Manos Vezos: So. If you could properly introduce yourselves, for starters.
Tom Heaton: OK. My name is Tom Heaton and I’m the Game Director of Man Of Medan.
Manos Vezos: OK. So, for all intends and purposes you kind of ruined me. I had prepared several questions and I obviously wasn’t anticipating the multiplayer aspect of the game.
(Laughs)
Manos Vezos: So, I guess my first question is… what got into you?
(Laughs)
Tom Heaton: OK. So, uh, this has been the plan all along. That’s the first thing. The whole game and every game in the series has been built with multiplayer in mind, local multiplayer in mind and server play, from the ground up, from the start. You have to do it that way because it’s not like we can add it later. And it was partly a response to the way we saw people play Until Dawn. So one of the things that we saw is that people played it in a very social way. We thought we‘d made a single-player game but what happened was… everybody, well, not everybody, people invited friends around and played it together, on a sofa, they kind of called out what they should do in the decisions and they talked about it and things and we thought that was amazing. So one of the multiplayer modes is Movie Night and is kind of an enabling of that. People put their names in and are assigned a character and they kind of own their characters. Local multiplayer, you pass the controller around and it’s fun, it’s a party and the fun comes from being with other people.
Manos Vezos: This basically harkens back to your PlayLink experiments, I suppose.
Tom Heaton: It’s related to them but it’s much more how we… it’s much more about Until Dawn, how we saw people play Until Dawn, but of course we learnt stuff from PlayLink, yes, absolutely. So that’s a fun mode, you know, it’s good fun to play with friends. But at some point, someone said, wouldn’t it be cool if a friend of mine could play one of the other characters while I’m playing the game, you know, if a friend could join me in the full game. And we thought that was a bit crazy actually because it’s, this is, it’s quite difficult to do that. But we built a demo, a simple 2-player demo, a tiny demo, really all you could do was walk around in an area and have a conversation. But everyone we gave that demo to said, this is great, I love it. So we thought, OK, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna make a game out of this.
Manos Vezos: OK. So where’s that someone with that idea now? Why isn’t he here?
(Laughs)
Manos Vezos: Anyhow. I noticed, I don’t know if it’s going to be the same in the final form of the game, the different players don’t actually communicate among themselves. Just for clarity’s sake, you have the Movie Night Mode, but that’s not the only multiplayer mode in the game, Movie Night Mode is basically 4-player couch co-op.
Tom Heaton: 5-player. 2 to 5 player couch co-op.
Manos Vezos: While the other mode allows the cooperation between two different players.
Tom Heaton: Yeah.
Manos Vezos: Online only?
Tom Heaton: Yeah, so that’s Shared Story, it’s online 2 player co-op. And you can play the whole story line, you share the story with a friend, all the way through. Sometimes you are in the same location and in the same interaction and you’re having a conversation or you’re doing something together or you’re making choices. Sometimes you’re in the same location but you’re doing different things, you’re exploring around, you’re trying to get out of the ship or whatever, and sometimes you’re in completely different locations and you don’t know what the other player is doing at all.
Manos Vezos: And I suppose choices you make then must have some impact to the other one’s experience.
Tom Heaton: So, yeah, every, every choice you make in one of our games, changes the game in some way. Sometimes in a really massive way, sometimes in quite a small way, the choices that other player makes change the course of the game, so you’re no longer in complete control of the game, you’ve got another player who could ruin what your carefully conceived plans are.
Manos Vezos: And I suppose you don’t really know what, assuming both players aren’t in the same place, there’s no way to know what the other side is doing and how that affects you. You get some small messaging sometimes…
Tom Heaton: Sometimes you can see what they’re doing. And especially in the build you just played, a lot of the time, you can see what the other player is doing, you can kind of see their thought processes while you can see what they’re doing. Sometimes, you’re right, you have no idea what the other player is doing. When you meet up again, they kind of have to communicate some of that information to you and make sure you have enough information to understand the story. Sometimes… we call it co-op, ultimately you are both trying to take all of the characters out alive, but sometimes you have slightly different agendas. Sometimes there might be an item, for example, that is useful to your character and you have to decide if you’re gonna keep it or give it to the other character, so sometimes you’re a little bit set against each other. Sometimes one of you might know something and you can choose whether to share that information or to hide it. So there’s cool stuff we can do.
Manos Vezos: You’re sharing such information through pre-determined in-game dialog though.
Tom Heaton: Through conversations. Yes, that’s right.
Manos Vezos: It’s not like I can somehow talk to the other side.
Tom Heaton: You can use party chat.
Manos Vezos: Obviously, I can…
Tom Heaton: Some people will and some people won’t. Of course you can talk directly to your friend. It’s the modern world.
Manos Vezos: Obviously but I feel the lack of communication, built-in communication, is a choice you made deliberately. Is that so?
Tom Heaton: No, no, really no. The built-in communication is at system level, so if you’re both playing on PS4, then you can communicate through the PS4. We don’t have to do anything to enable you to do that. It’s already there.
Manos Vezos: So in your mind there’s no canonical way to approach this.
Tom Heaton: No. There’s no canonical way. It’s completely up to the player. They can play it solo mode, maybe that’s their preferred way of doing it, they can play Shared Story with a friend, they can play Movie Night with a bunch of friends, they can all talk to each other or decide not to communicate at all, they can do something in between, you know, they can play it a couple of evenings or they can play it all in a evening. However you like.
Manos Vezos: How would you prefer to play it?
Tom Heaton: I would play, but it is only how I would play it…
Manos Vezos: Naturally.
Tom Heaton: I would play it, and this will be true of other games in The Dark Pictures series which I’m connected with, I would try to find a friend and play it co-op. I think it’s such a cool feature, and I wouldn’t communicate, first time out, and in any subsequent playthrough I would communicate, yeah. That’s how I would do it.
Manos Vezos: The things is, having a chat right after trying the game, actually changed my perception of a certain scene. Me and another guy realised we were actually in the same room, as the two different soldiers and we both saw the same kind of monster but the thing is that monster was actually the other player. And we had no idea. And at that point we had to make a semiconscious choice to either attack or not. And I thought that was really really interesting in the sense that the only way for me as a player to realise what really went on at that point was to have a chat about it after that. Is this one of the things that you’re trying more in an one-off capacity or something that you intend to build on later on? The one-off approach isn’t something I consider demeaning, you can have many little delicious tidbits trying things…
Tom Heaton: The thing about having two players in there is it gives a wide range of interesting things you can do narratively. And it’s not so much about game features, so much as narrative. We’ve always been a studio that builds these strong narratives with strong characters and interesting twists and turns so, and we have a flexible enough game system to be able to support narratives like that. So if we can think of interesting narrative things, then we can make it work as a game. That’s the way we go. What’s cool? What’s a really good story to tell? And then how do we make that work in a branching dialogue? In a branching game, sorry.
Manos Vezos: Um, by now it’s obvious to anyone that you’re actually, as a studio, committed to horror.
Tom Heaton: Yeah.
Manos Vezos: And you’ve tried your luck in a number of ways. Until Dawn was a high point, for sure, you tried VR, you tried things like Hidden Agenda, and am I forgetting anything, but you seem to be pretty committed. I remember from our last chat last year that you were saying you’ve identified dozens of different flavours of horror and you can see yourself pulling from them as you build out the Anthology and whatnot. Even so we get many, let’s say, indie horror productions. The horror genre is not exactly extinct or anything, we don’t get many bigger productions, bigger horror productions such as yours. So in a sense you end up being, wanting it or not, much like an ambassador for what a horror game can be and can do. Are you even conscious of that at this point? Or do you just go with the flow?
Tom Heaton: It’s not a daily concern. That’s certainly true because we have a much bigger concern, we’re trying to make a really good game that our audience we like. We are aware, just not as an ambassador but I see what you mean, for horror games, yes, we’re very proud of it, we love horror and it’s true we’re proud of our production values. So that’s, so definitely… and we’re trying to innovative in the narrative game space. And this is a very innovative feature and we’re very proud of it. It is about pushing forward and constantly pushing ourselves to get better.
Manos Vezos: That’s exactly why I’m asking. Because one team may end up doing the same thing because someone thought it was cool and a different team may do the same thing because they actually think it’s an interesting step for the genre as a whole. Which do you fall on?
Tom Heaton: Oh, we are definitely looking. I mean no one else has done this sort of 2 player stuff in narrative games so that gives you a clue. No way we could copy to do that and it’s bold feature because no one knows if it works. And it’s very difficult to get it to work. We had to learn a lot and try a lot of things out, we have a tool we used to make the game very early on, which gives a very lo-fi version of the game, just images and text. But it works with two players. So we could get two players, both with their own controller, both with their own TV and we can play the game in this very lo-fi form. And we played it over and over and over again spotting problems and it meant we could fix them very quickly because it’s so lo-fi. And there were loads of problems that we didn’t anticipate. That demo, cool as it was, it didn’t answer, it didn’t even show us all the problems. So there was a lot to learn and it will take people a while to catch up with us if they try and imitate us. And we’ll be looking to do the next thing and push a bit further in the format.
Manos Vezos: Do you think you’ll be trying to do that within the Anthology or would you…
Tom Heaton: I have no idea at the moment. At the moment we’re just trying to make the game we’ve committed to make.
Manos Vezos: This is a horror game or a series of horror games in any capacity, so I feel obligated to ask about audio. Audio is, really, usually left out of the conversation but has quite the different kind of importance in a horror game. So I was curious about whether you’re going to support positional audio of any kind.
Tom Heaton: Ooh. I…
Manos Vezos: Because it could make a difference in this kind of game.
Tom Heaton: I don’t know the answer to that, I’m not technical enough. I believe we do fully support positional audio in the sense that audio is placed 3D in the world. I don’t know if that’s quite what you mean because I’m not technical enough.
Manos Vezos: It’s not exactly that but I get what you’re trying to say.
Tom Heaton: So we certainly take audio very very seriously, we have a very good audio department. You’re right that it’s important and it’s… one of the things we know about horror is that everything has to be there. You know, the visuals, the timing of things, audio as well, because if you get everything else right and the audio wrong then the whole scare doesn’t work. And those guys hate us because they’re last in the pipeline. So everything else gets made and then…
Manos Vezos: Audio guys, the fun guys. Always. Always.
Tom Heaton: And they complain that they’re left last. But they do a great job. They do an essential job.
Manos Vezos: Is there any point, maybe after finishing the game once, or anything of the sort, that I get to have, as a player I get clear picture of what my choices meant? Think, I don’t know, maybe a less elaborate way than Detroit’s. I don’t really mind not knowing, that’s not really the point. But some players really want to know if their choices really had impact, that’s it’s not an illusion or anything.
Tom Heaton: Alright. There’s two aspects to that. So the first thing is all I can say and I say this a lot in interviews is that every choice has an impact.
Manos Vezos: You understand that it’s a phrase that’s being thrown out…
Tom Heaton: I know. OK. So sometimes, it has a massive impact. It’s gonna cause the death of a character or a major plot twist. Sometimes it has quite a small impact. It might just that one character thinks slightly different about yours or says something that you change a trait or something like that, but those things build up and come back to have an impact later. It is easily the most branching game we’ve done, many times more branching than Until Dawn, but it’s one of our rules. Every single choice matters. And it’s a difficult rule, because it means someone has to go and think of why this choice matters and they have to go away and create another little bit of content to justify that choice being made. So that’s the first bit. Every choice matters. Yes, we do have a system which will show you… well, we haven’t gone the Detroit route because we don’t want to show you this big flow chart, which is kind of too exact and gives away too much.
Manos Vezos: I happen to agree. I wasn’t a fan but even so…
Tom Heaton: No, it’s kind of mathematical isn’t it? But also, a flow chart would have to be massive, it would have to be huge. So we picked out the key cause and effect choices for the main kind of lines, we let the player know, because you did this, this happened, and then because you did this, this happened. It doesn’t tell you what would happen if you didn’t do that, but it allows you, when you get to the end of the game, you can go back in chapter select, you can choose a chapter and use this tool to kind of help you make different decisions and find out, maybe, go to different bits of the game. There’s another thing you can do. When you finish, completely finish the game, you unlock a mode called the Curator’s Cut. And that allows you to play from, to play the whole game again, from a different character’s perspective.
Manos Vezos: And that’s completely up to me? Am I actually choosing the character I’ll play?
Tom Heaton: No. It’s, it’s, you use the other character from the Shared Story. So it’s just… but it allows you, for example, if you prefer to play a game solo, you can access all the content that you would have access to through Shared Story. And it means you can go and make different decisions, go down different routes sometimes, find all the secrets and all the trophies. It’s just a tool to help replayability. And it is… you get it straight away if you pre-order. Eventually we’ll release it to everyone.
Manos Vezos: I think I saw something on a poster about it being released for free later on or something.
Tom Heaton: Yeah, that’s right.
Manos Vezos: OK. Since you’ve already dabbled in VR, do you think it’d be interesting, in a game such as this, not to convert it to a VR game -that would be a different undertaking altogether-, but maybe allow the player to use the VR headset just to look around and maybe feel more of a part of the environment? That simple.
Tom Heaton: It certainly isn’t in any of our current plans to use VR at all. As you said we’ve done VR as a studio and we’re very keen on VR, we really like it and we’ve had success with those experiments. But it is a very different… one thing people have learnt about VR is that you can’t just convert games that are 2D into VR games. They’re very different experiences. And although you gain something by going to VR, you also lose something as well. And what we’re trying to do with Man Of Medan and The Dark Pictures is give a cinematic, a classic cinematic experience. So that really has to be, you know, 2D. Well, not 2D of course, it’s 3D…
Manos Vezos: I get it, I get it.
Tom Heaton: OK.
Manos Vezos: So thanks for your time.
Tom Heaton: Not at all, thank you.
Manos Vezos: I wish the best of luck with the launch.
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