Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 1
4/16/2009 7:17 PM | 7 Comments | Page 2 of 8
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Kahn: And we had seen strong early sales, too. That dichotomy was really weird, where some editors felt strongly about it, both negative and positive, but consumers in general were really having a ball with [the game].
Blackman: The reviews were really all over the map. We've sat down since and said, what are all the criticisms, and "So what are the real issues here?" The targeting, for example, was something that got brought up repeatedly in reviews. When we focus-tested, among mainstream gamers, targeting was never a big issue. It was always the hardcore guys who wanted more precision; they were the ones who were complaining. Of course the biggest complaint, and it's one that I agreed with, was that the game was kind of buggy. There were bugs in there that I wish we'd caught before we'd shipped. We patched them later, of course.
Victor Lucas: Did you find that most people finished the game?
Blackman: We did. We didn't want to make a game that was 40 hours long. We wanted you to be able to play it in 10 or so hours, and then hopefully replay it. So a lot of people we talked to finished it, yes. I think the story was a big part of that, too.
"When my hand emits a little blue cloud, you fly backwards away from me. Ready?"
Story-wise, this wasn't just a great videogame story; it was a great Star Wars story.
Jones: I appreciated the love story. I'm very attracted to Juno Eclipse. I have dreams about putting a baby in her.
Kahn: Do you want her number? We have her name and number...
[Laughs]
Jones: She's a great character. And Proxy's a great character.
Blackman: Speaking of Proxy, I don't want to name names -- you guys can probably search and find it -- but there was one quote that I absolutely did not agree with. I swear to god the guy that wrote the review did not actually play the game. We felt that way about a lot of the reviews, like they were just regurgitating stuff from other reviews. I don't know if that is prevalent or not, but it feels that way, and it drives us nuts that that happens. But literally there was this one reviewer who called Proxy "an annoying, jive-talking robot sidekick." And I'm like, OK, if you want to say he's annoying, that's fine. But "jive-talking"? Where did this guy get this?
Lucas: How well did
The Force Unleashed sell?
Kahn: I haven't actually seen a recent sales figure. But
Battlefront II and
LEGO Star Wars II have sold 8 million copies or so. And
The Force Unleashed has sold faster than both of them out of the gate. And it's still selling.
Narcisse: Something that few people know is that you were stitching three different technologies together underneath the hood of the game: Pixel Lux, Digital Micromatter and Euphoria. And, you know, the bugs did annoy me, but I kind of forgave them, because of what you were trying to do.
Lucas: And you guys don't own any of these companies flat-out, right?
