Resistance: Fall of Man Dev Team Interview

IGN sat down with the Insomniac Games development team behind Resistance: Fall of Man to discuss all the hot topics that we’ve picked up on before: all those weapons, the 40-man multiplayer frag-fest, and of course, that it’s so big only a PS3, Cell, and Blu-Ray could handle it. Along the way they drop in hints about the two lead characters, tilt control, and some strategic pointers to keep in mind when the Chimera come a-knocking this fall.

Insomniac definitely tailor-made Resistance for the capabilities of the PS3. Brushing aside all those criticisms that developing for Sony‘s next-gen console would be a challenge (and that’s putting those criticisms mildly), they cite the parallel processing capabilities of the PS3 and the storage capacity of Blu-Ray as key to unleashing all that the game has got (from graphics to physics to AI, all on a massive scale and simuultaneously). “It would have been very, very difficult to create Resistance on any other platform” – including the PC.

Read on for the rest of the interview.

IGN sat down with the Insomniac Games development team behind Resistance: Fall of Man to discuss all the hot topics that we’ve picked up on before: all those weapons, the 40-man multiplayer frag-fest, and of course, that it’s so big only a PS3, Cell, and Blu-Ray could handle it. Along the way they drop in hints about the two lead characters, tilt control, and some strategic pointers to keep in mind when the Chimera come a-knocking this fall.

Insomniac definitely tailor-made Resistance for the capabilities of the PS3. Brushing aside all those criticisms that developing for Sony‘s next-gen console would be a challenge (and that’s putting those criticisms mildly), they cite the parallel processing capabilities of the PS3 and the storage capacity of Blu-Ray as key to unleashing all that the game has got (from graphics to physics to AI, all on a massive scale and simuultaneously). “It would have been very, very difficult to create Resistance on any other platform” – including the PC.

One other capability that Resistance will use is the tilt controller. The team’s not giving anything away just yet, though, but fully recognize that some people’s style of play may not be appropriate for a controller that’s also a tilt-sensitive device. In other words, those who can’t control their hand movements while playing the game. So they’re including the option to disable all the tilt-sensing functions in that case.

As for the 40-player online, Insomniac made the decision to scale up once they say the 32-player-capable demo at E3 run solidly at 60 frames per second – and they saw the “lukewarm” reaction to those numbers. Since they wanted to show just how bad-*** they can get, they decided to pump in more players, more stuff, and more stuff blowing up. They had to drop the framerate to 30 frames/sec., though, but they ran the game through a torture test of artificially high latency and packet loss to make sure it would run smoothly. Both single and multiplayer are locked to 30fps.

Besides multiplayer, weapons count has also been ramped up into this game. One of the things they did to balance out these weapons – so that all of them would be useful, and not just simply the top-tier ones – was specialization. “Many of our weapons are wonderfully powerful, but only if used in the correct time and context… The weapon designs are meant to encourage strategic choices between weapons from situation to situation, and the added strategy that comes from that will help players through the second and third play-through.”

And with that and massive levels to burst through in both singleplayer and multiplayer, there will be more than one path to victory. “The game accommodates a huge variety of play styles, and the player is encouraged to experiment… The player will have opportunities to choose multiple tactics and paths in order to overcome certain challenges, such as our massive battlefields, and there will also be more restricted environments. These allow us to control timing and suspense, and offer some fantastic one-off events, such as the Burrower that crashes through the walls at the end of our E3 trailer.”