Vital Red Steel 2 Information

If you’ve been patiently waiting for the sequel to Red Steel since its release during the Wii’s hardware launch — then you still have awhile to wait. While waiting though, Ubisoft was kind enough to take questions from fans on their website forum. There’s a good amount of information to soak in. If you’d like to read the entire Q&A, click here.

Here are a few of the more interesting questions I found…

Why did you not continue the game where the Red Steel ended?

Well, it was certainly a tough call. The fans and the team had a lot of affection for the setting and characters of the first Red Steel, and it was certainly tempting to pick up where the first game left off.

However, as we developed our gameplay and art style for Red Steel 2, it became clear that what we were doing would work much better in a new setting: a setting that was built around this new type of combat we had built, and a setting that better fit what we wanted to do with the game visually.

So, we took a good hard look at what was really cool about the first Red Steel (guided by a mix of our own gaming tastes and our quite passionate feedback from the fanbase). From this, it became clear that the strong Asian-style setting and the mix of modern action gun combat plus katana-based sword fighting is something that resonates with a lot of people, us included, but that there was room to take the franchise in a new direction while still keeping that “Red Steel” core.

So, we started there. Then, we began to build what would become an entirely new world, story, characters, and visual style around those core concepts. What you see is the result.

What is more important to the dev team: smoother controls or better graphics/art style?

This is less a question of what is more important to the team than it is a question of what is important to the game. A first-person game with quick, exciting melee-attacks and precise shooting gameplay simply must run at 60fps, and that’s what we have. Thus, every decision we make is colored by the requirement to keep the gameplay smooth and responsive.

But, of course, we all also want the game to look spectacular. Paradoxically, by having agreement about the 60fps principle from the beginning has liberated the art team: it has allowed them to focus 100% of their effort on getting the absolute most they can out of that 1/60th of a second, instead of looking for other compromises. As a result, Stephane Bachelet and his team have developed a look that is exciting, suits our gameplay, runs very well on the Wii.

So, to the team, both are important. But we all know that for a first-person action title, gameplay comes first.

In the E3 video interview when Jason talks about the difficulty settings he says that beating the game on Ninja difficulty is going to be an achievement, does that mean that there’s going to be an achievement system like on the Xbox or is it just unlocking something in-game?

Well, in that specific case, I was using the word “achievement” in its literal sense of “having done something incredibly challenging”. I was trying to convey the idea that I want give players who can beat this game on the hardest setting a sense of real accomplishment, both in the sense of gaming and in the sense of physical motion and dexterity. Being able to swing a sword around with skill and accuracy is something a lot of people think is pretty cool, and I want our best players to have something to be proud of.

As far as an actual system of achievement goes, we like the concept of rewarding the player for pushing themselves to attain difficult goals, so you never know what you might see. Stay tuned for more info on that.