18th March 2003, 6:53 AM
Quote:GameSpy: Jak II is graphically stunning. How difficult was it to coax such great performance out of the PS2 hardware?
Jason Rubin: We're always pushing the hardware. It's always hard no matter what system it is, no matter what we're doing. The nice thing about Jak II is the fact that since we already had a base engine, we weren't struggling to get gameplay up. The gameplay immediately came up under the old engine. At that point we could just improve. We could do more smaller special effects like lightning, distortions, the lens flares and glows that you see all over. The icing, as opposed to what we had to do in Jak & Daxter, which was just get a game up. So it really was nice to be able to do the more detail work this time around as opposed to the vital engine stuff that we had to do last game.
Advertisement
GameSpy: So, a lot of the stuff from the first engine's come back for this second-generation engine?
Jason Rubin: Yes. Everything from the first engine game back, some parts were rewritten and improved, and then additional engines like the lightning you saw and then the glows that are happening everywhere. We have more glows onscreen than just about anyone else I've ever seen -- stuff like that was additionally added on to the engine that was already there.
GameSpy: Why do you think other studios have trouble getting such performance out of the PS2?
Jason Rubin: The big advantage that Naughty Dog has is that Sony backs Naughty Dog with a huge amount of resources that we can spend on programming talent. We have a lot more programmers than most studios can afford; we have better programmers than a lot of studios can afford. It's not a level playing field in video games. There's smaller teams, there's bigger teams, there's publishers that help you out more, there's publishers that help you out less. Additionally, we have the advantage that we get to share technology across all of Sony's internal studios. Mark of Kri's sound tool is now our sound tool. The stuff that Zipper Interactive was doing with progressive scan, they sent us the code for it. And Insomniac which isn't even owned by Sony, and Naughty Dog share engine code back and forth. A lot of teams have an, "If it wasn't done here, we don't want it" attitude -- the programmers want to do it themselves. We have a, "If we can get it in the game, get it in the game" attitude. We don't care who did it ... so long as it's up for grabs, we'll take it. That gives us a great advantage.
GameSpy: Could you see having a possible future side business of licensing your technology to other developers?
Jason Rubin: I don't know whether we'd ever license our technology to other development groups outside of Sony that involves a lot of maintenance and support and things like that that would probably cut into us making games. But we already share internally in Sony, and as we go forward and systems get more difficult, I can see Sony internally sharing more. It'll be harder and harder to make games in the future. This is not the pinnacle of difficulty, this is just the ramp-up toward the next generation and the generation after that, so I think you'll see a lot more sharing between companies.
GameSpy: Jak & Daxter ran at 60 fps, and Jak II will run at 60. Is there a certain design philosophy behind this?
Jason Rubin: The most important thing about running at a good framerate is that your button input is read at the framerate you're running. So when you're running at 30 frames per second, your character has the ability to change what he's doing 30 times per second. If you're 60 frames per second he has literally double the input, which is effectively saying he's twice as controllable. You have much more detail in what you're doing. Certain games do okay at low framerates, I tend to really steer away from slow framerate. I think as a company culture we don't like slow framerate games, so we always try to peg it at 60. There will be times because of the open nature of the game where if there's enough guys -- you can run away from guys and they'll keep chasing you -- so if you keep running you'll keep getting more and more guys around you and eventually it'll get to the point where the system slows down. So it is possible to run at 30 frames, but we try to maintain 60 as much as we can. I think especially in the character action genre that is an absolute necessity.
GameSpy: What is the single greatest improvement in Jak II?
Jason Rubin: That's a hard question to answer...
GameSpy: Just one.
Jason Rubin: I think the single most important thing that we've done with this game is that we've allowed the player to use all of the mechanics that we give them on all of the levels all of the time. So you can use all of Jak I's moveset, the guns, interangeably at any given time, the hoverboard, the Dark Jak moveset ... it's all around, all the time. It's not like you can only use Dark Jak in certain levels and only use the gun in other levels and things like that. We allow you an absolutely massive moveset by layering all those things on top of each other, and make the game truly integrated as opposed to a bunch of stuff strung together where we setup a puzzle, give you a solution, and let you go through it. We setup a puzzle, give you multiple solutions, and let you go through it. And that I think is the single most important differentiation between us and all other games out there.
Ratchet & Clank started to show some of that, we were really excited by it, but you still only could use your skate boots on the rail ... the rail boots, I don't remember what they were called. You could only use your magnetic boots in the magnetic area, so while you could change some of your guns you couldn't change everything all the time. We allow you to pull out your board in the most ridiculous situations in the world and use it, and if it kills you then you won't do it again. We really do allow you to do a lot more of that interchangeability and I think that's the single biggest improvement, and gamers will recognize that.
GameSpy: So do you think it's fair to say that while your story is linear, your gameplay is non-linear in a sense, because you have multiple ways to conquer the objectives...
Jason Rubin: Yes, exactly. The game overall feels less constrained even though from a story standpoint it's far more constrained. Having said that, there are still branches in the story. Sometimes you have two or three, maybe even four options that you can do at any given time. But it's not as open as Jak & Daxter; most people play through the game one time. If you play through the game one time it's always linear, right? Because you're always choosing one specific path. It only becomes non-linear if you go back and play a second time and decide to play it in a different order.
GameSpy: What are your top three platform games of all time?
Jason Rubin: Let's see ... that's a difficult one. I was absolutely addicted to the first Donkey Kong Country. I really thought that the way they setup their gameplay -- which was the foundation for Crash Bandicoot really, more than Mario was -- was stunning. I liked a bunch of the Marios, I don't really remember which one I liked most. It's been a while and they all blur together. And I was a real big fan of the first Sonic.
3D, if you want to go into more recently, I loved Mario 64 but I wasn't wild about Sunshine. I didn't think that they had added enough to Sunshine to make it really that different. And I liked Spyro ... 2 the best of the Spyros. I really liked Spyro 2.
GameSpy: A lot of those games are old -- this is really a classic genre. Why do you think platforming has seen a resurgence lately?
Jason Rubin: As a new system starts, these games ... different games take different amounts of work. A game like ATV though it's a brilliant game is much more constrained than a character action game. You make the ATV mechanic, you make the human on top of it mechanic, you make your levels, you're done. You don't have to do as much as we do for a game like Jak & Daxter, with a seamless world with different vehicle types, the enemy AI. The AI is much simpler in a racing game. I know this because we did Crash Team Racing, which is a much more constrained game. So it takes a while to design a new character and on a new system to get an engine powerful enough to show all this stuff.
One of the reasons I don't like a lot of the recent games is that people have decided that the character action genre is a specific type of game and they're not pushing the limits. Look at a game like Ty. It's just not exciting. It's old news. I don't like fuzzy characters anymore. I don't like animals with attitude anymore. It's been done, it's old, we're moving on, we're doing something new now. Personally, if I see a game that looks like a Nintendo 64 or PlayStation game in high-res, I'm not excited by it. What could we do now that we couldn't do then? Jak II. And Jak I, too. And Ratchet is another good example of a game you couldn't do on the previous console, it just didn't have the power to do it. You could have done Ty. You could have done Sly Cooper, which is a good game, but to me it's a little old-generation with new graphics. Fixed movement through the worlds, very very straightforward gameplay. I like the game a lot, but it doesn't excite me the same way because it sort of hearkens back. Blinx was interesting, but it didn't come together quite right.
GameSpy: I ... didn't like Blinx.
Jason Rubin: Yeah, interesting idea though. At least they tried something new, gotta give them credit for that. They tried something that was truly original, it just didn't quite come together well.
GameSpy: Along those lines, where do you see the genre going in the future?
Jason Rubin: It's an interesting question. I think that the genre has to expand beyond simple levels and simple tasks, and that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to create a story more like a Metal Gear, although it took 1,500 messages on message boards to figure out what Metal Gear's plot really was. But Metal Gear does have at least a story going with it. We're trying for something along the lines of the Onimushas or the Devil May Crys or something where you have that kind of story going along with it. And we're also trying to add a little of the excitement you get out of Grand Theft Auto being able to do things different ways. Throw on top of that the Tony Hawk ability to grind and just sort of have fun with the environments you're in, and the other stuff that we also throw in from other little games here and there and hopefully bring the genre into more of a world and less of a game with levels that are just set out there. So you feel like you're really in an environment as opposed to playing a game.
GameSpy: So you're navigating an environment and encountering challenges that grow naturally out of that environment.
Jason Rubin: Exactly. And there's things going on in the environment, plot points that are sending you in specific directions. But if you go somewhere else there's still a world there and there's still stuff going on. That's kind of what we're trying to do.
GameSpy: Do you see Naughty Dog remaining at the forefront of platform game development in the future?
Jason Rubin: It's hard to say what we'll do. At the end of every game we try to figure out what we want to do next, and at some point that may not be a character action game -- no promises. I think we'll continue to try to push forward whatever genre we work in. We try at this point to lead as opposed to follow, and I say that knowing that back in the days we were doing Way of the Warrior we were in a lot of ways ripping off everybody else. But I think now what we're doing with Jak II, we're actually pushing the genre as opposed to pulling along behind.
GameSpy: What were some of the new ideas that Mr. Yasuhara brought to the development process?
Jason Rubin: He brings a real openness to do kind of ... wacky stuff that we never would have done. We were much more structured than he is. There's this one thing that he put in the game in one of the levels that we haven't shown yet that reminds me of Yasuhara's style. We have a hoverboard, right? So he created a tube to go through that has holes in the sides of it and it rotates. And it's a simple thing, but it requires some pretty complex timing to get through. And it's just something we never would have done, because we never pushed. It required Andy, as a programmer, to totally redo the way board was done, because it meant that the board had to handle the rotating pipe that you're going through. But it was cool. It's visually simple, easy to understand what you need to do, but with very complex gameplay. That's the kind of thing he does. That's what he did with Sonic.
Visually it's very easy to see what you have to do, but it has complex gameplay. He's really, really good at that stuff. And he's really good at just kind of creating little mini-universes where things are kind of interesting in themselves. He did this one area where you have these floating boxes and it's a puzzle. And you just have to hit the boxes in exactly the right direction at the right time to open it up and create a path. That stuff is his hallmark. He does all that stuff.
GameSpy: You touched on physics a bit when talking about the rotating pipe. Do you think enhanced or better physics will be a large part of future platform games?
Jason Rubin: Yes and no. The vehicles in our city are physics-based. The hoverboard is not physics-based, because it plays better as a classic hack, which is what Jak's movement is too. Jak is not physics-based, Jak is a hack. When you try to create a physics-based character, you end up losing the control that you have when you do a hack and allow, for example, the character to leap off the ground in the same frame that you hit the button. When you do a physics model he has to recoil and jump and that ruins the gameplay, because it takes too long and you have to think too far ahead.
GameSpy: In the early 1990's you made a game called Rings of Power that a rather risque Easter egg. Do you think that would fly today?
Jason Rubin: Yes, I think it would fly today, but I don't think we would do it. We've grown up. We were 18 years old when we put that in and we did it because we thought it was cool at the time. I have new responsibilities as the president of a company owned by Sony. I don't really have a problem and I don't regret putting it in, but it's not the kind of thing that a company of 45 people with a multi-million dollar budget tends to do. It's the kind of thing that a couple kids sitting in their den do when they're 18 years old.
GameSpy: Who does your hair? It's ... fabulous.
Jason Rubin: I do it, what are you... Actually I haven't had a haircut in two months.
GameSpy: Oh, you ... you're dispelling the magic now.
Jason Rubin: It's true, I don't cut it.
If i had a dollar for every time i ran out of hair in the middle of a spoon making contest id only eat your children with a side of slaw and THOSE ARENT PILLOWS!!