http://threespeech.com/blog/?p=413





At the recent Sony European press event at the 3Rooms, we were surprised and gratified to get a short but sweet audience with a man who is fast becoming a legend: David Jaffe, the man behind God of War. In this instance, Jaffe had his Calling All Cars hat on – explaining that the experience of creating what, for our money, is the best of the PS3 download games was so happy that he has more such games in the pipeline. This is what he said – over Eye Toy video-link from San Diego.

Q: Was it a relief to embark on a smaller, cartoon-style download-only project after your usual epics?

David Jaffe: Relief may not be the right word – but it was a joy. It was so much fun to do a game that was really just about what I think makes games great: the interactivity. It wasn’t about storytelling, cut-scenes or ambience; it was about what you do with the controller, and what you do with your buddies when they have the controller. I loved getting into the purity of that. Because I got into games in 1992/93, and I never got to work on those kinds of games that I grew up playing and loving, like Pac-Man, Ms Pac-Man, Asteroids and Battlezone. Because of the technology, that’s all they could do. And now I love the fact that with the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade and PC downloads, as designers, we now have the opportunity to go back to what I think was a great era of gameplay, and maybe even try to build on top of it.

Q: Did you face any challenges in developing a first-generation PlayStation Network title?

DJ: Well, there were some technical challenges that I can’t speak about because I’m not a technical guy. As a game designer, I think the biggest challenge was the realisation that we couldn’t fall back on any of the tricks that we had used in the past, in terms of: “Maybe here, the gameplay’s not that great, but let’s show you a really cool camera-move,” as in God of War, or: “This room isn’t that exciting, but in the next room we can make up for that fact.” But in a game like Calling All Cars, or any arcade game, if your core gaming isn’t working, there’s nowhere for you to hide, because that thing that’s broken travels with you over every aspect of the game. There’s only so much real-estate, and you’re always in the game. So that was the biggest challenge, and the biggest thing to learn and take forward with our future PlayStation Network games – you’re pretty much naked with these things, and you’d better bring your A-game, otherwise after a few minutes, you’re pretty bored.

Q: Is Calling All Cars totally finished and ready to go?

DJ: The American version is in format-checking; we’ve come in and out of format a couple of times, but bugs kept coming up, and I think we’ll clear the format for the American release today or tomorrow. I know we’re doing the Japanese submission in the next day or two; I don’t know about Europe. On the development end, we’re finished with it.

Q: Playing it single-player, the AI is quite harsh – you have to work hard to get through it. Was that a conscious thing?

DJ: Well, no. We focus-tested the crap out of it, because we didn’t want to make the game too hard. We saw a lot of early testers complaining about the overwhelming power the AI has with the magnet. Because we had to go back into the game and fix critical bugs anyway, we went back in. We didn’t change the multiplayer, which everyone seems to be a fan of anyway, but in dingle-player, we toned down the AI ability to suck the criminal out of your car with the magnet. And we may also have toned down the difficulty a little bit in the default mode. That’s the hard part, too: when you focus-test it, you don’t know who your audience are. We brought people in as focus-testers who were obviously interested in videogames, and we watched them play in default mode, even before we fixed the magnet. These guys would be able to get through the game in, like, 25 minutes. PlayStation 3 is still a relatively expensive purchase; the assumption is that people who have one can hang on to the title of a gamer. So it was a real challenge: who were we tuning the single-player for?

Q: Was Wacky Races an influence?

DJ: No. R Crumb was an influence – the cartoon artist who did a lot of comics back in the 60s and 70s. Originally, it was not going to be so much of a G-rated family game – it was going to be more of an X-rated, kind of cartoony Ralph Bakshei kind of thing, and for a number of reasons we ended up moving away from that. One was a gameplay reason, one was an issue with guys on the team, where guys didn’t know whether we wanted to take it that far. Wacky Races is more benign than where this actually started out, which was much more X-rated.

Q: What was behind the name-change from Criminal Crackdown?

DJ: Legal came back and said that we couldn’t use Crackdown. They never said this, but the assumption was because Microsoft has this game Crackdown. Legal’s great because they watch out for us, and nobody wants to end up in court or to get sued. For me, that was a little bit of a stretch – Criminal Crackdown/Crackdown, people ought to be able to tell the difference.

Q: Are we going to see more PSN download games from you in the future, then?

DJ: That’s all you’re going to see of me in the future. You never know what’s going to happen, but this is the space I want to be in, to work with this great team I have out of Utah, and I want us to really mark our mark in this space. To me, it’s all a journey – that’s what I learned from God of War, that I only want to do games that I feel can 100 per cent reach the intention of the designers behind them. I think this game comes a lot closer to realising the intent – it may not be as critically successful – but the intent is to provide people with fun, to make people laugh and trash-talk with their buddies. I think that intent has been achieved much better than the intent behind God of War, which was to get people to feel emotional about the story and the character. I feel that we can achieve our intents much better on the PlayStation Network with these sorts of games, and this is all I’ve got lined up for at least the next couple of years. Assuming Sony will continue to support me and put up with me.

Q: So you’ve got several ideas download games?

DJ: We’re in the design phase with numbers two and three right now.

By Steve Boxer


看来David Jaff同学真的一门心思去搞PSN的下载游戏了

目前David Jaff组建了一个三人团队专门搞这个

PS3的GOW看来和David无关了

去年GDC似乎就说过，GOW2以后专心搞PSN，GOW3只是看几眼

我觉得未必，时间还长得很。

不过以第二代的高素质来说，GOW已经上了轨道，所以无妨。

引用:

原帖由 CN 于 2007-5-19 03:11 发表
我觉得未必，时间还长得很。

不过以第二代的高素质来说，GOW已经上了轨道，所以无妨。

嗯，虽然二代剧情方面没有一代那么好　但是作为ACT已经超越一代，二代的制作人不比他差........