all have related or bludgeoning tools for close-in combat.
CU: When the game begins, the West is basically a "normal" West, though there's an undercurrent of mystical aspects that have been going on. The Darkwatch has been keeping it in check for a number of years. And then, kind of your fault, you release this vampiric creature named Scourge, and that sets off a whole pulse wave of evil. Graves empty out.
PO: The Hellion is actually a character that the Darkwatch constructed, sort of like a Frankenstein character, that is constructed in the labs using undead flesh stitched together for their own purposes. The Darkwatch has recently decided to start fighting evil with evil. It's their corruption and their downfall in a lot of ways.
CU: It shows in their vehicles and weapons, they don't look like typical good guys out to save mankind. They have taken on some of the persona of the things they are fighting against.
FV: That was the challenge; how much of the gothic aspect in Darkwatch do you mix in with the Western element, still keep it a Western, but have the horror?at the same time it gives us a lot more freedom. We're not tied down?it gave us an outlet to tap into that fantasy side.
Just looking at the rudimentary demo, it became obvious that as artists we will not be able to hide behind the tech anymore. We're going to have the polys, we're going to have the texture maps, and the lighting tools to create really beautiful worlds.
[WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW!]
GS: Let's get more into the plot. So there's a train wreck, Cross is bitten by the vampire Scourge, but why is Cross allied with the Darkwatch?
PO: You need the agents to help you track down Scourge, and in return you'll basically be their personal assassin. But it's an uneasy relationship, and after going off on a couple of missions with your partner Tala, you come back from a particularly disastrous mission, that wasn't your fault, but they blame you nonetheless, and the leader of the Darkwatch, Cartwright is chewing you out in his office.
GS: So Tala becomes a shoulder for Cross to lean on, in essence, and she seduces him. Did I see her cut her own throat?
PO: She uses her nail to draw the blood out of her throat, which causes Cross to bite her, and as a consequence she inherits some portion of his power. And the very next thing that happens in our story is that you wake up the morning after that and the Darkwatch Citadel is under attack. Now that she's gotten what she wants from you, she betrays the Darkwatch from within, and all hell breaks loose. But what you find going forward is that in a lot of ways, she's pursuing the same things you are, she's just gong about it in her own selfish way. You can continue to be her ally and follow her path if you want, or you can view her as an enemy. That's up to the player. Again, there's this adult relationship between the two of them and as a consequence of that is now this woman has been changed, she's been transformed, you've let a potentially very evil thing loose and it's your responsibility, what are you going to do about it?
PO: We come into their lives as Jericho, they're not princesses to be rescued. Cassidy is an enormously capable partner; she's a better fighter than you are initially. She was orphaned at a young age by vampires, raised as a ward of the Darkwatch, convinced that she needs to be better than any other agent, she's the A student.
CU: It's Betty and Veronica.
PO: Tala is kind of the biker girl. She's into adventure for its own sake, and power for her sake, and she doesn't particularly care if she succeeds by fair means or foul. There are attractive qualities about both of them; there are drawbacks about both of them.
CU: That's where we try to personalize good and evil in both these characters. And you as the player have that choice. Jericho himself is a bit of a cipher, and if this were a movie we'd have more to say because it would be all about him, but really a game is all about the player.
PO: I know when he was born, I know where he was born, I know what he was doing during the Civil War, I know why he became an outlaw, when he came West. We know why he's vulnerable to women in distress... those things are all part of his character and the story, but we hope to express them through the actions in the game rather than clobbering you over the head with a back story.
