Devil May Cry 4

A few weeks ago, we spoke with Hiroyuki Kobayashi--the game producer, not the baseball player--about Devil May Cry 4, shipping next year for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. The first and third games were much-lauded, while the second was generally viewed as a disappointment. So with the fourth game in development, it was reasonable to wonder whether there could be a brewing every-other-game-is-mediocre problem (much like the Call of Duty games made by Treyarch rather than Infinity Ward.) But with Kobayashi having such games under his belt as the highly acclaimed Resident Evil 4 and the defiantly offbeat Killer 7--and based on what we saw recently--we think fans of the franchise will find themselves entertained. We asked him why Devil May Cry 4 features a new main character; what he thought of his chief competitors Ninja Gaiden and God of War; and how hard it was to develop for the PS3. Here's what Kobayashi had to say.

via newsweek 

The first and the third Devil May Cry games were the best received in the series, and a lot of people particularly like the third one. What did you want to achieve with Devil May Cry 4?

One of the first things that we decided when we were just planning out the game was that we would definitely have a new main character in the game. We definitely wanted to have a new hero. We also wanted to have this kind of like, changing of the baton or passing the torch; that you would be able to switch between between Dante and Nero in the game. So how to be able to do that in the game and how to be able to do that in the story was something that we had to think quite a lot about.

Was the reasoning behind having Nero as a new character primarily story reasons or for gameplay reasons primarily?

Primarily it was for gameplay reasons. I mean, in [Devil May Cry] one, two and three, Dante got more and more moves. It was getting more and more complicated and it became a little bit difficult for people who had never played the series before to be able to control him. So in order to be able to attract both new fans and people who were fans of the series already; so they would both be at the same starting point and both be able to enjoy the game, we felt we had to change and have a new main character.

The relationship between Dante and Nero, seems like that between an older experienced person and a younger impetuous person. In some ways, it reminds me of the relationship between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker or perhaps Solid Snake and Raiden. Was that deliberate? Also, since Devil May Cry 3 was a prequel, Dante was younger than he was in Devil May Cry 1. So in a way, it's almost like Dante and Nero are akin to the older and younger Dantes of the previous games. Is that how you thought about Dante and Nero for Devil May Cry 4?

Certainly as young characters, Dante in [Devil May Cry] 3 and Nero are kind of similar. Nero, at the start of this game, he does not have much experience. He's very much at beginning of being a devil hunter. The way he looks at the world is different unlike Dante who's a real smooth customer.

Nero's much less experienced and he sometimes screws up and makes mistakes as well. Compare that to Dante; he's definitely a veteran. He knows what he's doing. So there is definitely that relationship between them, between the old and the young; Dante the adult and Nero, who's really still a child. So one of the things we wanted to explore in this game was this kind of relationship that does exist in real life between the veteran and the newcomer. We wanted to explore how Nero would, by the end of the game, be able to take over from Dante and become an experienced veteran in his own right.

When you started showing me the Dante section, the way that he moves and his moves were very recognizably Dante from the previous games, did you use the same animation data or motion capture data from the previous games or did you redo it but have it done in the same way so that, you know, Dante would seem the same?

For the motion capture in the cut scenes, we've used the motion capture from Ruben Langdon, who also played Dante in Devil May Cry 3. So they certainly do look similar. In game, we have used the same facial animations as we did in Devil May Cry 3, but obviously with it being a different generation of consoles, we have tinkered with them and improved them to make them look as they should look on next gen.

Where did the idea come for Nero's sword, to have a motorcycle throttle in the sword? And will you actually be able to plunge your sword into an enemy and sort of drive him around the screen as we say in the cutscene?

You really can't do that in the game, drive enemies around like that. The reason we have that in the cutscene is because at the start of [Devil May Cry] 3, there's a scene where Dante hits a guy with a sword and surfs him around the place. So--

Exactly, that's one of my favorite scenes.

Shimamura-san [Yuji Shimamura], the director who also directed the cutscenes in [Devil May Cry] 3, he directed them in [Devil May Cry] 4 as well, and he wanted to do a similar thing where Nero rides around the enemy with his sword. So that's the reason why that's in there. As for the Red Queen--the throttle on that sword—actually, that idea came from a guy who makes some of the motions for the game, one of the motion artists. He had this idea like for a long time for a sword that had an accelerator or throttle in the arm that would be really cool. So he finally got to put it into practice this time.

So do you ever feel pressure sometimes when the people directing the cut scenes come up with these really cool ideas and it creates expectations in gamers, like myself, that we're able to do that, we'll be able to do that in the game but we can't. So does that ever put pressure on you to sort of well I have to figure out a way to get this into the game?

We do try as much as possible to make the cutscenes from things that you can actually do in the game, and to let you do things that are in the cutscenes in the game. But there are some things that we just have to give up and say, "Okay, we can't do this in the game, but it makes for a good cutscene, so we'll just do it in the cutscene. If everything in the cutscenes were just everything you can do in the game, it might be a little bit less interesting than it is now. So trying to get the right balance between the two is important, I feel.

In North America and Europe at least, the two other leading games in the same category as Devil May Cry would be God of War and Ninja Gaiden.

Yeah.

What do you think about each of those games individually, and what are some of the areas that you can point to and say—and I don't mean to suggest that they're identical--but where you'd say "Well, they do this, but we actually decided to do something very different?"

Those games certainly do come up a lot. And to be honest, I haven't played either of those games myself, so I can't really comment on that. I don't really pay a lot of attention to what our competitors are doing. But I do think that the people who make those games pay a lot of attention to what we're doing. Personally, I feel that our challenge is to create something that's more interesting then Devil May Cry 1 or Devil May Cry 3. They're the games that we view as our competitors and they're the games that we try to create something more interesting than.

Did you deliberately not play God of War and Ninja Gaiden so that you don't accidentally incorporate the things that they're doing? Or is it just that you didn't have time to play those games?

Well, I don't have the time to play a lot of games these days, so that certainly is a problem. But as a creator, I think it's best if you don't. If you play another game and you see something in it then you kind of can't use it anymore. So I think it's kind of best to keep your distance from that. Instead of other rival games, I prefer to get my inspiration from animated movies and other things like that.

So which animated movies did you draw inspiration from for Devil May Cry 4?

In terms of having the two heroes in the game--the old hero and the new hero--one of the things that we did when we were doing the scenario meetings at the start of the game was to look at different anime that had similar storylines. Two examples are Dragon Ball and Gundam Zeta; I don't know what the American title is exactly, but it's the first one in the series. We had a lot of discussion about it, like "Oh, this anime does this, this anime does that." So that was a bit of an influence on us.

Can you talk about the thinking behind the Devil Bringer weapon, both for grabbing enemies and bringing them towards you and using it to move through certain spaces? I'm also interested in how you came up with Pandora's Box for Dante, and how you feel it fits with the other abilities that Dante already has, since he's been building up his abilities over the course of what will soon be four games?

As I understand it, the idea for the Devil Bringer actually came up during the development of of Devil May Cry 3. It was an idea that director Itsuno-san [Hideaki Itsuno] had, the idea of being able to use this demonic right arm to do lots of different things in the game. But you couldn't actually use it in that game, because it felt a bit weird that Dante would suddenly have this demonic right arm. So that was an idea that was kind of kept over from that and then used in this game.

As for Pandora's Box, we always thought that having a weapon that would change into a bunch of different weapons would be kind of interesting. From that came the idea of having it as a case that changed form--that it would be kind of cool. And from that came the idea that it's Pandora's Box; it's something you can't see inside, you can't look inside. That's where that idea came from during the development of the game.

For the Devil Bringer, what was interesting to the team about being able to bring the enemies towards them? Did that stem from wanting to give the player more ways to continue to chain attacks or was there another idea at work?

With the sword and the gun, most of the attacks based on them send the enemies far away from you. Then you, playing as Dante, would have to go to the enemy to attack them. We wanted to give the player some more control over what they could do with the enemy. So with the Devil Bringer, you can control where the enemy is. You can lift them up. You can bring them up, bring them down. You can be close or far away; and even at far away, you can grab them and lift them up and do whatever you want with them. So it does add a lot of variations to the actions that you can do in the game.

For Nero and then Dante, how do you see the interrelationship between the different moves, close-up versus far away? What becomes the optimal way to play either character?

As for Nero you saw a lot of skills today, but he doesn't have all of those at the start of the game. It builds them up gradually as it goes through the game. So it teaches the player what they should do and how to create the balance right between what enemies he faces. As for Dante, yeah, Dante certainly has the four styles straight off. He has the handgun and the shotgun and a lot of different things that he can do. But by the time Dante comes into the game you've probably gotten used to a lot of the actions.

The other thing is that you don't have to use all of those different styles or all of the different things he can do. We kind of leave it up to the player. Do what you like with Dante, play with him the way you like, because you don't have to use all the styles in order to finish the game. By playing through it and then playing through it again, playing certain sections again, you can see how much better you've gotten and what you've improved at the game. We leave that up to the player themselves.

This game engine was used for both Dead Rising and Last Planet on Xbox 360.

Right.

But this is going to be the first game done for using this engine on PlayStation 3. What were the technical challenges involved to get this technology up and running on PS3? How does it compare to Xbox 360?

It's not a 360 engine. It's not an engine for the 360. It's the internal engine that we use at Capcom for next generation machines called the MT Framework [note: MT stands for multi-target]. That actually runs on PC. As you know, we did originally plan to have this title just on PS3, but actually the development was done on a PC, not on a particular console. So because it's all done on the PC--as  were the other two titles that you mentioned--it makes it very easy to move it put it on the 360 and use the power of that machine, or to put it on the PS3 and use the power of that machine, each in different ways. It's really pretty easy to do it, developing it from this PC base.

Excellent. Well thank you very much for you time.

Thank you.

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