MechAssault 2: Day 1 Studios Interview

Day 1 Studios chief Denny Thorley reveals all on this huge Xbox Live sequel, discusses company plans, next-gen, and handheld tidbits.

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Kikizo: So we just had a look at some of the multiplayer environments, but looking at some of the singleplayer environments as well, obviously we saw they were quite destructible and you can climb up the buildings and so on, so how does the environment design enhance the gameplay possibilities?

Thorley: Well in the original, one of the areas we really pushed was the building destruction, and making that a lot more fun, and players really responded well to that. So with MechAssault 2, we upped the ante; the destruction is a little more interesting from that standpoint - and things blow up cooler if you will! But they do add quite a few elements, with the BattleArmour being able to climb the buildings - this adds a little bit of a stealth factor for the BattleArmour; he's very lightly armoured but he's very quick. But people have a tendency not to necessarily look at the size of buildings, so as an enemy, you could walk by a building and not realise that the BattleArmour was up there, and it could jump and jack the enemy mech. We also have a lob weapon that will allow you to shoot over buildings and things like that, and damage people on the other side.

Kikizo: Obviously one of the things you're trying to push with the sequel is the story aspect and the characters - it's quite easy to forget that there's a guy inside these enormous machines. What are the sorts of reasons these guys are in this war zone, and what are some of the ideas and concepts we'll see in the story?

Thorley: Well in terms of the story it takes place a couple of years after the finish of the previous game, and basically there are these power cores that give unique capabilities to the mechs themselves and some of the other vehicles, and the BattleArmour in fact is built off of technology that was captured in MechAssault 1. So you've basically got a new enemy, it's still in the Word of Blake, which is the protagonist in the first one, but he's a little but more capable, and he's already attracted some of these power cores, and your primary core is to hunt him down and get these cores back.

Kikizo: How would you describe the learning curve, is it fairly accessible, because obviously there'll be a lot of naturally adopters with fans of the first game but for newcomers is it something that's pretty easy to get into?

Thorley: It's very easy. One of the things that we were very pleased with in the first one was that even in the online play, people were able to get in and feel like they contributed right away, and as I'm sure you're aware, the barrier for online play is how comfortable people feel. The hardcore players have no issue with it. We're trying to attract a broader audience, so that it's still very appealing to the hardcore, but even if you haven't had a lot of experience you're contributing right away, and hopefully you felt that when you played the game today.

Kikizo: You talked about the Conquest Mode as well, could you explain what that's all about for those who aren't familiar?

Thorley: Sure, we found that in playing with MechAssault 1 people had a lot of fun playing it, but there were always these raging debates on the forums about who was better than who and how much they can kick the other person's ass. And we said you know what, we can fix this. There are two aspects that help us fix that; firstly we are pushing the stats of the game up to a website, so when a game ends, we're throwing that to a server and the server is publishing the stats to a site, so people can actually see how they rank compared to everybody else, in a format that's a little more conducive than perhaps their television - they want to look at it on their computer.

The other aspect is Conquest Mode - think of this as territory. The better you do at a variety of games, you can capture territory. So there are planets, and each of the five houses that are derived from the fiction on the Battletech universe of the Inner Sphere, you join a house, then you try and capture territory, and whichever house has the most territory wins the game. It's kind of a perpetual, persistent thing, so we're hoping to inject quite a bit of team play. Each planet is assigned a multiplayer game type and a set of rules, so perhaps eight, ten or twelve players, on a specific map, tied to a specific game type, whether it be Snatch It, or Capture the Flag or things like that. And if you win missions in succession over the defending team, then you actually capture their planet, and we depict those planets in the 3D world, and then also broadcast those to the website as well. So you can see where you are in terms of control of the universe, if you will.

Kikizo: And just looking at some more specific gameplay aspects, one thing we noticed just now was when it says "system breached", is this to do with the jacking process?

Thorley: We call it Neurohacking, and jacking for short. And that is basically an interface that is relied on with several of the interactions, whether you're taking over a terminal, or hacking a mech. You get an interface which you follow the button presses, and if you're jacking it in a multiplayer game, the person you're jacking is doing the same thing, and the person who accomplishes that most rapidly ends up getting the victory, so he can then deny the jack, or take the mech over.

Kikizo: And what are some of the power-ups that are available both in single and multiplayer games, and how do these spice things up?

Thorley: They enrich the experience in several ways. The salvage - we fictionally refer it to salvage but you term it as power ups, which is fine - each of the weapons has three different levels and you have power ups that raise the level of a weapon in terms of how powerful it is. The VTOL can pick those up either on the battlefield or they can actually take them from the VTOL base and distribute them to their players. So the VTOL plays a support role in getting the mechs levelled up. If you're an assault class mech and you have all your weapons levelled up to the maximum level, you get a thing called an Alpha Strike, and this is kind of a one-shot kill. It heats your systems up so you won't be able to fire another round after that, but whoever you use it on will pretty much be destroyed. The other power ups that are available - the VTOL can drop bombs and it can also drop unmanned turrets, so if you wanted to defend a particular area you could take a smart turret and drop it and it can defend that area for you. The power-ups are also available if you kill a mech - one of the benefits is you get is additional power-ups from that mech.

Kikizo: When you hit the right thumbstick, you kill yourself - what purpose does this serve?

Thorley: One of the things we found is that if you get out of the vehicle and then that vehicle were to be destroyed, but you weren't destroyed as the pilot, it's a long way back to get another vehicle, so we allowed people to commit suicide so that they could get respawn and get back to their base and get another vehicle.

Kikizo: Is there a trend of players who usually prefer the flying mechs [the VTOL], versus the ones on the ground, because they're obviously quite distinctive in terms of the gameplay styles.

Thorley: They're hugely different tactically, and gameplay styles - the VTOL craft we really don't really refer to as a mech - but the VTOL can be an offensive weapon when it drops these bombs and turrets, it can also be a support vehicle where it can go back to its base and pick up salvage before dropping it. But one of the very interesting things is that it's a very fast means of transport, so if you were to play capture the flag, it cannot take a flag itself, but it can fly a BattleArmour in that can attach to the bottom of it and grab a flag quickly and then transport the BattleArmour back really quickly to put the flag back.

Kikizo: The look of the game is improved overall and looks quite polished, especially in the cut-scenes. Is the system that runs everything proprietary, have you used any middleware?

Thorley: The only middleware we're using right now is Granny for the animation system. It's our own custom engine, the engine was totally reworked and redistributed. When we did MechAssault 1 we weren't sure if we'd have to port an engine over to other platforms. Then we signed a long-term agreement with Microsoft with the success of MechAssault 1, and that allowed us to really focus on what the hardware could do, so we were able to kind of re-balance the systems, and really take advantage of all the power of the Xbox, so the game engine is now specific to the Xbox and that allows us to achieve the look that you've seen - I'm glad that you like it.

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