Everyone Will Burn: Dante's Interview

In-depth chat with executive producer, industry veteran Jonathan Knight, who reveals what makes Dante's Inferno hot - and what he committed to on "day one of the project".

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Kikizo: We've heard a lot of reasons why developers can't or won't try for 60 frames per second. A lot of people say they don't think it's important, that the human eye can't really tell the difference between 60 and 30 frames. Which is bullshit, especially with a fast-paced title like this...

Knight: Yeah!

Kikizo: How did you guys crack that one?

Knight: For me it's commitment, frankly. Obviously there are technology concerns, obviously there are trade-offs that you make. But games are all about trade-offs. You're always making trade-offs, whether you're in a 60 frames box or a 30 frames box, on a PlayStation 2 or a PlayStation 3, a Nintendo DS - there's always a box you have to work within. And so what I said on day one of the project was "this is going to be a 60 frames game". We want it 60 frames on day one, we'll ship it at 60 frames, and if we ever drop below that we'll immediately fix the problem and get back to it.

It's really a commitment, and I think it requires the team to say "gameplay is more important than graphics". Graphics are really important too, and good graphics are really hard to do, and it's a big reason why people buy games. So you can't not do good graphics, but in the pecking order of priority I just put gameplay a little bit higher.

That's true of the combat system. I could have an animator say "well, the character kind of pops around," but when you're playing the game you don't care. What you care about is "I pressed the button and he did exactly what I asked him to do."

Kikizo: The camera seems a lot further away from your character than in Devil May Cry. Does that factor into maintaining the frame rate at all?

Knight: No it's not particularly related. Obviously where we put the camera does affect the frame rate, so we make those choices, but that doesn't mean there won't be scenes in the game where you'll get quite close to the character. Mainly in the scenes we've shown it's combat, and you need a bit of space to see where the enemies are coming from...

Kikizo: So the camera isn't positioned further away during these battles to hide, say, reduced character detail?

Knight: No. It's just so you can see what's going on around you, and be effective in combat. We will definitely have moments where you get closer.

Kikizo: About the source material - as you've said, it informs a lot of modern western culture. But how many players do you think will be able to track the game's fiction back to the poem itself?

Knight: You'd be surprised! We did some research earlier on to validate the cultural awareness of the poem. We did some pretty extensive surveys - it wasn't driving the creative decision-making, but it was interesting to have the data - and we were pretty pleasantly surprised that the vast majority of people in North America, all fifty states - we didn't test in Europe, by I suspect it would be even more in Europe - have heard the phrase "Dante's Inferno", and have some sense that it relates to a book about hell. Obviously a minority have actually read it, but things like the Seven Deadly Sins and the Nine Circles of Hell - these are Dante concepts, that didn't exist before Dante. And I think they're still with us today.

And you certainly don't have to have read the poem to appreciate the game, but I think by playing the game you'll appreciate the poem. We've already had many people that have gone back to look at the poem or learn more about it because of the game. Which is a good thing.

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