IGN: Speaking of weapons, with as many that the team has already created for
the Ratchet series, how do you continue to come up with new ones? What is the
process of developing a new and more interesting weapon for a game that
takes itself a lot more seriously than the Lombax?
Ted Price, Founder & CEO: Coming up with new weapons is definitely fun, but it can
also be pretty tough. Early on we decided that this game needed weapons as exotic as
Ratchet's, but with a more serious flavor. We encouraged everyone at the company to
come up with suggestions for weapons and as usual, we got some excellent ideas from
lots of team members. But I have to give real props to Nathan Fouts and Ken Strickland
who together came up with many of the designs and implemented our craziest weapons.
To their credit they were always open to anyone making comments on the guns. And,
during the project it was very cool to walk by and see a group of people at Nathan's desk
point at the screen saying, "Hey, can you make that go faster? And what if it had more
auto-targeting?"
IGN: Would it have been possible to create Resistance on anything but the
PlayStation 3, like the PS2, Xbox 360 or PC, and if not, why? Have you had the
idea for the game on the backburner and been saving it for capable hardware?
Ted Price, Founder & CEO: It would have been very, very difficult to create Resistance
on any other platform. First, this game requires an incredible amount of processing power
to support the large number of moving characters and objects in the levels. Every one of
our characters has sophisticated AI and navigation routines running in the background.
Plus, every object -- including characters -- has to access our physics and collision
systems constantly. And, of course, I'm ignoring all the other processes that have to
occur simultaneously to create immersive, believable environments. What a game like
Resistance requires is parallel processing on a massive scale and fortunately the Cell's
SPUs give us this. We can take complex and expensive systems and move them onto the
SPUs, which are extremely good at number-crunching. When these systems run in parallel
it means we can do more per frame and that means more detail in the game.
Second, the game requires more than 20 gigabytes of storage space, which means that
the only viable storage medium for us is Blu-ray. We could not have fit this game on a
DVD or a HD-DVD. So, yet another reason that the game could only have been created
on the PlayStation 3.
Ted Price, Boss Guy
We haven't had this idea on the backburner for years. We
knew that we wanted to do a FPS when the PS3 was
announced but the game's design evolved significantly as we
moved through pre-production. The reason the game's
design evolved was not because of the hardware -- in fact
we've been pleasantly surprised with what the PS3 can really do -- it was because
designing games here at Insomniac is a
collaborative process and we're never afraid to change
something if it makes the game better.
IGN: What's the biggest misconception about
developing for the PlayStation 3 thus far, and how
can that misconception be changed?
Ted Price, Founder & CEO: That's a good question. One
thing people have mentioned is that it's challenging to
develop on the platform. But it's important to note that
developing for any platform presents unique challenges
especially when you're trying to push that platform to its limits. Developing console
videogames has never been easy -- if it was, everyone would be doing it, right? On the
PlayStation 3, if you can take advantage the Cell's parallel processing abilities you can do
a lot more than on any other platform. But getting to that point requires focus and hard
work.
With Resistance, we worked very hard to develop our own proprietary engine exclusively
for the PS3 so that we'd be able to make games that were bigger and better than
anything else out there. We also worked very closely with Sony to co-develop technology
to take advantage of some of the Cell's unique properties. The bottom line is that
developing technology for PS One, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 has always required
careful planning, creativity and a little brute force. But the results are definitely worth it!