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| You are going to visit locations not seen in the movies. |
4Players: What system are you developing PoN mainly for? How do you want to avoid poor conversions?
Dave Perry: We are making it for Playstation 2, Xbox and PC. There's a lot of competition in the team. (The Xbox guy trying to beat the PS2 guy etc...) It's very healthy and I think because of it, all three versions should make good use of their hardware capabilities. When we started the game, I called a team meeting. I told the team that the world would expect us just to add new levels to Enter the Matrix and try to sell that. They would expect Enter the Matrix 1.5 I said we needed to go to 5.0 It's funny now as I keep hearing that mentioned, and I have to give it up to my team, they somehow have pulled exactly that off! There's effects in this game that have never been seen before on the Playstation, we got a major "best technology" award at the big E3 conference and also runner up for best graphics of the entire show. (A show that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 was at!) And were not even finished making this game yet. So right now, we are pretty excited.
4Players: Why are you developing for current generation systems like PS2 and Xbox when PS3 and Xbox 360 are about to start?
Dave Perry: Because we wanted to really push today's hardware the best we could before moving on. Enter the Matrix was just the beginning for us. The Path of Neo shows what our tools are capable of. Then we move on to the next generation. We also will probably get about 10x more sales, simply because there's a ton of current generation hardware out there.
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| The game is going to stick close to the story of the trilogy. |
4Players: What about a handheld-version of PoN? NDS and PSP should hold enough power for a mobile version.
Dave Perry: I would love to get the game onto the PSP. I'm a huge fan of the hardware and would love to have more 3rd person action games available. My guys will do research on that after they get some sleep.
4Players: On what technology is PoN based on? Are you using an enhanced Enter the Matrix-engine or are you working with a brand new engine?
Dave Perry: I would say it's about 80% new engine with entirely new fighting and rendering systems. Shiny has always made it's own engines as we can only blame ourselves that way if things go wrong. We can also be sure to add all the features the Design team wants.
4Players: The characters in the E3-Trailer are looking kind of blocky and square - is this gonna change until the release?
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| The struggle between Neo and Agent Smith is a central design element of the game. |
Dave Perry: The E3 footage was mostly shot from October 2004->February 2005. Since then the characters now have specular mapping (reflective glasses, clothing etc.), bump mapping (the folds on their clothing cast shadows), lip-syncing (the lips move), eye-tracking (they look where they are going) etc.... So they get better and better and better. It's exciting for me as each day I go to work, I see new features and new moves. I think you will be very happy.
4Players: Is there a way to save Trinity? Dave Perry: No. There's always the lady in red. :)
4Players: Will this be your last trip into the Matrix?Dave Perry: Yes, now that we got to make the Neo game, our work in the Matrix will be done. At Shiny, we like to keep challenging ourselves, so we won't be doing Matrix 3,4,5,6 We're lucky that our Publisher doesn't force us to do that.You find the german version of the interview
here.
