Hunter The Reckoning: Redeemer Interview

Hunter The Reckoning emerged as a sleeper hit last year, particularly among people that game with friends. This year we see two Hunter games, and we talk to Chad Kent, Producer at High Voltage Software, about Hunter: The Reckoning Redeemer (for Xbox). He reveals what the "green light" process entails, improvements over the original, thoughts on Xbox Live, and the idea that the end-consumer (i.e. gamers) should be listened to. Thanks for your time, Chad!

Related Links:

Review: Hunter - The Reckoning (XB)

Review: Hunter - The Reckoning: Redeemer (XB)

Interview: Scot Lane, Hunter The Reckoning Q&A

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Hunter: The Reckoning Redeemer Q&A Conducted by Omni

Please, introduce yourself; describe your role on Redeemer and your background in the gaming industry.

My name is Chad Kent and I am the producer for the latest two Hunter: The Reckoning projects here at High Voltage Software. I coordinate the team’s work in-house and work closely with Vivendi Universal Games to ensure that all of their needs for the game projects are met. I started in the Industry three and a half years ago when I joined the team at HVS. I worked as a designer on the first Hunter and then moved on to producing both Redeemer and Wayward.

This seems like a tired question but it’s a good opener: What did the team learn with Hunter The Reckoning that helped in the development of Redeemer?

Not a tired question at all. Really! We do a great deal of research after our games ship to find out what gamers liked about the product, as well as what they would have liked to see done differently. I spent a lot of time checking out reviews and the message boards to get a feel for what people wanted to see in the next game. Based on the feedback we received, we incorporated fade-able objects into the new game to allow us to use complex environments, levels with pillars, and mausoleums for example, without obstructing the camera. We also found that we could make better use of polygons to allow for larger levels without sacrificing the look of the characters in the game. There are more but that gives you an idea of just a few of the things we learned that we wanted to get into the new game.

What criticisms of Reckoning were considered when development of Redeemer got under way?

As I mentioned previously, we knew from gamer feedback that we wanted to focus on camera improvements, brighter environments, and some improvements on the hand-to-hand combat, like being able to change the direction of your combo moves in mid-attack. We also found that the fans of the game wanted more control over the combos and more combat moves; this led to adding specific combos that could be preformed with the use of the trigger and the right analog stick at the same time. We have also included a new experience system that assigns experience based on how you fight. The more you use a skill set, like melee, Edge (magic), or ranged attacks, the better your character gets at that type of attack. In Redeemer, players can now develop their characters to match their play style. And with the new import/export feature, they can even save their character off to a memory unit, head over to their friends house, and jump into his game at any point.

One of the most noted critiques of Reckoning was an essentially immovable camera. Why wasn’t a more versatile camera implemented then or now?

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Having four players in a three dimensional environment poses some interesting problems, like if you give camera control…which player gets it? If all four can control the camera you could end up playing dueling banjos, so to speak. Also bringing the camera down low causes player characters further back on the screen to be obscured by hunters and monsters at the front of the screen. We also wanted to create the feeling of larger environments, not limiting

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the characters to a pure top down view, or limiting all our environments to being a series of smaller interconnected rooms. However, even on the powerful platforms today there are still limits to how much we can “draw” on screen at one time. Therefore, not allowing the camera to be positioned to look all the way down the main street of Ashcroft was a choice between the lesser of two evils - limited camera versus possible frame rate hits. We hope that the camera zoom - teamed with the new fade-able geometry - will solve many of the camera complaints made about the first game.

From your position on the team, what is Redeemer’s single most important improvement over Reckoning?

I feel the ability to change the direction of a combo attack mid-stream and the inclusion of the new combo control system has added the most for me in game-play, but I also could not get over the new, more colorful art style. The game is just damn pretty to look at! (Can I say “damn” here?)

When was the greenlight given to Redeemer?

The new design was approved in September of 2002, and our first actual game builds began going to the publisher for monthly reviews in October 2002.

How does that whole “greenlight” process work? The sales figures come in and marketing thinks, “Sequel!”? Clear this up for us.

Well, in the case of Hunter we were receiving a lot of favorable attention when the game shipped. Of course people had their criticisms, but overall the fun of four players on the same screen monster bashing seemed pretty popular. So the talk about a sequel started very soon after the first game shipped. The first step was to gather together all the reviews and forum commentary we could get our hands on and go over it as team to figure out what changes and improvements everyone wanted to see.

Also we have a feedback section on our website at http://www.high-voltage.com/. If your readers would like to share their thoughts with us I encourage them to visit the site. We are interested in what they have to say about our games!

Anyway, the “greenlight” process is generally a bunch of business types and lawyer types assuring that both sides are in agreement with the principles of the deal for the new title (release date, cost, resources, legal implications, etc…). When they all feel that things are going smoothly, and that a contract will be signed soon, they give us the “greenlight.” At that moment, we begin the design phase.

Was the development time for Redeemer shorter than the original? Why?

Yes it was shorter, about a year start to finish. A few different things made that possible, first that the core engine code was written already, we just needed to make additions and improvements, rather than starting from scratch. To our benefit, we also had several team members with us who participated in making the first game. These experienced guys were able to crank out good work quickly and were very familiar with the license and the code base. Our publishers helped out as well. Their support for the team and solid vision of what they wanted to see in the game allowed us to focus on our job of getting a solid title out on the shelves. We also benefited from having two Hunter projects going at the same time. Many of the original team members were working on Wayward as well, giving both projects the advantage of being able to share an experienced base of team members. I would also be remiss in not mentioning the fact that we had an amazing group of new team members join each of the projects. So I guess what I’m saying here is that having a dedicated and talented team sure helped make the short schedule possible.

Were the development tools used for Reckoning re-used for Redeemer? Did this help or hinder Redeemer’s development?

Yes, we re-used and improved many of the tools used for Reckoning. We have the advantage here at HVS of having our own proprietary engine and an in-house Tools & Technology team to support it. If we need help with our tools, help is just few feet away. We also have the advantage of having a full sound studio on site, again making our lives easier. All of our design tools are developed here in-house and our art team uses 3D Studio Max. We also have a strong relationship with Red Eye Studio, the folks who handle our motion capture needs. Having them located right here in Hoffman Estates IL has been very convenient for us.

Did you have more leeway in what you could and could not include in Redeemer after proving yourself with Reckoning?

As I mentioned before, we have been blessed with a great group of supporting team members on both the side of our publishers, Interplay & Vivendi Universal Games, as well as White Wolf Publishing, the guys who publish the Hunter pen and paper game. A good number of our team members, myself included, are big White Wolf fans, so I think that defiantly helped. We did receive a lot of leeway in the game’s overall storyline and content, but we owe a lot to the fact that White Wolf gave us a great world as background to work with. Anybody who is a fan of the Carpenter anti-hero in the game may want to checkout some of White Wolf’s “World of Darkness” novels where he is a re-occurring character. It was great of the White Wolf guys to let us use him, definitely a great character that added to the video games.

Was the original team that worked on Reckoning assembled to work on Redeemer?

Most of the original team was reassembled for Redeemer; Matt Corso reprised his role as lead artist and Dave Rodriguez was back at the lead design helm. Many of the other key programmers, artists, and designers also joined us on the Redeemer, and on Wayward as well.

Was the Q4 2003 always the target release date?

Yes it was. There was a ton of work to do, but we made it! Though, as I said earlier, we owe a lot of that success to our counterparts over at Vivendi.

High Voltage has its hands on a number of projects, including the next Leisure Suit Larry game; was there any cutting corners to save time so these other projects could be attended to?

Definitely not! We do occasionally share some of our employee’s time with other projects, consulting with certain guys who have areas of expertise but may be assigned to other projects, but that is generally a short conversation at the most. We have a pretty good size staff here at HVS (I think were up to about 120 members here now) so there’s plenty of talent to go around. We have monthly company meetings to keep on top of what is going on in the other projects, and there is a lot of inter-team idea sharing that goes on there, discussing challenges they are facing and making suggestions to one another. We also have an inter-office FAQ and knowledge base site that allows all the members of the company to post problems and share the solutions they find in all of the different disciplines and platforms. We have these things in place specifically to avoid one project’s needs negatively affecting another’s progress. Our department heads in Tools & Technology and Audio also closely track the needs of all the specific projects and schedule time accordingly. A daunting task with up to five teams running at once, but the system hasn’t failed us.

How will Redeemer make itself heard above all the noise of the other titles released in Q4?

I think it really comes down to the fact that we listened to what gamers said they wanted in the game. We have gorgeous new art and an impressive new feature set.

New combo combat system.

Fade-able geometry to improve the camera.

New larger level environments.

A dynamic experience system to reflect the player’s preferred play style.

New weapons and edges.

Standard Hunter weapons that change in appearance and improve in effectiveness as your skills improve.

New ammo power-ups that paralyze, poison, ignite, or free your opponents of evil possession

New NPC’s that fight by your side.

3 new Hunters for the Xbox system: Kaylie playable from the start and two new un-lockable characters.

The ability to import and export personalized characters into and out of any saved games

All new storyline supported by a host of new real time in-game cinematics.

A wide variety of new Easter Eggs, including collectable cards that allow you to un-lock playable versions of many of the games monsters, just for grins and giggles.

Hopefully that will do the trick!

Why did Wayward appear on the Playstation 2 and Redeemer appear on Xbox? Why the different games?

We wanted to make each game for each of the different platforms special and different. We wanted the storyline to flow across all three games, but we wanted the game-play experience to be different and exciting for both platforms.

Was the possibility of Xbox Live multiplayer ever examined?

There was some discussion early in the project’s design phase, but the decision was made to focus on the success of four players playing together on a single screen. There is downloadable content available for Xbox Live users; currently new Hunter costumes are available for download.

The Hunters seem like good candidates for action figures. What’s the hold up?

You tell me! I need Hunter action figures to decorate my office with!

Seriously though, I’m not really sure why we haven’t seen them surface.

I’ll just keep wishing and maybe…

Be blunt, are game reviewers (as a group) too cynical? And how reliable is their opinion? I mean, GameSpot had that whole, “Played Savage for 3 hours,” controversy.

All in all, I respect what they have to say about titles. They do see far more games than the average user, so I think it is important to take their constructive criticism and use it to make a better title your next time out. Occasionally you get the off character that just seems to enjoy bagging on people’s work and in my opinion that is a sad, but usually rare, thing. I think my favorite feedback is from talking to gamers at the shows (E3, GDC, GenCon, etc.) Also, I love to get gamer feedback from our website as I mentioned earlier, then you can find out what the people buying your game really think. I think professional critics perform a valuable service, but it’s not a job that I would want to do. There’s a lot of responsibility to both their readers and the makers of the games they review.

It seems the games industry is in the middle of a shake-up (or at least headed that way) with developers going under, some publishers on shaky financial ground, and overall game sales on the decline, do you ever wonder if you’ll be able to keep working in the gaming industry?

No, not really. The industry may go through some changes but I think that console and computer gaming are pretty firmly entrenched in our culture and cultures all over the world. I think the most important thing for an independent developer like HVS is to stay flexible, and to stay staffed with creative and competent people. Of course we would all like to see a thriving economy with an ever-expanding gaming business, but I can’t help but remember my starving college years when I always seemed to be able to pick up a new game and forget my pauper status while I played. Entertainment is such an important facet of all of our lives today that I find it hard to believe the gaming industry will suffer any real permanent decay. As for myself, I’m extremely happy to be a part of this industry and High Voltage Software in particular, and it is very hard to consider myself doing anything else, anywhere else, so hopefully I’ll never have to cross that bridge.

(November 13, 2003)