Insomniac’s Drew Murray talks about Resistance: Fall of Man for the PS3
By Michael Lafferty

“… the biggest challenge was probably working on battlefields”

July 11, 1951 – U.S. Army Ranger Nathan Hale is patrolling with a group of British soldiers when they are overcome and die from bug-like creatures carrying the Chimera virus. The virus is responsible for mutating life forms into Chimera, the species that has overrun Asia and Europe and is threatening to annihilate all life in England.

Hale is infected with the virus, but unlike others, it does not seem to have the same physical mutating effects. For four days, Hale carries out a personal war with the Chimera and its alien culture.

This is Resistance: Fall of Man, a first-person shooter from Insomniac Games for the Sony PlayStation 3 console system. The game will be a launch title and in addition to a single-player game, and co-op experience, it will also feature a robust multiplayer element.

Sony hosted an event in late August in the Burbank studio of Insomniac to allow the media to have a gander and some hands-on time with the game.

It was during that event that designer Drew Murray took time to chat with GameZone about this amazing title.

Question: What was the inspiration that lead Insomniac to go from the cartoon-animated genre of games like Ratchet and Clank to this full-bore intense first-person shooter?

Drew: I think there was a desire on the part of the company to branch out and try something different. Ratchet and Clank, and Spyro, have – obviously – been great for Insomniac, but we wanted to branch out. Most of the people here are gamers and love playing games, and a lot of us here love to play first-person shooters.

Q: Was there anything that lead to the inspiration behind the story?

Drew:  We are all a bunch of geeks and we’ve all read a bunch of science fiction, we’ve seen a lot of movies and played a lot of games. I don’t think there was one particular source that you could point at and say that’s the thing. The creative part was certainly collaborative and as we started to come up with ideas we would open up a lot of e-mails and forums internally and get a lot of ideas from a lot of different people.

What was the biggest challenge as a designer when you entered the project?

Drew: Probably going into uncharted territory … actually, the biggest challenge was probably working on battlefields, being suddenly able to have 40-50 guys running around at the same time, figuring out how to get the experience of the battlefield with lots of action going one but still making the player the focus and making the player be the difference to the battlefield, and being able to balance the chaos and lots of activity while keeping the player the primal focus of what is going on.

Q: The engine that runs this game is rather remarkable. You have a lot of activity going on and yet in the midst of all this, there is this prime character that is the difference maker. When, conceptually, you came up with all of that, did you have the physics engine already in place, or did you have to come up with it?

Drew: We really started building that for this project, and for our future projects, obviously. We are working on Ratchet and Clank for the PS3 and we will be using that. Obviously it is a very important part of our immersion principle. Things actually flying around and breaking – it makes all the difference when you are running around a battlefield. Things blown into the air and rag-dolling, buildings falling apart – I think that is where a lot of it came from. And then once we started getting the physics where it was starting to work, we tried to come up with new ways of using it.

Q: One of the tactics that is very common in shooters, from the players’ perspective is you open fire, you back up and move around. The AI is doing that in Resistance. It seems that the AI in this game is rather intelligent …

Drew: It’s pretty intelligent. We definitely have a good base system, there is a certain amount of scripting finesse that goes on for certain encounters but going back to the battlefields – a lot of what is going on in the battlefields is loosely scripted and they have very general directions of what they are doing. Every time you go into the battlefield, you will see something a little different.

Q: And the game has quite a remarkable weapons system as well…

Drew: Insomniac has a good history of doing that. While we had to make some of the weapons a little more realistic, some of the weapons are still out there. No ‘Sheepinator’ this time, but maybe next time we turn people into leapers or something like that. But that is one of the things (the exotic weapons) that make Insomniac games Insomniac games.

Q: The game takes place in a four-day span. How can you pack that much action, without it being real time, into such a limited time frame that the game has?

Drew: It’s four very busy days for Hale. A lot of the mystery will be revealed; a lot of what the U.S. government does and doesn’t know will be revealed. It’s a pretty small country so you can get around and see a lot of stuff pretty quickly. So it unravels really quickly and it’s going to end with a bang and hopefully we are going to carry that over to the next one.

Q: Which brings up the question – is the game plan in place for a sequel?

Drew: We have a framework for carrying the story beyond what we have now and we are working on fleshing out the details. We have an overall story arc.

Q: Creating for a next-generation console was that a challenge more than a delight or a delight more than a challenge?

Drew: It’s a mixture. The process is more of a challenge because there are challenges that have not been dealt with before. There’s a lot of moving pieces, working with the physics system, working with the number of creatures we were able to have. It’s a lot of work getting there but once it is all done, the game looks – I think – pretty phenomenal. I’m really excited about it.  

del.icio.us | Digg This | Glink It

---