How much does the karma system affect the game, or the outcome?
You know the first question you inevitably get asked, and I understand why we get asked, is how different are the endings. And you know we came at the karma stuff almost backwards from that. We did not think how do we make different endings because you know it's a "choose your own comic book," that's our game. Where one end is you know plastic happy valley and one end is post apocalyptic nightmare. It's not what we came at this as. We came at this as what would happen to you if you had super powers? And I think one of the most profound things is, does it corrupt you. To me that is one of the essential DNA parts of being a superhero.
So we were coming at it from that side, which is what are the things that would be fun but you have to restrain yourself from like frying peds. What are the things that are hard about being good, like well I don't really want to kill all these people, how do I not do it. So what we did is we decided that some of the more interesting directions here are things like your powers themselves and say lets make them reflect your choices.
So if you're being an ass, you're going around just ripping on peds then we're going to give you splash damage on your weapons, you'll get bigger and badder effects.However, what if you're being good?We're going to give you precision modes, and we're gonna give you the abilities like the power that doesn't kill everyone it... restrains everyone, you can go through and pick out the ones you want. We'll levitate them so you can pick them out, you know what I'm saying?
Right. Why did you guys wait so long to show off the Karma system?
Because it was hard to get right. I mean, it was probably the last big thing that we had to get right. So we got climbing right, which took us forever, but we got that right sooner than karma.
Does it compare to other morality systems, in other games?
You know, there's only a couple that have really done it deep. Fable 2's the one that everyone tells me I should go play, and -- partly because you don't want to pollute yourself working on this, because you want to explore the space yourself.
Sure.
You get so -- and partly because we've been really busy, I haven't played the game, so I don't know. When you play it, you'll have to tell me.
Do you think it adds to replayability, somebody could be like, "I'm going to go back there and do this."
You know, I hope so, I think it's really -- what we've done is neat, I think we had an interesting take on it. It took us a long time to get it kinda sorted. You know, there's a lot of moving parts in the game, a big, systemic, open environment game where you have enemy groups and difficulty and for so many different pieces to mesh together [the something] was for us, the hardest to get right.
Who wrote the story, was it internal or external?
Yeah it was written by us, you know, we're big believers that the story is incredibly important, and I think the Sly series reflects it, but it's not more important than fun. And so writing the story for us is a total pisser for people, because they'll have a story that they love, and we'll find something that's fun, that doesn't fit that story, and we'll be like, "Re-write it around this". So, we're huge believers in story and presentation, but fun is more important than both. And so, uh, we wrote a lot of the story internally, and you know, our lead designer, the game director, Nate, has written all the Sly stories, he wrote most of it in the beginning, and as we got more and more busy we weren't able to do it with just me reviewing Nate's stuff.
So we brought in a guy, Bill Harms, who's actually a published comic author, who we knew from -- he worked at another Seattle game development firm, we uh, brought him in and he worked full time on it for like the last 9 months. And you know, it's more than just story, it's all the prompt dialogue, it's all the ancillary things, and writing for marketing, so you know, he's been a huge savior of the writing.
