Month: March 2018

Many recent Ubisoft games have had you climb towers to unlock new sections of the in-game map. The company first used the mechanic in Assassin’s Creed, before later bringing it to Far Cry and Watch Dogs, and even The Crew. Now, with Far Cry 5, Ubisoft has poked fun at itself and the mechanic.

During the game’s opening, your handler–a character named Dutch–instructs you to climb a tower to activate an antenna. While doing so, he reassures you that, no, he won’t have you climbing towers all over the game’s fictional Hope County, Montana, USA, and that this is just a one-off. Take a look at the moment in the video above.

Previous Far Cry games have required you to climb towers scattered across their worlds to see what activities are available in their region. Far Cry 5 drops this mechanic in favor of more organic exploration: you’ll unlock activities and gain map markers by talking to NPCs and traveling past points of interest.

For more on the open-world shooter, take a look at our Far Cry 5 review-in-progress. Critic Edmond Tran has provisionally awarded the game a 9/10. “Despite some brief irritations and missed opportunities with its narrative, spending time in the world of Hope County remains absolutely delightful,” he wrote. “Far Cry 5 boasts a wonderfully harmonious flow to its adventure, with its smart changes to exploration, discovery, and progression distinctly bolstering the enjoyment of creatively engaging and experimenting with its spectacular open world.” Check out our Far Cry 5 review roundup for a wider view of critical opinion.

The earliest prototypes for Splatoon used what looked like large blocks of tofu that fired white or black ink. The next unsuccessful iteration involved rabbits. But perhaps unsurprisingly, Nintendo also tried using some of its existing IP while it was searching for the perfect characters to encapsulate Splatoon’s splashy gameplay. But it wasn’t any of the aquatic denizens you might be thinking of from the Mushroom Kingdom or Hyrule–Splatoon was almost populated by a world of Yoshis.

During a GDC talk in San Franciso this past week, Splatoon producer Hisashi Nogami (who you might recognize as the guy who comes out in the lab coat to deliver the game’s updates) dropped some behind-the-scenes knowledge on the making of Splatoon and Splatoon 2. He showed in-development shots of Yoshi in the game, as well as prototype images from even earlier character designs. You can see those slides from the presentation below. But following the panel, we also got the chance to ask Nogami a few follow-up questions, which you can read below.

This is just an excerpt from our full interview, which covered topics including Splatoon’s grim lore, the meaning of “dark Nintendo,” and why rabbits keep popping up in Nintendo games. You can read the complete Splatoon 2 interview here. The answers to the questions below were provided by a translator from Nintendo.

GameSpot: During your presentation, you showed an image of Yoshi, and it looked like he was in the game. With the rabbits and with the tofu, that was obviously a prototype; but the Yoshi felt like much further along. How far did you get with putting Nintendo characters and other characters that we’re familiar with in the game?

Hisashi Nogami: I think that option we were considering of whether or not to use pre-existing characters or IP came right around the time that we started to have doubts about our rabbit characters. We thought, “Okay, if not rabbits, then maybe we can consider these other characters.”

Of course, as Nintendo developers we’re aware of this stable of pre-existing characters we have and their appeal with players. It’s not that if we had found a character that was perfectly matched to the type of gameplay we were trying to create that we would not have considered going with it. For Yoshi, he can come in many colors, change his color; he was in this case more appealing and a better fit than Mario.

But then when you get that far and think, “Well, okay, Yoshi can change his color, that makes him suitable,” you run into the same questions. Why would Yoshi shoot ink or dive into ink? Is it okay that he wouldn’t shoot his tongue out or throw eggs like he typically does?

In that prototype, did Yoshi hold a gun or was he shooting the ink out of his mouth?

Well, at the stage we were considering putting pre-existing IP into the game, including Yoshi, we had already decided that this was a game where we wanted to have a large variety of weapons and tools for you to use in order to shoot ink in different ways. We were already pretty far along with that idea, so rather than just give Yoshi the ability to shoot ink out of his mouth in one particular way, we had him hold these weapons that we had already started to design.

One of the most interesting takeaways from Nintendo’s Splatoon 2 GDC 2018 panel was that early prototypes for Splatoon featured Yoshi instead of the now ubiquitous Inklings. But the behind-the-scenes information didn’t stop with that tidbit. Following the panel, we had a chance to talk with the presenter, Splatoon 2 producer Hisashi Nogami, about what it’s like to work at Nintendo, how Yoshi worked in the game, and even the meaning of “dark Nintendo.”

That’s “dark” in a narrative sense. The underlying story that goes deeper than the bright colors and happy smiles you see on the surface. And it’s that focus on the deeper layers that Nogami says makes Splatoon (and most other Nintendo properties) feel like they have so much depth.

You can find the full interview below, along with images of the slides from the presentation, which show off various prototypes in Splatoon and Splatoon 2’s development. While they don’t capture all of the anecdotes from the full presentation, they provide a visual summary of some of the cool development insight Nogami provided.

GameSpot: From the Splatoon panel I got the impression that you have a lot of freedom to ideate. It sounds like Nintendo encourages employees to come up with new ideas. What is your personal experience at the company?

Hisashi Nogami: I think it’s as they say, “With great freedom, comes with great responsibility.” [laughs] We start out by trying to create a particular type of game experience, and then we have to come up with a world, a look, a feel, that is best suited to that and expresses or help supports this game experience we’re trying to offer.

Something I’ve heard from Mr. Miyamoto frequently, and I also mentioned something similar in my presentation, but a game’s art needs to support its functionality. It has to help serve as an expression of that functionality. And so we want, when creating the way a particular world looks, to make sure that it’s not doing anything to hold back or constrain the gameplay that we’ve laid down as a base.

So, we actually have a reason for coming up with this style of creation at Nintendo; as Mr. Yabuki [the director of Arms] mentioned in his presentation yesterday, one of those reasons is you need to be able to say when you’re asked, “Okay, well why is this the way it is?” You need to be able to provide that answer to others in the company that you’re going to show the game to. And if you can’t answer that question yourself, then there’s no real path forward for you.

It may be possible to say that we do have this wide array of choices in front us about the way we want a game to look, or that we have freedom in terms of how a game will end up finally being. But what we choose is really carefully…criticized might not be the right word, but it’s carefully looked at. It’s examined and analyzed. We need to be able to justify the decisions we make.

Thinking about Splatoon’s early development, you mentioned starting off with rabbits and then saying, “Well, it doesn’t make sense. Why are they shooting ink? Why would they they disappear into the ink?” But rabbits seem to pop up a lot in Nintendo games. More recently, they ended up being the bosses in Super Mario Odyssey. And of course, rabbits appear a lot in other games, including Mario. Are rabbits a popular pet among the Nintendo development staff? What’s with all the rabbits?

[Laughs] Yeah, it is kind of curious. I’m perplexed by it myself. But when you think about rabbits, they’re something that people are familiar with. They’re cute and fuzzy. They are animals that can actually imagine being close by. It’s true that there are previous examples of rabbits in other games, and I guess this is something Mr. Miyamoto may have thought was an appropriate character for his games as well.

He understood our reasons for wanting to initially go with rabbits as our Splatoon characters–they are mischievous, and they fit the world well in that way. But when it came time to justify things like you mentioned with the ink, especially from Mr. Miyamoto and others like him, we got that feedback of, “Well, maybe there’s another option that might work better. This doesn’t completely feel right.”

I should stress that it’s not just that Mr. Miyamoto keeps rabbits. [laughs]

During your presentation, you showed an image of Yoshi, and it looked like he was in the game. With the rabbits and with the tofu, that was obviously a prototype; but the Yoshi felt like much further along. How far did you get with putting Nintendo characters and other characters that we’re familiar with in the game?

I think that option we were considering of whether or not to use pre-existing characters or IP came right around the time that we started to have doubts about our rabbit characters. We thought, “Okay, if not rabbits, then maybe we can consider these other characters.”

Of course, as Nintendo developers we’re aware of this stable of pre-existing characters we have and their appeal with players. It’s not that if we had found a character that was perfectly matched to the type of gameplay we were trying to create that we would not have considered going with it. For Yoshi, he can come in many colors, change his color; he was in this case, more appealing and a better fit than Mario.

But then when you get that far and think, “Well, okay, Yoshi can change his color, that makes him suitable,” you run into the same questions. Why would Yoshi shoot ink or dive into ink? Is it okay that he wouldn’t shoot his tongue out or throw eggs like he typically does?

In that prototype, did Yoshi hold a gun or was he shooting the ink out of his mouth?

Well, at the stage we were considering putting pre-existing IP into the game, including Yoshi, we had already decided that this was a game where we wanted to have a large variety of weapons and tools for you to use in order to shoot ink in different ways. We were already pretty far along with that idea, so rather than just give Yoshi the ability to shoot ink out of his mouth in one particular way, we had him hold these weapons that we had already started to design.

On the subject of guns, and I guess going in a more serious direction–Nintendo in general has such a playful kid-friendly focus, especially with Splatoon, which definitely isn’t a traditional Western shooter. But in recent weeks a big focus in the press has been on violence in video games and its affect on kids. In Japan and in Nintendo, are you having those kinds of conversations as well? What are your thoughts on all of this focus on violence in games?

As a game developer, I hate to hear that games would be thought to be capable of having a negative influence on society. Games are something that I feel have the power to have a positive influence. They’ve had a positive influence on me and my life as a developer, and one of the things that I see in my role as a developer is to create games that give people good experiences and have some sort of positive influence.

That’s how I’ve made games up until now. That’s how I want to continue making games. That’s not to say that other companies are making games with some sort of negative intent. I think all game creators are making games because of their interest in them, and because they want their games to be positively accepted and have some sort of good influence.

So the others may make shooters with more realistic gameplay. I don’t think at all that they are doing that with any sort of negative intent. I think that they’re proud of the things that they’re creating and want to put those expressions out into the world. But at Nintendo one of our goals, and I mentioned this yesterday as well, is to create games that can be enjoyed by as wide a variety of people as possible. To take on that challenge of making games that can be enjoyed regardless of age or background, that’s one thing that we’ve put a lot of effort into making sure we follow through on.

Splatoon is colorful and lighthearted, and in a lot of ways even silly, but the lore is surprisingly dark. In the trailer for the upcoming Octo expansion, that especially seems to have a darker tone. How will the expansion balance with the silliness of Splatoon?

This might be just sort of one of our particular traits as developers, but we start by creating this well-built exterior to our games. But I think that, in the worlds we create, we strive to also have interesting inner content. For example we started with the gameplay necessity of a character that could transform, and we wound up with these humanoid characters that can transform into squids and vice versa.

But then we had to answer the question: “Why would they do that? What type of world would they live in?” That’s where imagination comes in. So maybe it would be that these squids lived in some sort of far-future world, where humanity doesn’t exist anymore, where it’s met some sort of end. This was their world that they had evolved into. You think of things like that as you go along.

That ability to give this thing we’ve created an interesting inner world comes from the amount of energy we spend trying to answer that question: “What would their world look like?” And after creating the characters: “How will they live?” Focusing on answering those questions, it’s not that we necessarily set out to create something with darkness inside of it or with those darker sides you were mentioning, but with depth. We wanted to make this world feel alive, like it has purpose, and to make it feel convincing.

Just like real life, you don’t live every single day with the same attitude. You’re not smiling and laughing every day of your life. In the same sort of way, we give that feeling to our world; it’s not simply bright colors and fun times. There are variations in the emotions in this world that it feel more convincing and draw people in further.

We actually have a phrase in Japan: “dark Nintendo” or “the dark side of Nintendo.” It’s something the players have said, but I remember Mr. Iwata saying it as well. It’s not something that we’re spending too much time trying to make sure our games are edgy and dark, but that we want them to be believable. We want them to feel like they have heft and weight to them.

It’s something that hovers in the background in order to give characters that three-dimensional feeling.

We have the squid kids. We have the Octo Expansion coming up. Are we going to see anything more about the Salmon?

We think of the Inklings and Octolings as different, but they’re not so different as to prevent them from becoming friends. That’s something we can imagine. But the Salmonids from Salmon Run are pretty different, so we’re not sure that they’ll ever be able to join Inkling Society.

This is a world where humanity has come to ruin, and 10,000 years have passed. That said, we envisioned the creatures of this world as having some of the same impulses that they’ve always had. In Japan we think of squids and octopi as being…maybe natural enemies is too strong, but they’re compete against each other. They use each other as food sometimes, and we’ve continued those thoughts as we made our world.

Salmon exist in a, kind of, different world. They behave a different way than squids and octopi. So we’re not sure we see a future where they are able to join this type of society. That’s not to say we consider the Salmonids to be complete barbarians. It’s not that the Squid are the forces of good and the Salmonids are the forces of evil. It’s more that the Squids have their own society, and the Salmonids have their own different society.

Final question: Out of all of the star Inklings (Callie, Marie, Pearl, and Marina), who is your favorite?

That’s like asking me to choose between my daughters! I will confess and say that I fought for Team Callie in the final Splatoon One Splat Fest so…

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Spoilers for Pacific Rim Uprising below!

If you saw Pacific Rim Uprising over the weekend, there was probably one big twist that stuck with you: Charlie Day’s character, the lovable, quirky Dr. Newt Geiszler, turning out to be the movie’s main villain.

It turns out Newt’s drift with the baby Kaiju–a major subplot in the original Pacific Rim–had a negative effect on him after all, just as multiple characters in that movie said it would. In Uprising, we learn that he’s been working against humanity for years, building toward the simultaneous opening of multiple breaches and, very nearly, the destruction of the world.

Given what a major shift it is for the character, you might assume that it came from Steven DeKnight, the sequel’s director. But DeKnight confirmed to GameSpot that the idea to make Newt the villain came from del Toro in the first place.

“Charlie Day being a villain is also something that Guillermo had talked to him about when he was still involved, before he had to leave to do Shape of Water,” DeKnight said. “And Charlie was very interested in that turn.”

Charlie Day himself hinted at the twist in an interview with Crave back in 2013 in the weeks after the original Pacific Rim hit theaters, saying that del Toro “liked the idea of Newt becoming a bit of a villain in the second film,” although that was before they’d begun making the first movie. He added that because of the way the character turned out, “I don’t think he would want to turn him into a villain now,” so clearly he thought it wasn’t going to happen.

“I didn’t realize that [the idea was original del Toro’s] until I talked to Charlie,” DeKnight said. “When I came on board, there were three completely different versions of three completely different sequels that I read through, and I took a little bit from here and a little bit from there. I think in one of those, at one point, I want to say Burn Gorman was the villain. So there were different possibilities, and for me it just seemed like Newt was the perfect character to go down that path since he was drifting with the brains to start with in the first movie, and Ron Perlman warned him not to.”

In yet another version, the villain was the movie’s “billionaire industrialist” character–not Jing Tian’s character Shao Liwen, but the equivalent character in an early draft. But that was too obvious, and DeKnight thought Newt being the villain was more fun.

The director added that it also gives them more setup for Pacific Rim 3–“if we’re so lucky to do it,” he said, “we’ve set up this great thing where you have Charlie Day with things in his head controlling him, but Gottlieb, Burn Gorman[‘s character], loves him as his best friend, and will do anything to help protect him and save him.”

So there may be hope for Charlie yet. Read the rest of our interview with Pacific Rim Uprising director Steven DeKnight here, and don’t miss our chat with star Cailee Spaeny, our Pacific Rim kaiju ranking, and our Pacific Rim Uprising review.

Spoilers for Pacific Rim Uprising below!

Pacific Rim Uprising takes things in a very different direction from the original, leaving humanity’s future in the hands of a young generation of up-and-coming pilots. If you’ve seen it, you might have some questions.

How did the world get where it is in Uprising following the events of the original Pacific Rim? Why was it important to the movie’s director, Steven DeKnight, to hand the reins to the younger generation? How did Newt sneak a massive Kaiju brain into his apartment, and why did he think it was his wife?

We sat down with DeKnight and asked those questions and more. Read on for the answers, then check out our Pacific Rim Uprising review, interview with star Cailee Spaeny, and ranking of the series’ Kaiju.

GameSpot: So what’s the state of the world when Pacific Rim Uprising starts?

Steven DeKnight: It’s 10 years after the end of the first movie, after the Breach was closed. There’s been peace and world building, the PPDC has rebuilt from the ground up. So they’ve had a chance to redesign their Jaegers and their program. They learned from the first movie that Jaegers really are the best defense against the Kaiju, so they’ve been preparing for a possible second attack. And that’s where we find the state of the world when we open this movie.

So they’re not resting on their laurels.

No, no, they very much–there are people that believe the war is over, that’s it, they closed the Breach, it’s finished. And there are other people, like Scott Eastwood’s character, Nathan Lambert, that believe sending giant monsters to stomp on a few cities is not a tactical plan to destroy humanity, and they think something else is coming.

So one of the conflicts in the first movie was that the government was going to shut the Jaeger program down. Now the conflict is between the government, the PPDC, and the private sector, the Shao corporation. The PPDC has the base in China that we see in the movie. Are there other bases?

Yes, all over the Pacific Rim, there are multiple Shatterdomes and many Jaegers.

So when the Breaches open in Uprising, are they attacking the other Shatterdomes or just the one we see?

Yes, we only see three Breaches opening, but there are multiple Breaches all around the Pacific Rim being opened by the drones–spoiler!–and the plan there was, yes, the drones were very much like a Trojan horse. When they were delivered they attacked in kind of a Pearl Harbor style attack and destroyed Shatterdomes and Jaegers.

So that’s how we wind up with the final conflict being only the cadets left?

Yes. Jake and Lambert–John Boyega and Scott Eastwood–and the cadets are the last men and women standing. So that’s the reason the cadets have to go in action.

There could be more elsewhere technically, but the characters we know are also the ones that happen to be at the base where they’re developing the rocket jets that will get them there in time?

Yes, they’re the only ones that can intercept in time. There’s a little bit in the movie that talks about there were a few Jaegers left that tried to intercept, and were destroyed. And they’re on their own.

So why did you want to focus on this younger generation of pilots?

A couple of reasons. I wanted to advance the story forward with the idea that it’s the next generation of Jaeger pilots, and also explore the idea that when you’re young you make more intense emotional connections with other people. The older you get, your walls come up, and it’s harder to make those connections. And also just the positive message in the world today, that, you know, every generation says, ‘The youth is going to change the world.’ And I think it’s particularly relevant now.

We made this movie before what happened in the United States with Parkland and everything, but it really shows that’s true. And the message I really wanted to get across was that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter who your parents are, it doesn’t matter the color of your skin, your religion, none of that matters–anybody can stand up and be a hero. And that particular message really lent itself to this younger generation coming in and helping to save the world.

And you couldn’t have known how relevant that would be.

Exactly, yeah.

I wanted to talk about the twist with Newt, and the thinking behind that, and then working with Charlie Day on being evil.

I’ll work backward. I’ve been a fan of Charlie Day for many, many years. My wife and I watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia religiously, and he just astounds me with his comic timing. And getting a chance to work with him was fantastic, and he’s everything you would hope he would be. He is just the sweetest, funniest, most professional guy, always showed up prepared and ready to go. I remember early on when I met with him and had breakfast and walked him through what I was thinking–and Charlie Day being a villain is also something that Guillermo had talked to him about when he was still involved, before he had to leave to do Shape of Water.

And Charlie was very interested in that turn, and when I sent him the finished script we got together, and his biggest concern was to make sure that turn wasn’t goofy or over the top, and I said, ‘No no no, I want it to be really grounded, particularly in your relationship with Burn Gorman, with Gottlieb, that’s really to me the key of that whole turn. And when we shot it, we were both very much aware that we wanted to make it feel as real as possible. And Charlie just gave it his all. And when he saw the final product he was very happy with what he saw.

But for me it’s much more interesting than–obviously, spoilers–we set up Shao Liwen to be the villain, very obviously, overly obvious, because I wanted to misdirect into that direction, and then reveal that it’s actually Newt. Because I thought–there were previous drafts of the script, before I came on, where the billionaire industrialist–it wasn’t Shao Liwen, it was a whole different story–but where the billionaire industrialist was the villain. And from the start, it’s villain, very clearly villain. And also with Charlie being the villain, I think you get one, a lot more fun, and a lot more emotion, and especially setting up for a third installment, if we’re so lucky to do it, we’ve set up this great thing where you have Charlie Day with things in his head controlling him, but Gottlieb, Burn Gorman, loves him as his best friend, and will do anything to help protect him and save him.

So there’s room for him to be good again?

There’s absolutely room for him to try to come back from that.

So the idea to have him be evil initially came from Guillermo?

Yeah, you know, I didn’t realize that until I talked to Charlie. When I came on board, there were three completely different versions of three completely different sequels that I read through, and I took a little bit from here and a little bit from there. I think in one of those, at one point, I want to say Burn Gorman was the villain. So there were different possibilities, and for me it just seemed like Newt was the perfect character to go down that path since he was drifting with the brains to start with in the first movie, and Ron Perlman warned him not to.

That did kind of set it up. Do you think they had the seed of that idea back then deliberately?

I don’t know, but apparently Guillermo must have, because he told Charlie something about being the villain in the next movie.

After I watched Uprising, and I went back and watched the original, and it was like, oh yeah. It’s all there.

Yeah, it’s definitely all laid in.

So how did he get a Kaiju brain into his apartment?

How’d he sneak one in?

Yeah.

Those are always the questions. You know, I always go back to Empire Strikes Back, when they don’t have the hyperdrive up and running, and they find Lando Calrissian in a system, obviously not that system–how the hell did they get there so quick without light speed? It’s one of those things. In my mind, he took a piece and he grew it, so it wasn’t like he was carrying a full brain into his apartment.

Can you explain exactly what’s going on with the thing where he thinks it’s his wife or whatever? Does he have a romantic relationship with the brain?

Yeah, it’s a little twisted. Honestly, that first came about because I didn’t want to just throw this alien brain in without some kind of setup. So when Newt says, you know, ‘Come over and meet dinner, you can finally meet Alice,’ you know, there’s a bit of a thing–is it something weird like that? Is it just a name he gave it? And also, when he was inviting Gottlieb over, if you think about it, obviously it was to infect Gottlieb.

I was going to ask what his intention there was.

Yes, it was to bonk him on the head, hook him up, and get inside his mind.

Thanks Steven! Pacific Rim Uprising is in theaters now.

Far Cry 5 pits you in a hopeless scenario: trapped in the middle of the Montanan wilderness, in a community run by a charismatic cult leader, with no help coming. It’s a daunting task, but with a little help you can start dismantling the organization and picking off the fine salt-of-the-earth folks who want to murder you.

Far Cry veterans are sure to recognize some basic mechanics and tools from their previous battles against isolated despots, but this fifth numbered installment actually changes it up a bit. For starters, Ubisoft has abandoned its ubiquitous tower-climbing mechanic for more natural discovery from exploration.

The experience system has been similarly overhauled in favor of a Perks system that rewards you for completing certain tasks. That may leave you wondering which perks to pursue first, but that really depends on how you want to play. If you’re a survivalist, you may want to immediately go for the Harvest Master or Repair Touch so you can get the most out of your resources. Harvest Master is especially handy for making money, which can be more scarce in this game. If you’re more of a stealthy killer, try going for the Grapple to climb easily and Locksmith to access areas.

Check out the video above for our full slate of tips, including some other Perks to prioritize and how to make the most bang for your buck. Sometimes literally. Far Cry 5 releases on March 27 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.