Des précisions sur le développement de Lost Odyssey

[Creutzfeldt-Jakob]

C'est au cours d'une entrevue accordée au site internet Gamasutra que Ray Nakazato, président de FeelPlus, a laissé filtrer quelques informations inédites au sujet du prochain jeu Mistwalker sur 360.

On y apprend d'abord que l'état d'avancement du jeu est presque parvenu au terme de son point d'orgue : le "remplissage", au bout duquel l'équipe se réserve encore un délai pour pouvoir bien peaufiner son jeu.

On y apprend ensuite que des lieux ont été sacrifiés au profit d'un cisèlement de l'ensemble et certaines des cut-scènes jugées trop superflues ont été sucrées.

On y récolte enfin quelques informations chiffrées : il y aura 1 heure de cinématique, à peu près 7 heures de cut-scènes, 300 à 400 différentes places et quelque 300 personnages.

Naturellement, le jeu est toujours prévu pour une sortie mondiale cette année.

[nicky]

un dvd de cut-scene, un dvd de cinématique, un dvd de map, un dvd de personnage

[Sitael]

Je penses que dans ce genre de cas M$ favorise le contenu téléchargeable et l'usage du HDD

Un hdd pour chaque jeu

[Galcian]

On y apprend ensuite que l'équipe s'est vu opposer un certain nombre de restrictions du fait d'une capacité de stockage limitée et que partant, des lieux ont été sacrifiés au profit d'un cisèlement de l'ensemble et certaines des cut-scènes jugées par trop superflues ont été sucrées

Le genre de choses complètement stupide à ne pas dire. Il veut qu'on achète son jeu ou quoi ?.

[Knobie]

Comme je l'ai déjà dit sur le très peu agréable JeuxVidéo.com, vous critiquez pour peu de chose.

Vous perdez quoi ? Une zone avec une fontaine et trois clampins qui n'apportent rien à l'histoire et vous pleurez ?

Au contraire, je préfére que l'on fasse l'impasse sur des choses futiles comme savoir que jusqu'a 200 ans Kaim aimait les pommes mais qu'après il a préféré des poires que de se retrouver avec des donjons artificiels qui gonflent la durée de vie.

Pour moi, la force première d'une production de maitre Sakaguchi, c'est d'allez directement à l'essentiel en nous appant dans l'histoire et dans l'univers que de se ballader 40 heures dans des couloirs ou l'on ne découvre finalement peu de choses. Puis bon, c'est le concept même du background :

Créer un univers et en conserver une partie afin de se concentrer dessus.

On y apprend ensuite que l'équipe s'est vu opposer un certain nombre de restrictions du fait d'une capacité de stockage limitée et que partant, des lieux ont été sacrifiés au profit d'un cisèlement de l'ensemble et certaines des cut-scènes jugées par trop superflues ont été sucrées

Moi je dit, tant mieux .... j'en suis bien content

[FanFFs]

Ce n'est pas à cause d'un problème de stockage, apparament Creutz s'est gourré... Ce n'est pas non plus une déclaration du directeur de Microsoft Japan, mais du président de FeelPlus... Bref, fixed.

[Creutzfeldt-Jakob]

Ah bon ? alors pourquoi le type dit qu'il "y'avait trop de cut-scene" qu'il fallait réduire le nombre de location etc ? Trop par rapport à quoi ?
Sinon pour le poste du mec, blimblim avait écrit "microsoft japan" et quand j'ai tapé son nom sur google, la seule occurence qui apparaissait disait qu'il était président de microsoft asia.

[FanFFs]

Bah Blimblim a du se gourrer. L'interview complète :
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070 ... d_01.shtml
Si tu peux citer la phrase où il dit qu'il n'y a pas assez de place.

[Creutzfeldt-Jakob]

Ah parce que d'après toi pourquoi ils sont astreint à virer des locations pour pouvoir en améliorer d'autres ?

[ikou]

Il me semble qu'il aurait pu avoir plus d'une heure de cinématique

[Knobie]

Gamasutra: And good distribution. But that aside, how has work been going on Lost Odyssey?

RN: It's going really well. There were some troubles, but it's all fixed now, and it's going very well. We're finishing up the content-side. The biggest task is content creation for that kind of game. And it’s almost done - we're satisfied with the result, and it's going to come out this year. We have a few more months, so we still have time to polish things.

Gamasutra: What is your direct involvement?

RN: I run the company, and we have director Daisuke Fukugawa from Square Enix. He worked on Legend of Mana. We also have production managers to do content production. In terms of what they’re making, I am kind of hands-off. I try not to say much about what they are making, so all I am doing now is project management. They tend to add more and more stuff. It's fine if they feel it’s important, but at the same time, if it really is important, they have to think of ways to cut out things that are less important and lower priority. Those kinds of things. I feel like I'm still educating the staff. It's 120 people, so a lot of things happen.

Gamasutra: Do you have any examples of things you needed to cut?

RN: We had 400 levels we had to make, so some had to be cut to make others better. Characters are fine. We've got about 300 characters. There's a little more than seven hours of real-time cutscenes. We determine priority: there are A Cutscenes, B Cutscenes, and C Cutscenes. There were too many A Cutscenes - the ones where we make them really good. We had to reduce the number of A Cutscenes and make more B Cutscenes.

Gamasutra: Are they all real-time?

RN: Out of those seven hours, one hour is prerendered, and six hours are real-time. They don't really look different, though, it’s almost the same. The prerendered scenes are for better lighting and for more visual effects like explosions or when a tower falls down. We needed prerendering for those scenes, but characters look almost the same.

Gamasutra: I didn't know that it was level-based, or did you mean scenarios?

RN: We had about 400 locations, I mean.

Gamasutra: How long has it been in actual production development?

RN: Sakaguchi started discussions in late 2003, but actual production started in early 2004. Over three years ago.

Gamasutra: That was well before the technology was ready.

RN: Yeah.

Gamasutra: What is (Panzer Dragoon director) Yukio Futatsugi's involvement?

RN: Nothing. When I joined Microsoft, he was already there, making Phantom Dust. We started new 360 projects, and he was the last (original) Xbox project – so he was doing that. After finishing Phantom Dust, out of the six new projects we were working, on, five used outside developers. The only one that was internal was Lost Odyssey, and that was done someone else (other than Futatsugi). We didn't have any plans to do more than six, so Futatsugi became more of a game design consultant for those projects. He checks deliverables, and sees if they’re ok, and things like that.

He’s still doing that. I think he should start a new project, but that doesn't seem to be possible within Microsoft Japan right now.

Gamasutra: That’s a shame, because he’s always really impressed me with his work. There’s Panzer Dragoon obviously, Panzer Dragoon Saga was great. But I beat Phantom Dust too – and I don’t feel the need to beat games that often. He’s got a great style and vision.
RN: He should join AQI!

Gamasutra: Sounds good to me! Anyway, in a talk earlier, Sakaguchi mentioned that Lost Odyssey would be a mix of real-time and turn-based combat. Can you say more about that?

RN: Basically, it's turn-based, but we put some real-time flavor to it. It's more strategic than real-time action. The basic structure is turn-based - you walk around in the adventure portion, then you encounter monsters, and it comes to a battle scene. It’s not seamless – it’s adventure, then battle, then adventure, then battle. As you progress, there will be a lot of things you have to concentrate on in the battle scenes, and also you'll need to focus on timing. It's turn-based, strategic combat with some real-time features.

Microsoft Studios Japan's Phantom Dust for the Xbox

Gamasutra: Sounds like it’s a little bit old school still. So you're using the Unreal Engine with Lost Odyssey?

RN: Yeah.

Gamasutra: Is Microsoft Japan fine with using external tools?

RN: It was hard, because it was a new platform, and Unreal Engine 3 itself was in development, so we had to deal with incomplete middleware. We actually released a Lost Odyssey demo in Japan in November, though we finished it in June of last year. Back then, the Unreal Engine was still incomplete, so we had to release something on incomplete middleware. That was hard. I think that demo was actually the first thing that was released using Unreal Engine 3; it was before Gears of War! We had to do a lot of workaround for that. Now that they've done Gears of War, the engine itself is much more stable.

Gamasutra: You probably had to remake a lot of stuff after the demo, then.

RN: Yeah. The most difficult thing was communication. Everything is in English. They have Japanese support, but it's limited. All the good stuff is happening in the newsgroup, but that's in English, and my developers were pretty much all Japanese.

Gamasutra: How important is it for your employees to know English?

RN: I think it's very important going forward. Because as I said, we chose to position ourselves as a high-end production company, so we have to be competitive in terms of technology. All the good technology comes first in the States, so we have to be in real-time for learning those technologies. To do that, you need to be able to read English. So for technology guys (it’s really important), suddenly.

If any developers working in America would like to work on games like this in Japan, we welcome them. It's good if they can speak Japanese, too, I mean they have to be bilingual in order to work with Japanese teams, but also get updated information from the States.

Gamasutra: How closely involved is Sakaguchi with the Lost Odyssey development?

RN: Pretty close. It was very close when we were starting up the project. There was a Mistwalker office - which is a really small company, so it's basically just Sakaguchi. It’s like the Sakaguchi office. It’s like three or four people in that office. So we rented a big space next to Mistwalker for about ten people. At the beginning of the project, we sent those ten people in next to Sakaguchi's office and did initial work. He was writing the story while that was happening.

Now that things are going well, he's more hands-off. We probably see him twice a month. He lives in Hawaii, so he spends half of his time in Japan and half in Hawaii. When he's in Hawaii, he writes a lot. When he's in Japan, he does more producer-oriented stuff. He's quite involved, and I think he’s coming in again now that the game's playable. He'll probably come up with a lot more comments. We try and satisfy him as much as possible. That will take place over the next few months.

Gamasutra: I’ve been hoping that, on the Square-Enix side, we’ll hear from (Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, and Final Fantasy XII original director) Yasumi Matsuno again. Maybe you should hire him!

RN: Yeah…but Sakaguchi is talking to him now, so I don’t know. He also started his own stuff.

Gamasutra: Right, but hasn’t announced anything, so it’s hard to know what he’s up to.

En fait, il n'en parle nul part ....

Gamasutra: Do you have any examples of things you needed to cut?

RN: We had 400 levels we had to make, so some had to be cut to make others better. Characters are fine. We've got about 300 characters. There's a little more than seven hours of real-time cutscenes. We determine priority: there are A Cutscenes, B Cutscenes, and C Cutscenes. There were too many A Cutscenes - the ones where we make them really good. We had to reduce the number of A Cutscenes and make more B Cutscenes.

En gros il y avait trois types de cut scene's allant des moins importantes (c) aux plus importantes (A). Au final, ils ont réduits les scènes importantes pour en faire des scènes moyennes, permettant ainsi de faire en sorte que les scènes importantes le soient réellement, qu'on éprouve de véritables émotions devant ces scènes plutôt que de les trouver quelqueconques au final. C'est un bon partis pris ....

[Creutzfeldt-Jakob]

Alors qu'on m'explique pourquoi ils se sentiraient le besoin de supprimer des cut-scènes et des emplacements s'ils n'avaient pas de restrictions au niveau du stockage ?

[FanFFs]

En gros il y avait trois types de cut scene's allant des moins importantes (c) aux plus importantes (A). Au final, ils ont réduits les scènes importantes pour en faire des scènes moyennes, permettant ainsi de faire en sorte que les scènes importantes le soient réellement, qu'on éprouve de véritables émotions devant ces scènes plutôt que de les trouver quelconques au final. C'est un bon partis pris ....

Sûrement pour ça, en attendant, dire qu'ils manquent de place est un peu fort, on est dans l'extra-ultra-interprétation.

[Julien]

Peut-être pour que le trop grand nombre de cut scene n'amoindrissent pas l'émotion véhiculée par l'histoire. Pour les emplacements par contre, je vois pas...

[Knobie]

Alors qu'on m'explique pourquoi ils se sentiraient le besoin de supprimer des cut-scènes et des emplacements s'ils n'avaient pas de restrictions au niveau du stockage ?

Inutile, sans nul doute .... Pourquoi rajouter des éléments si ils ne sont pas necessaires alors que la place restante peu servir à l'anti-aliasing, le blur, les loadings etc.

On retire le superflus pour le bien être du joueur et du soft