Midway's Simon Woodroffe on Wheelman
We get behind the wheel with the lead designer
Overall, we've found it an entirely positive experience. For me personally its been really enlightening and really rewarding. Especially now I can sit down with our testers afterwards and really get to the bottom of what they find frustrating. We want challenge, not frustration. So, we want to get to the bottom. It can be surprising. The most useful lesson they taught us was how to introduce brand new features - the cyclone, the melee - in a way they could understand while driving at 90 miles an hour. We don't want to keep stopping the game. We don't want forced tutorials. We want them to pick up these things on the move. Its a whole different challenge to do that in a car at 90 miles an hour, than it is when you're on foot. How you teach mechanics needs to be tailored. So we encourage those moves. Most people leave the initial stages fully armed, and then they can spend the rest of the game using these things how they see fit.
The controls are of course fairly crucial. What challenges have you faced?
Our goal from the outset was to make the controller as accessible as possible, and in many ways this means using as few buttons as possible. At least, that's how its kind of talked about - in terms of accessibility. But, really, it comes down to being able guess what will happen when you press a particular button. Everyone knows that steering makes a car turn; that the hand-brake makes it turn faster, etc. We had a lot of assumed knowledge. But we also have a lot of help assistants under the hood that help you be a better driver without taking away the sense of the player being in control. We didn't want an auto-pilot. We want an experience where the player feels in control, but helps the player do cool stuff. So, in most games you can't hit a hand-brake turn into a narrow alleyway; but in Wheelman everyone can. There's a lot of systems that help you do that, but it still feels like you've done it yourself.
A sense of the cinematic is key?
Yes. It isn't cinematic to crash into a wall and come to a dead stop. It's much more cinematic to scrape down an alleyway, bouncing between the walls, knocking over stuff, etc. We have a lot of assistants that aid this. There's a lot of really cool tech there, that sits between the player's controller and how the vehicle handles. I can't go into too much detail because its stuff we've kind of prototyped and made in this studio, that we want to use on future games... hopefully you'll get a sense in Wheelman that you're a cool, in-control, ultimate driver. Not like you're being driven. You'll be able to pull off amazing moves, etc.
Midway's business issues have been fairly well documented in recent weeks. Does this hang over your heads?
Honestly? Probably not. When you've had two to three years of your life invested in a project - some people have been on it three-and-a-half-years - it takes over your life in some ways. Ultimately, we're all here to make this game as good as possible. Midway will sort their issues our independently. The best way we can do to help them to help themselves to help this studio is to make Wheelman as good as possible. From our points of view it is slightly concerning, but I don't feel there is a need to be particularly concerned by it... although I can see how it looks to the outside world, internally it isn't a big deal. We still need to make Wheelman as good a game as possible. There's no reason not to do that.
It was in interesting... I was interviewing Ensemble's Graeme Devine a few weeks ago, and he said that despite the studio's imminent closure his team were not "mailing in" the game.
Good game developers are all about the game they're working on, right. In the future I wonder if it'll evolve to a more movie-like structure where people make a game then move on and so on. I think recently that has been discussed. You really do get attached to the project more than anything. As long as Midway's problems don't impact Wheelman then that's all good.
With that in mind, what would you like to do with a potential Wheelman 2?
Well, whether it'll be Wheelman 2 or just a spiritual successor... there's certainly some really cool technology. We've got a streaming world working in Unreal, we've got all the advanced driving moves, all the helper systems that have taken a long time to develop. They would find a place in any game we'd want to make next. It would be great to take the next steps. Wheelman's given us an awesome platform to start making a real, genuinely competitive open-world game, something that could compete with GTA or games like it. I think that from the platform we have now we'll be able to focus on the gameplay mechanics. Iteration. Cool and original stuff, as opposed to having to solve all the basic problems that every developer trying to get into this genre faces.
Not only that, Midway is sharing technology despite its critics, and is basically at the point now where it is mature enough so that we can take the systems we might want from other studios and use them in our own product. I used the example last time of taking the grappling from TNA Impact, we won't necessarily do that, but its an illustration of what we could do. Of course, there is integration time - none of these things come for free - but its a better position to be in, having a released wrestling franchise to pull technology from, and the experience of having worked with technology makes it a much more realistic proposition. As designer its great... our blue skies are bluer than other people's in many respects.
Sharing of technology and functionality is important?
It's a big thing for Midway, yes. It isn't exactly the smoothest road to get there... because everyone wants to share with everyone else and everyone wants to borrow, but no one had - previously - released a final product using the technology. So, they weren't de-bugged, there were problems. It became a situation where every stage was almost a negative thing. It was costing more than it was gaining. But recently the success rate has gone through the roof. This is evident in the demoes Midway are now producing... new games going forward. Other studios are able to pull areas of tech or resources they need from other teams, that enables them to put together demoes and prototypes much more quickly than in the past. Which enables Midway to make better decisions about which games to continue developing, and which to stop work on, earlier on. This is a strong place to be, basically. As a designer it's great... and the other main advantage is that you have access to a knowledge pool. I think its about 600 people, working with the Unreal engine across five studios. That includes Chicago, which is a big studio in and of itself. All those people have done almost anything you could want to do with Unreal, and because we have access it makes solving problems a lot easier.
Thanks very much for your time, Simon.
No problem, lovely to speak to you.
