The Rare Interview: Perfect Dark Zero

On the eve of the Xbox 360's US launch, we bring you this detailed interview with Rare's Duncan Botwood, for the PDZ data you need before release, including Live and even Perfect Dark 2 gossip. Awesome new trailer too!

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Kikizo: It seems like you've put tonnes of work into the weapons in perfect Dark Zero. Can you talk us though your favourites and how they're used?

Botwood: Well, the weapons used a lot earlier in the game are a shotgun, and a DW-P5. The shotgun itself is a very powerful short-range weapon, as many players of FPS games will be familiar with. The thing about it is, it comes into its own in multiplayer with a variety of secondary and tertiary modes. Basically whenever you fire a weapon in multiplayer you'll appear on the radar, but with a shotgun, you can do a scan as well, and find out where people are at any point in time, and you can also mimic a member of the opposing team.

So if you hold off firing until the last minute, on the radar, all the enemy will see is the green dot coming towards them, and when you finally shoot you've got a good kill, because you've managed to keep your finger off the trigger for that long! With the DW-P5, it's kind of the standard scoped machine gun, so it's kind of an all-round weapon. And it's got a silencer on it - when you equip a silencer with the weapons that allow one, it will make those first shots more accurate and reduce the noise level, so that you don't appear on radar, but it also does take the damage potential off of some of those bullets, so they're not going to hurt the enemy quite as much.

Kikizo: What about the rifles - do they offer similar sub-functions?

Botwood: The sniper rifles - there are two in the game - the Shockwave Rifle and the Jackal. The Jackal is more of a traditional sniper rifle - single shot, bolt-action rifle, with a very long zoom. The secondary function of the Jackal is to highlight targets; it kind of paints them and they will appear on radar for some time afterwards, and finally, you can swipe the target across them, so it's useful for example if some enemy teams are coming in on a vehicle - you can paint that vehicle so everybody knows where, for example, that hovercraft or whatever is.

The Shockwave, on the other hand, has a kind of heat-based attack, which travels a very long distance, and overheats the weapon if you're not careful. But the secondary function for that is it acts as an x-ray scanner that can see through walls, so you can provide information to your teammates about where enemies are at any one time.

Kikizo: So it's kind of like the Farsight from the original Perfect Dark?

Botwood: It is similar but not identical; the Farsight could see only a particular depth, so you'd be missing somebody standing in front of you, but you could shoot through anything to get to that person. The shockwave differs in that you can see through everything, but you can't shoot through everything. So because it's a prequel, it's a bit of a precursor to that weapon...

Kikizo: Cool. What gameplay functions did you have in mind when choosing these different gadgets that can be used throughout the game?

Botwood: Well there's this little thing called an Octopus, it enables you to open tumber locks or traditional locks, to gain access to new areas. There's also a Demolition Kit which can attack weak areas of a wall, and it's also used in multiplayer to provide different ways into opposing team bases, so you can blow through a wall to give you access to the flag room quicker. There's also the Data Thief, which lets you hack into enemy computer systems or open big doors; there's the Revive Kit which is great in cooperative story mode, in which case one player is down and you go with the Revive Kit and bring them back to life at half health, they pick up the gun they were carrying and carry on. In multiplayer, you can buy it as part of the Dark Ops mode, so you buy all of your equipment in that mode - and that would never be to revive another character in the same manner, in a mode that wouldn't allow you to have a second chance.

We can use some of these gadgets in multiplayer as well, and they'll help things like in Territorial Gains and Deathmatch mode, you'll run up to a hill, and try and hack the hill - you can hack the hill faster with a Data Thief than you can by just pressing the button and watching the progress bar go up. So they've all got their advantages and benefits, but the possession of one isn't necessarily a game-breaking thing.

In the singleplayer story mode, there are certain mission-specific gadgets you'll be given, like the Soundalizer, which is pretty useful in level one, which had been kept a secret for a long time. It helps you identify certain characters and zooms in long distances. And there are other gadgets like that which are pertinent on particular levels, but you're always given them when you need them,.

Kikizo: Why didn't you want the media to see the first level and most of the game before launch?

Botwood: We haven't shown the first level pre-release, ever, I think. We wanted some secrets bagged. But we've shown the levels like rooftops a few times since before X05. We've tried to keep as much of the singleplayer story under wraps as possible, because it's really cool, and there are a few twists and we don't want to spoil it for people who are going to pick it up on day one.

Kikizo: Can you give us more details about how things tie in with the first game?

Botwood: It takes place three years before those events, and basically introduces Joanna to the Carrington Institute, and dataDyne as well, and certainly the characters that will appear, or have appeared, in the PD64 game. Set in that three-year gap, we're releasing a series of books, and each one deals with one of those three years in between the two games. So in these books as well, you'll see more of the details of the back story, stuff that we could try and cram into the game but it wouldn't really do us much good, or the game much good, to try and get them in. The novels are written by a guy called Greg Rucka, he's a great thriller novelist and commonly considered to be one of the top writers at DC Comics. They're available in all good bookstores! [laughs].

Kikizo: We've noticed that for example when you're taking on a boss you get to choose what to say to him - what's the idea behind this?

Botwood: Well we're certainly trying to bring Joanna's character more to the forefront with this game, whereas the previous Perfect Dark and many first person shooters, you don't really see much of that first-person character, for the very good reason that you're supposed to have the player identify with that character and you're not going to see them all the time. But we're trying to do it, just at specific points. With some of the third-person moves as well, like the cover move, the climbing, the rolling, you see the actual Joanna model as well; it's not just a hand on a gun.

The emotes also help - they don't play a major role in the game, but they pop up from time to time, and you'll be able to influence events with those. So for example when you're playing against the boss, you have the chance to taunt him, and if you reply in time to a taunt then it throws them off a little bit, and might give you more of a chance to shoot without him coming back at you.

Kikizo: Perfect Dark Zero has been in development for a long time, was there anything you had to change or cut out of the game at any stage of the development?

Botwood: Yes. We had a lot of content we'd accumulated over five years. And there still just wasn't enough time to put all of it in at the quality we wanted. Hence the announcement back at E3 when we said we'd have fifty players, we had to change that to 32, and that was a logistical decision. It was a testing thing; we couldn't test 978 different permutations of the game with that many players in the time we had available.

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