HEAVENLY SWORD AT 3ROOMS

Ninja Theory’s Tameem Antoniades and Andy ‘Gollum’ Serkis, who brings a mighty motion capture performance to Heavenly Sword, popped along to the Three Speech event at 3Rooms last week, answering a bunch of questions from those in attendance.

Read on for their thoughts on cut scenes, Blu-Ray, emotional engagement, the making of Heavenly Sword and more.

ON CUT SCENES

Tameem Antoniades: “A common misperception is that we have voice acting in the games. We don’t have voice acting. Every performance is a real performance. In terms of cut scenes, we took things quite a bit further than is traditionally done in video games.”

Andy Serkis: “Tameem’s intention was to elevate the cut scenes to dramatic pieces, so that you actually care about the characters and feel an emotional connection with them – it wasn’t just a bit of extra story telling bunged in which you got when you reached the next level.

He asked me to get involved. I came from a dramatic perspective, not a gaming perspective. Through my experience working on motion capture characters such as Gollum and King Kong, I thought we could find this fusion between gaming and narrative storytelling, and make the character much more engaging.

We rehearsed it like a play or film. We sat round a table with everyone at Ninja Theory and said let’s work with Weta Digital in New Zealand, who I’d worked with over a number of years, and take this into a more dramatic environment. It really pushed Weta’s boundaries too, as they hadn’t work with multiple actors on stage before.

Traditionally scriptwriting and gaming have been two separate things. Tameem’s desire was to create a story which had a flow between cut scene and game play. This seemed like a tall order, as hardcore gamers want to get into the bit where they’re in control. But I said to the actors, let’s treat this like a film and if it’s engaging enough hardcore gamers will want to watch. Hopefully, there’s a marriage between both areas and it’s more of a rewarding experience as a whole.”

ON EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT

TA: “Despite our ambitions, what we’ve done on Heavenly Sword is just the beginning of what’s possible in terms of drama in video games. We engage players in every single level possible – it’s the only medium that actually engages the audience at a visceral level. One of the areas in games we’ve had trouble engaging people in is on a more emotional, meaningful level. If there’s one thing I hope after Heavenly Sword, it’s that more developers take up the mantle of motion capture and performance capture, and create games that genuinely have feeling behind them.”

AS: “If that happens, a lot of people will come over from the film industry – actors, directors, filmmakers, composers, visual effects artists. They are genuinely excited by the gaming industry; it just seems to me that the scripts have always let everything down; there isn’t an inexorable end point which is focusing everybody. If scripts become really great in gaming, you may see a massive fusion between gaming and film.”

TA: “I’m keen to point out that gaming is the most diverse medium every created. There’s nothing that says you have to have stories and nothing to say you don’t. Warhawk is a great example of play – it’s pure play. Heavenly Sword is a good example of being a hero. Whether you feel part of it is your call – it’s an interactive thing; either you like the story-based games or you don’t.

ON THE SUGGESTION THAT BLU-RAY MAY ENCOURAGE DEVELOPERS TO FAVOUR CUT SCENES AND MOVIE MATERIAL OVER ACTUAL GAMING

TA: “In my experience, it’s not storage that makes developers go a certain way. With Blu-Ray, you have a lot of storage. 25 gigs is first generation; next year I think everything’s going to be 50 gigs. Then there’s 100 gigs and 200 gigs. As a developer, you’re always fighting against the limitations of the hardware, and so the more storage you have, the higher resolution textures, the more audio you can put on it. It’s just easing part of the development process – it’s not a bad thing. Nowadays, we just want to make the best we can with the equipment we have. The more we have, the better we can make it.

ON KAI, NARIKO’S LITTLE SISTER

TA: “She plays completely differently to Nariko – she’s got no melee combat but has an enormous pump action crossbow, so she has to play with more cunning. It breaks the pace between the brutal full-on combat.

We wanted to create a real relationship between Nariko and Kai, so as you play, you start to feel an attachment. A lot of Kai’s game play is more about duck and cover. The way the narrative is played is more film-like, so you play as Kai and then the action passes over to Nariko at certain points.”

ON THE APPEAL OF HEAVENLY SWORD

AS: “Because I was never a massive gamer myself, what I’ve strived for is a purity and artistic truth. I think it could appeal to a family audience – I think gaming can command an intelligence of story writing and script writing in this area. I think it’s an arena that could be opened up to a much wider audience. Wouldn’t it be interesting to make a game of Macbeth or to find a way that brings text like Shakespeare to life through a game? So I am coming at it through a dramatic keyhole, not a hardcore gaming perspective. In rehearsals I was encouraging the actors to treat it as seriously a project as they would a film or play.”

TA: “We workshopped and came up with little relationships between the characters, and it doesn’t mean we have to have big long cut scenes to explain it - it’s just little snippets of dialogue here and there, and you understand a little bit of the personality behind the characters, so it gives the fight scenes more meaning. This is something that Andy brought to the project. As a traditional games developer we’d never have explored this.

AS: “The technology’s arrived where you can actually bring characters to life. They’re still fantasy characters, they’re still larger than life, but they’re based in a dramatic truth. If you’re going to have characters in a game that look extraordinary, let’s give them a life.”

ON WHETHER A TIME WILL COME WHEN CUT SCENES ARE FULLY INTERGRATED IN THE DYNAMIC OF THE GAME

TA: “Will that time come? Yes and no. We’ve explored a little bit of this in Heavenly Sword but we haven’t fully explored the concept of gaming as a film language. I believe games are going to develop an interactive language. Games are all about pacing - sometimes you want to be fully in control and pressing lots of buttons, other times you want to ease off. But there will be a point where you always have control in the game play, but the level of control varies.”

In addition, here’s a re-run of some interviews we filmed with the Ninja Theory team earlier this year.

Here’s our interview with Andy Serkis (he of Gollum in Lord Of The Rings fame), with him talking about the motion capture process and his role as King Bohan in Ninja Theory’s Heavenly Sword - a game he also worked on as dramatic director.

Here’s our interview with Sia Tong Man, lead combat designer at Ninja Theory, who tells all about combat systems, game play and core features:

Here’s our interview with Laura Kippax, lead character artist at Ninja Theory, who reveals the processes that were required to bring the unprecedented levels of reality into Heavenly Sword’s leading characters: