All About 3D - Part Two
Andrew Oliver discusses the problems of selling the 3DTV format and the need for standardisation in the industry
That's next year's mission... every year we have something we'll be pushing on, and next year it's emotion. There's a lot of emotion in Dead to Rights, but I think it's the one thing the games industry has really lacked. It's really easy to make shooters where you don't care about who you're blowing away - it's the sensitive emotions that are hard.
I think it'll be a massive, massive turning point. I always look back - one of the films I most respect is Snow White, because it was the first film in colour, but it was bold, brash and extremely brave. If you think about the fact that they painted every bloody cell... back in those days, they must have been mad. All they'd done was Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and then they decided to make this huge movie, the first one in colour...
But even within the film, there are so many new techniques that they pushed into it - but the one biggest thing is that it was hand-drawn cell animation that made people laugh and cry. We haven't done that in videogames yet, and look at all the tech and tools we've got.
They're doing in the movies with the same tools - the CG movies - they get away with it in those, they're doing emotions. It just seems to be something the games industry doesn't do. I think it's the saddest thing, but that'll be next year's thing for us.
You talk to publishers and everybody likes the idea of a game that's more emotional, so you ask for 10 per cent extra to really spend a lot of time on that aspect... they ask what we're going to do and how, to which we respond that we've got ideas, but in the end we do things on our own.
I'd like to think that Dead to Rights is fairly good on the emotional rollercoaster stuff, and you've yet to see the storyline, but it's got 72 minutes of cutscenes. I don't like just putting things generally into cutscenes, but a lot of it is actually within the game environment, and there's a helluva strong story to that.
We've felt that it's more of the way we should go, but you have to build it more into the game.
And it's hugely challenging, but it's not impossible.
Andrew Oliver is CTO at Blitz Games. Interview by Phil Elliott.