Designer Diary: Legacy of Kain: Defiance, Part 4 at TotalPlayStation (by Riley Cooper)
- November 12, 2003
- By Riley Cooper and TotalPlayStation
"Lead Designer Riley Cooper sums up just how the Crystal Dynamics team went about crafting and creating Legacy of Kain: Defiance (out today)."[1]
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Legacy of Kain: Defiance, was for us, the team, a huge success. We delivered the most complete, and highest quality product we have ever made, and we did it within the time frame that Eidos gave us. We're actually going to be on store shelves ahead of schedule (today, 11/12/03.) That said, the development cycle, like all I've been a part of or aware of, was not perfect. Following I'll look at some of our big hits and misses to give a sense of how Defiance's development cycle went.
Defiance started with a less than ideal pre-production period. Less than ideal because of what we were able to take away from it after a year of effort. On the bright side, pre-production did help us to eliminate quite a few ideas. One prolonged experiment was giving Raziel hang-gliding like physics. This was fun in and of itself, but turned out to be too difficult to integrate with the rest of the game. In order to set-up the environments and camera for it to work, the spaces would have to be quite open and large, and there were not enough different setups that the gliding made possible.
One thing we were able to take away and build on from pre-production was our spline based camera system. We developed it's primary functionality and were very excited about the opportunity to present an LoK game cinematically during gameplay as opposed to just during cut-scenes. This was a win over the standard follow camera which always shows the world from the same perspective and the character from the same distance. In executing we were able to achieve the above, but found it to be a steep learning curve for proper implementation and quite a bit more work than using a follow camera. While we were able to achieve the more cinematic presentation of gameplay that we had hoped to, we are very interested in improving upon how we use it. Our realization is that the more planning you do for spline based cameras, the better they will be. They can't be thought through too much.
Defiance's story is one area where we improved quite a bit. The most clear cut example of this is that it has real conclusion. This may sound like an obvious thing to do, and it is, but the reality of integrating story as complex and particular as LoK stories are, has always been an incredible challenge. It impacts choices for art, design and code and sometimes in very fundamental ways. The reason we were able to succeed in delivering a very full story where we had previously not, involved some major changes. Perhaps the biggest was decoupling story from all places where it would not have a significant impact or resonance with other aspects of the game. This allowed us to create the game more quickly as every decision did not have to pass the particularly stringent story test. We also grew our team size, and with that larger team were keenly focused on achiving the goal of having a complete and still very intimately integrated story. This meant cramming more work into our tight production schedule even though there were many who felt that it would be too much for us. The fact that we were able to deliver is a testament to the incredible amount of passion each member on this team has. Without it, we definitely would not have come close to achieving the goal of every LoK game which is to have a complete, well integrated and satisfying story.
Another large choice we made was to revamp our combat system. We knew we missed the mark with Soul Reaver 2, but were also confident we could do better. Even so, at the end of our year long pre-production we were not happy with where we were. While it's not fair to say we started over at this point, the changes we decided upon were pretty fundamental, and ended up defining the combat that we shipped.
Our philosophy was to let the user create their own combos rather than having to memorize the combos we wanted them to do. This goal meant that if you pressed an attack button at the beginning of a combo string or at the end, the function of that attack would have to be the same: the lift attack that launched an enemy into the air at the beginning of a combo string would have to do just that at the end of the combo string. Without this the user would not be able to predict and thus spontaneously invent new combinations of attacks. Our goal of user choreographed combat also meant that combining these same attacks in different ways had to yield different enough results; otherwise there'd be no payoff to that choreography. Within these constraints we ended up with the three button combat language of 'combo-attack,' 'vertical-attack,' and 'projectile/throw-attack' (telekinesis.) Once settled upon, we simply had to tune the function of each to maximize the number of ways that they could be combined. These primary attacks along with the earned slam moves and special reaver moves made our high goal a reality: people really do get that feeling of inventing their own combos. This is not to say that we think our combat couldn't be improved - we very strongly feel it can be - but we are happy to have achieved this high goal.
Hopefully this gives you some sense of Defiance's development cycle. It was quite a challenge, as game development always is, but we're very happy to have shipped the game we did and hope you are too.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Designer Diary: Legacy of Kain: Defiance, Part 4 at TotalPlayStation (by Riley Cooper)
