Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 1
4/16/2009 7:17 PM | 7 Comments | Page 6 of 8
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Jones: Are there things you're simply tired of talking about, or being asked about?
Blackman: We actually got asked a lot about some of our older IPs, like Monkey Island,
Grim Fandango and
Full Throttle, and stuff. We were really focused internally on building the next big Star Wars game, so getting asked over and over again when we're going to resurrect those IPs was frustrating. I always wanted to say, "No, we're actually here to talk about Star Wars."
Some people asked us if we thought, maybe, that the Force was too unleashed in the game, and that maybe it was straying too far from the films. And sometimes, no kidding, people would show up and go, "Oh. So this is a Star Wars game?"
Kahn: In general, interesting questions are rare from journalists.
[Looks at Haden] Am I wrong?
Blackman: No, you're not wrong. But to be fair, there were also a lot of questions that I had hadn't been asked before. And that's always refreshing. I do think that a lot of the people who were sent out to do interviews with us were hardcore Star Wars fans, and they really dug in with the questions.
Narcisse: I remember, two or three years ago Adam, when you did that first big
Force Unleashed press conference in New York.
Kahn: November ... 2007?
Narcisse: The thing that struck me then was that you gave us the whole story.
Kahn: The whole thing?
Narcisse: The whole thing. And that stunned me as a journalist, because one, you never get the whole thing right out of the gate; and two, with a fan base as obsessive-compulsive as Star Wars fans are, I figured you'd want to hold onto the details. What was the decision behind that? To give the whole story, Vader's betrayal and everything, straight-up?
One beer down.
We decided that story and gameplay were going to be equally important to us. It's funny, because before I started working on
The Force Unleashed I used to have this comment when we were in meetings, and we'd spend an hour and half on the story and characters and only 30 minutes on the gameplay. I used to get really frustrated. And I'd say, "Look, you never read a review where people say, hey the gameplay sucks, but the story is so great you have to play all the way through." You've never read that. But you read the reverse all the time, right?
And I feel like, in some of the reviews that were hard gameplay, we actually got that. Some people actually wrote, "You know, there are a lot of rough patches in gameplay, but the story is pretty good, so you should finish the game just for that." So the motivation behind [revealing the entire plot] was that we felt we had the goods. We felt we had a story that was compelling. We felt we truly had a story that bridged the gap between the two trilogies. I mean, in hindsight, it probably would have been cool if we'd waited a little longer until we had some cinematics. But I think we thought that we had it, and we wanted to share it.
