1UP: Yeah, but if you didn't put it online, people are always going to want what they can't have. People would have been asking "Why isn't this game online?"
TI: Let me clarify some things for you, and give you some facts so we can look at this logically. This way people can understand why we did what we did. There were comments from people when we released Dead or Alive 4, regarding Kokoro in a kimono in one of the opening movie scenes, but the costume wasn't in the game. And the reason for that is that the cloth physics for something that complicated is incredibly stressful on the system. So the same thing goes for DOAX2. If you're playing online in jet skis, and you have four girls all wearing the most elaborate flowing costumes in the game, and they all have their hair down and it's flowing around their shoulders, and they're wearing ribbons on their wrists and accessories maxed out, there's just no way the game will run on this machine with the girls dressed up in that way. So we decided for this game that for online we'd limit the specifications to make it feasible for the game to run. In hindsight, hearing what you say, and hearing that people are frustrated at not being able to take these costumes online, that's why I say maybe it would have been better not to include the online portion at all, because we knew it wasn't going to be possible from the get-go.
It's difficult, because some people might say that starting out, why didn't you implement the cloth physics so it was precalculated, or why not make the hair less processor intensive. It's tough for us because we're always pushing the envelope in physics and graphics, when it comes to real-time graphics. We want all that flowing realistically and moving in real-time, but because of that there are other limitations that come across, so it's always a balancing act for us in how we get the technology to be the best it can be while giving the people what they want.
So you can bring in any physics engine you want from any company, but it's not going to give us the kind of active movement and animation and things that we want for our games. That's why we always do our physics engine in-house. There's a certain level of quality we need that can't be reached by standard solutions. Now, if there are any executives of software companies out there who think they have a physics engine that can do what we want, let me know, I'll sign the contract on the spot, because to me it's all about the results.
You know, so talking about online, if the game -- in a logical way -- was going to be misrepresented, then maybe we shouldn't have been put in. I also know that there are a lot of people out there who would say "Don't say that, it may not be completely what we expected, but we're glad it's in there." If our goal was to be so that you could take all those swimsuits online, we could make new character models for online characters with less polygons, we could redo all 2,700 swimsuits to have less polygons, we could go in and make a less intense, less impressive water physics engine to make it all run. We could do it. I also think the Marine Race aspect is fantastic, I really like it. And I know that I said that the online part of the game is one percent, but for Team Ninja, one percent is still pretty big. So maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to say we should have just cut it out, because it's still important. So I just want everyone to realize that we wanted to get this game out on Memorial Day, and in order to make it happen we had to think about what's the best way to use our resources. So yes, if we wanted to create low poly models to make everything work, we could have done it. But it wouldn't have been feasible or logical in thinking about our goal of when we wanted the game to come out. And we want our next game to come out in the same time frame next year, so we have to think about that in the big picture, and we had to set our priorities, and we made our decisions regarding the online mode based on all of these decisions.
