The Press Box - Ep. 262: 'Achievement Oriented' on Google Doodle Games and Ubisoft's Sword-Fighting Experiment

Episode Date: February 17, 2017

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion talk to Jordan Thompson, lead software engineer for the latest Google Doodle game, about building games for a massive search-engine audience with unique control constraints and compatibility concerns (0:15). Then they bring on Ubisoft creative director Jason VandenBerghe to discuss the innovative combat system at the center of newly released fighting game 'For Honor,' why sword-fighting is so tough to translate to video games, and how he created the concept of Vikings versus Samurai (19:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Achievement-oriented Channel 33's gaming podcast. My name is Ben Lindberg, and I'm a writer for the ringer.com. And on the other line, some call him the conqueror, some call him the peacekeeper. Jason Concepcion. Hi, Jason. I feel like a conqueror right now. I feel as if I could conquer many, many knights and Vikings and samurai. Well, we are going to talk later in this episode about For Honor.

We're going to talk to Ubisoft's creative director. Jason Vandenberg about the game and Jason and I are only in the early stages still, but there is a lot to like and a lot to learn. It's a game where basically the doom of Valeria befalls a medieval landscape of some sort and it divides this landscape into kingdoms and naturally those kingdoms are populated by knights, samurai and Vikings and then they have to fight. Geographically, there may be some issues, but they'll overlook that. Creative license. And it's an online multiplayer-based game. It looks deceptively like a hack and slash game. If you look at screenshots, you'll say, oh, it's Dynasty Warriors with Vikings.

But it's not at all like that. It's a very complex, deep combat system. And it's a unique game. It's a singular game. Low-key unique in the world of gaming. Yeah. So we're going to talk about that later in this episode. But first, we are going to talk about another genre of games that we haven't discussed yet on this podcast.

Google doodles. If you went to Google at some point late last week or early this week, which you did because it's Google and you all go there, you saw a Google Doodle game called Pangle in Love. It was a Valentine's Day themed platformer that sort of had a nature conservancy message, but was also just a video game plopped right onto the. the Google homepage, and we are talking to the designer of that game and a software engineer for the Google Doodle team, Jordan Thompson. Hey, Jordan.

Hello. Hey. So it occurred to me as I was just sort of casually playing this game that this must be among the most played games in the world right now, or whenever you make a game, it must be among the most played games in the world. And maybe it doesn't immediately come to mind when people think of video games, but just given how many visitors there are to the Google search. page, I would imagine that the numbers of people playing these things are really, really high.

Do you have any sense of what percentage of visitors will actually play a game or how long they will typically spend with it? So we can't share specific numbers, but it is very, I mean, it's huge, right? There's a million people, and obviously a million is actually under exaggerating here, that see this, you know, in a day. But it's, yeah, it's a bizarre thing to go from. no users to, you know, in a day, like most of the internet can play your game if they so desire, and many, many, many do. It's a pretty unique challenge to essentially get it right. The very

first time, because you don't, I mean, you've got a 24-hour window with most of these games to push any fixes if you need it. But after it's done, it's done. And, you know, our usage drops off obviously dramatically once it comes up the homepage. We've gotten feedback that people want to play these for longer. So it was up for longer this time. The first two days were mobile only, which was a first for us, and then went to all platforms on Monday. You're talking about pushing out fixes within 24 hours. So obviously your adoration process must be pretty hectic. Have you ever, like, what's the worst bug you've encountered in a Google dual game? I mean, this time, one of the first versions that went out didn't work in

private mode and safari, which is not something I had thought of testing. So, yeah, it was an issue with the local storage API which we use for storing your scores. And so, you know, that was a matter of just somebody on the team was like, hey man, my girlfriend tried to play this and it just didn't work. Well, private browsing.

My hair on fire. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so, I mean, we try to test everything we can, but there's never these things that slip through. And I've been, I mean, I've been fairly lucky with my handful of launches. Nothing hugely terrible has gone wrong. So that's probably the most significant one that I've dealt with personally.

So how long is the planning and design process? How do you decide or when do you decide that a doodle is going to be a game? And then how long do you have to develop it? And you can either speak specifically about this most recent game or just generally about the typical game. So it varies quite a bit. You know, depending on what we're celebrating and what kind of resources we have available at the moment, We'll allocate teams a couple months in advance to this one was probably the longest timeline we ever had. And it was about 10 months in advance.

And it was originally, I mean, it was originally for a different holiday. And then, you know, after some debate and figuring out that, you know, we wanted to, our secondary goal of promoting the penguin as an endangered species and raising awareness came up. And it was like, oh, this is perfect for Valentine's Day because, you know, they can, they can meet up and do what we need endangered species to do. So that was just, yeah, it's 10 months or months for this one. But that's definitely on the longer side. So since compatibility must be such a big concern for you and it has to work on so many different devices and browsers and mobile and desktop, how does that place constraints on your ambition when you're designing a game?

You know, are there certain types of games that make sense for doodles and others that don't because the framework, the architecture just wouldn't support it? Yeah, so it kind of changes per game. We obviously can't support every browser for everything. These things don't work well in IE6, shockingly. It normally, a, you know, a decision will make to, like, limit a platform normally comes from necessity, and then we'll reevaluate it with each next doodle. Like, the first thing I worked on was Beethoven in 2015. And that was the one where we first decided that, you know, we couldn't support IE anymore

because it didn't, it didn't implement the HTML Auto API, which was obviously a very core component to the Beethoven game. So those are the kind of constraints that come up. And then, you know, we try to reopen. We try to, I mean, we obviously try to target as much as possible. But, you know, there's the occasional thing that will limit us in one earlier. How do you choose the topics that you guys build your game around? I mean, obviously, Google is a gigantic company with enormous international reach,

meaning that, you know, just building a game could have possible political implications in different countries, et cetera, et cetera. What is the process like? Like, I guess Beethoven is an easy one, but the Pangolin. How much do you guys have to talk about, well, what issues could arise with this game being played in Leipzig? I mean, there's, you know, there's the brainstorm phase that we go through, right? We've got the, we've got a team of a few dozen now people that work on doodles that, you know,

we get together. We are a big brainstorm obsession is once a year. and we all kind of pitch ideas that we think would be fun to celebrate. And then it gets mulled over by the leadership and comes out with, you know, these are the things we want to do. These are the things we want to emphasize as interactives and, you know, really put some resources behind. And, but, yeah, so the Panglin idea came up as we were just coming up with a story idea.

We had a, we had a weekly meeting. One of our weekly meetings, we were like, we just don't have a story. And so we all kind of went back and we had a task for the next few days to just come up with each person, you know, whether you're an artist, engineer, or UX designer was going to come up with a story that you thought was compelling, then it would come back and essentially just vote on them. And this idea of celebrating a nature species was brought to us by Kevin Burke, the UX designer on the team. And we all just loved it. Like, I mean, it was just great. You know, such an awesome opportunity to use the platform that we have to raise awareness for this, I mean, animal that none of us had ever heard of. And we suspect that, you know, most people haven't heard of them. Once we had researched it, it was like, oh, man, we should we ought to do something. So we just ran with it. And how big is your team approximately and roughly how many games or interactive designs are you working on at any one time? So that's varied quite a bit, actually, since I've been on the team since 2015, like I mentioned. The current, there's, I think, eight engineers right now.

And we've got a handful of things baking in various states of completion. and, you know, each one, with each one, we try to experiment with something new technologically. So it kind of justifies the end effort towards it. And then the artist team, for this game specifically, we had three full-time artists assigned. One joined midway through the project. But yeah, one worked on the cutscenes, primarily one worked in the end-game art, and then the one that joined afterwards was able to, you know, pick up wherever the other two needed help. The whole team, though, is, like I said, it's a couple dozen.

And I mean, I want to say we're around 15 artists right now. And they're all, I mean, they're all professional artists and obviously great at what they do. And that's, you know, a big reason why I work on the team is because I get to work with these awesome people. Yeah, the art is beautiful in this game. Music plays a big part of this game. So everything is done internally. Then you don't need to outsource anything. If you need to compose a soundtrack or something, there is someone at Google who'll do that too.

So we have, I mean, for different games, we've done different things. This one, we did hire out Silas Haidt. He's a well-known in his field composer for this kind of thing. And he was just amazing to work with. It's kind of hard because you never meet them in person. But like we would get so many, like pretty much every morning you would send us, you know, like here are some options for, you know, what you want this sound to be. And we'd throw them in the game and see if it feels right or not.

But yeah, so everything else that was internal. You got kind of a limited control set. Obviously, people are playing on mobile or playing on the keyboard. How do you kind of unify that and make sure that people can play across platforms? How difficult is that? I mean, obviously, the Beethoven one wasn't available on mobile, but it was more of a, you could arrange sheet music that corresponded to Beethoven's music. And that was this kind of like cool mechanic that was personalized to him.

and then the Pangling game is quite rightly made as a platformer. Like, how do those game design decisions get made? And how do you make sure it works for everyone? So, yeah, so we started out emphasizing the tilt mechanic and tried to make that, you know, the premier experience. And then, you know, realized that we could do this with buttons pretty well and needed to for some, for some devices where we, you know, couldn't lock orientation.

So the tilt would cause the screen to rotate, which was obviously very frustrating for the player. And then, you know, that translated into desktop like, oh, we've got on-screen button. on the phone, like, we should definitely do that for desktop. Yeah, it's, I mean, it was, it was a matter of, you know, emphasizing what a, what a phone, that was, and one of our initial things was, you know, we want to emphasize that, you know, mobile is the premier experience and tilt was something that you can do on mobile and you can't do on desktop. So that was the original control scheme. And then also, it just has to be simple, right, that you've got people of all

backgrounds playing the people who have never played a video game in their life are playing this. You know, people that played tons of video games for this, too. It's, it's, it's, it's, a very wide audience and we try to strike a balance between, you know, reasonable complexity with mechanics and also very, very simple control schemes. Like the, you know, we have a single button that changes function based on where you are, but it's, it is a single unified button, so you only have to think about tapping one spot, right? So what's the makeup of your team tend to be as far as gaming proclivities? Is everyone on the team a lifelong hardcore gamer or not so much. Are you coming from all different backgrounds? Are there people who, whose training is in

game design, or is it something that you all just kind of came to organically after starting somewhere else inside the company? What's the typical path to the doodle team? Yeah, it's definitely, it's a per person thing. A lot of people join the team because you get to work with artists and have some kind of art background. But like I played video games casually like any kid growing up in the 90s, but I was never really hardcore into anything besides, you know, Super Smash Brothers because, of course.

But, you know, some people are avid gamers, you know, played, it's often a topic of lunch conversation is, you know, oh, if you play the nude, whatever. And then, you know, on the other end, you've got, like, some of the artists who have never, I mean, I could say artists, but

a handful of people on the team just don't really care about video games and just want to make something beautiful. And I think the artists, it was a really unique dynamic to have that of like, you know, these artists don't really care about adding a functionality of the game. I just want to make it pretty. And I think we got something really unique from that mindset. And will you often use actual preexisting games as reference points in your planning? Like when you're making the Penguin game, would you say we envision it as this sort of platformer, you know, maybe it's a Rayman style or a Sonic.

style or will you often make that kind of comparison? Will that come up in your meetings? Yeah, I mean, it comes up like, you know, obviously it's smart to learn from success stories. And both of those are obviously wildly successful games. So it comes up. I mean, we also try to be unique and make something that obviously hasn't just been made before. So yeah, they come up as points of reference, as I think is appropriate. What's next? What's the next? Can you tell us? Can you give us a hint with the next game possibly be? Oh, about the next game. I mean, I'm not involved in the next one to come out, and I would be betraying the team to give it.

Well, you mentioned earlier that you kind of have to get it right away because most of these games are only featured for one day. So what is the testing like? Are you just testing it internally in your team? Are you sending it out company-wide? Is Eric Schmidt playing this thing? at his desk and giving the final approval. That's a great question. How does that work?

Yeah, so we, it kind of varies on the, we normally don't do a company-wide previewed session. We, you know, aren't very subtle with our, with our links. So people want to play them, they can play them. We do, like people internal, obviously, we do user tests regularly to make sure that the game that we're making is fun. And people from, we basically just. a blast email to everybody sitting anywhere near us.

All kinds of people will show up. We'd, you know, bribe them with doodle stickers and just little stuff to come by and play and give us feedback. And that's always really interesting. You know, you are building something that you think is fun and, you know, you get really good at because you're, you know, writing, you're writing the game. And then you watch somebody else play and you're like, oh, just do that. And you realize like, oh, we need to, you know, very explicitly say, do this or, you know,

or we need to simplify the control scheme. I remember one that sticks out in my head was just this one user tester just told me, this isn't fun. Like, all right, you know, let's get a little. Harsh, but fair. It's like Silicon Valley. Yeah, I used to hear it.

Yeah, so, you know, we took that feedback in the account, and I remember very specifically the same person coming back, I think it was probably six weeks later, and was like, this is fun now. It's like pretty explicitly. It's like, all right, okay. That was a moment of, you know, me feeling like this is actually something that we're that might be successful.

Yeah, I guess it can be difficult to describe why a game is or isn't fun at times unless you're experienced in doing that sort of thing. So just lastly, I guess, you know, there's a, there's no credits in this game. I don't think it's not a mystery who designed it. We're talking to you right now. but your names are not front and center. And I'm curious, there's a long legacy of developers sort of embedding Easter eggs. The original Easter egg was just designers putting their names in the code somewhere.

You'd unlock a secret room and it would say who the programmer was. Have you ever snuck anything into a doodle game that was not immediately obvious? Of course. Can you divulge anything? Oh, really? Can you divulge any details? If you are to 100% complete the game and then come back and play it again, you might find something. Oh, okay.

All right. Good teaser. And if people want to play it, they can because Google Doodles do not disappear after one day. They might not be on the homepage anymore, but you can find them online at Google.com slash doodles. You can even click on just the interactive ones if you want to find the games. and you can follow Google Doodles on Twitter also at Google Doodles. And thank you, Jordan. This was very enlightening because I've played these games many times.

Everyone has, but I hadn't necessarily stopped to think about how they came to be and who was making them. So I'm happy to find out. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Of course. You guys have a good day. All right. We'll be back after a quick word from our sponsor to talk to Ubisoft's Jason Vandenberg about for honor.

So this is our 17th episode. and it's also our first to be sponsored by a video game. This is long overdue. From legendary game designer John Van Canagam, creator of the Heroes of Night Magic series, comes Creature Quest, an adventurous RPG that brings a new level of depth and strategy to mobile games,

which are not normally known for their depth of strategy. Begin your quest with a group of five distinct creatures before growing your collection into a hard-hitting team. You get all the RPG hallmarks in a mobile package, quests, battles, PVP dungeons, and time-daily events, all offering their fair share of shiny rewards. Creature Quest tasks players to collect battle and upgrade various creatures ranging from fiery dragons, the fuzziest of kitten mages.

Each turn-based RPG battle aims to be fast and pace, fun, and tactical while the game lets you explore maps at your own leisure, overcome obstacles, build your own dungeon, and of course, earn treasure rewards in order to succeed. Creature Quest makes a point of ensuring that there's plenty to see and do in a strategic cycle that will have you wanting to engage in just one more turn. In other words, you're going to get hooked and you're not going to put the game down and you're going to miss your subway stop, and you won't mind because you'll be playing. Creature Quest. It's available on the app store at Google Play and at Amazon. You can download Creature Quest for Free Today and be part of the best turn-based collectible RPG. The Quest for Creatures

is paved with adventure. So Quest on. Okay, so we are joined now by Jason Vandenberg. He is a creative director at Ubisoft and his new game for Honor is out this week for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. And Jason, this is a very complex game. It's got a deep, creative combat system. and it blends a bunch of different genres in ways that I don't know that we've seen before. But how close was its origin to someone sitting around just thinking, dude, what if Vikings fought samurai? You're not far off there. I'm going to be honest with you. The game kind of had two origins. In fact, it had there was the origin of the combat system. Then there was the origin of the world and that sort of the setting and the characters.

And for the world and the setting stuff, you're dead on. That's pretty much exactly what happened. We were, in the early parts of the project, we were like, what should we do? What kind of world should we have? What kind of character should we fight? And people would be like, oh, I want to be a viking. I want to be a samurai. And it took about two weeks to go, what if we did all three?

Right? What if, what if we did? And when I said that, I said that to my producer one day and I said, hey, Steph, what if it was just Knights Vikings and samurai? And he's like, I kind of love that. I'm like, yeah, it's weird. right? Really weird. And so we really ran with it.

The world is kind of an excuse to make that happen, right? It was the plan. But the game, the game originally came from, I took a course in German Longsword, like 15 years ago. Oh. Yeah, yeah. There's this new style of martial art that's been discovered. And I was studying that. And I was walking home one day and thought, what if I took these stances and I put them on the right stick?

What if I just moved those to the right stick? And very quickly, the control scheme that you have kind of fell into my head. And then I spent a bunch of years pitching the game over and over. And I got all these nose. People were like, no, no, that'll never work. And turns out that it did work, which is really cool. I pitched it at UBSOF Montreal here. And they said yes.

And five years later, we're making the game. I'm going to go back to your German long sword. This is, is this kind of the, I recall reading these, like, the oldest swordfighter, European sword fighting manuscripts So these like German manuscripts, I forget the name of them. That's what it is. That's what it is. And so it's based on that?

Yes. Yes, exactly. So what happened was about 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, 30, some fight enthusiasts got together with a bunch of German and Italian academics who had access to these fight manuals. And they started collaborating over the Internet. And together they broke the code on what those fight manuals were actually trying to tell us because for hundreds of years, no one knew what these manuals meant.

They were just pictures with these really cryptic sentences underneath the pictures, but they cracked the code. And so now we have this organization called Hima and Arma, these two groups that are sort of rediscovering these fight styles. And that's what's being taught. So I learned the longsword form, the German longsword. I tell you, when I picked up the German longsword for the first time, these wooden practice swords in the dojo, I was just, I fell in love. I was instantly like, this is my style. This is it. Right.

Like, this is so cool. And it was so simple, but it was so hard to perfect. It was exactly right. And so I just kind of, I got really into it. Because I've been into this topic for my entire life. And so then once I had that controller idea, I was like, this, my insight, my hope was that if we use this controller scheme, that you would feel the way that I would feel the way that I, I feel when I pick up a weapon and do it in real life, right? That sitting on your couch, you would have the emotions of being on that battlefield

that's you'd be locked onto your enemy and then you'd be studying what they're doing and trying to guess and anticipate and you have this anxiety about where your weapon is. You have to manage your own block and defend yourself, but you also have to make time to get some hits in, right? And managing your distance all while keeping track of where everyone else is on the battlefield, that mix of emotion is really what it feels like to be in the middle of the battlefield. And that's what I wanted to capture. And I thought that this control scheme would do it.

And it seems like it's doing the job pretty well so far. I think Neil Stevenson, the author famously, was trying to get a sword fighting game off the ground for many years. And then obviously ran into a lot of obstacles that never happened. But can you talk about some of the specific difficulties in creating this fighting mechanic? It's very well-balanced is one thing I've noticed, even though I'd, keep getting my ass kicked, as I mentioned to you, for the game. But yeah, it seems like, you know, getting it perfectly balanced must have been really hard. And if I can piggyback on that for a second, you directed Red Steel 2, right, for the Wii,

which was, you know, a Wii moat controlled game that kind of mapped the sword movement one-to-one with the controller. And so I imagine that this was much different than maybe constraining in some ways relative to that. Right. I mean, part of the reason that I joined Ubisoft in the first place to make Red Steel, too, when they gave me the offer, was it was an opportunity to try out some of my ideas on this, right? I was so excited. I was like, yes, sword fighting. Let's try it.

But in first person, it's a whole different problem. It was actually much harder to make it work in first person than it was in third. And I learned in that project that if it was going to happen, it was probably going to happen. If I was going to achieve this, it was going to be in third person. And so when we started for honor, I started there. I was like, it's going to be here. It's going to be this kind of lock mechanic, this kinds of cameras, and, and, and was able to sort of hit the ground running, thinking about that.

I had the basic idea of the stances, right? I knew that we were going to have right left top. But I also thought we had a bottom stance at first. And for a while, we had six stances. It was like, we did a lot of experimentation on what people could do with a thumbstick and what made sense to people. making the system was really, really challenging. But the cool thing was that I had this team,

I had the good fortune of getting a team who had, they had just sort of finished another project, and they were looking for a creative director, and they had all this melee experience. They had done Naruto games, and they had some Prince of Persia stuff, and they had this technology and this expertise around fighting. And so we were able to start moving really fast.

What we did is over about 18 months in the first part of project. We made about 400 prototypes. We would we would we followed a process that I call it's the four Fs as fail faster and follow the fun right. We would we would just make as many mistakes as possible right and to find the really good stuff right. We would just iterate, iterate, iterate every day we were playing the game, playing the game, finding out what was working, finding out what wasn't working and chasing this new system as quickly as we can. And it was the the dedication and sort of the genius of the team that that sort of cracked the code to the system that you're playing now. They took my sort of unformed idea and turned it into the gem that you see,

right, and sort of passed through the team filter, which is always how games work, right? So it was an amazing process and it went really, really fast. During that period, it was all stick figures. We were fighting with stick figures in very planes, right? We were just focused on making the sword fighting mechanic work. And then once we had that core system, then we started adding characters and complexities, but we were building on top of something that we knew was a really solid foundation. We had the three stances or guard breaks, you know, the throws, the parry system, the stamina, all that the core stuff was there. And that really has been largely like that for most of the project.

There's been a lot of polish, of course. Every time we go and do a live period, we'd move the stats around and figure out stuff that we can do better. But it's the game that you're playing now, we've. been playing that game for about four years. So I think it's great to hear from you that it's balanced, right? You feel like it's really balanced because that's what we were striving for. And I think the reason that that happened was because the team was playing every day. And well, I was going to ask what kind of learning curve you envisioned or what kind of

learning curve you were okay with because I think when you play, when you pick up a new online multiplayer game. Usually it's a shooter of some sort and you kind of have a basic competence that comes with that. Every shooter is different. But the mechanics are largely transferable across games. And so you'll be terrible when you start, but you'll at least feel like you have a chance to be good at some point.

Whereas if you dive right into Forerunner without, say, playing the tutorial or maybe missing around in the campaign, you're probably going to get wiped away and you're not even going know why. So I guess how much time were you thinking that players would tolerate or how long did you want to make them have to practice to get good? So, I mean, you put your finger. I love the way that you describe that because it's, if you're exactly right, there was the biggest problem we faced was that players have kind of forgotten what they already know in terms of these genres, right? If you're a player of a genre, you come in with all of this basic knowledge. And that just isn't true for this game, which was a huge hurdle for us to overcome. The answer for how much time we

expected the player to endure that was as little as humanly possible. And what happened was over the course, you played the tutorial, right? That opening tutorial and those opening moments. So that tutorial, it seems obvious now. When people play it, they're like, oh yeah, that's a pretty good way to learn the game. It's really nice and it's super clear. Yeah, that's like the 150th iteration on that tutorial, right? It's, we've been, we've been working on that for almost as long as we have been working on the game system itself from not exactly from day one, but pretty much from day two. We were, we knew we were going to have to teach people how to play this thing and it was going to be a challenge. And over the course of the development, we went from, you know, people needing about 30 minutes to get it, to needing about 15 minutes to get it, to needing about five. And now they start, some players start to get it about, can get it in about 30 seconds. Some players. Some players, players takes five minutes. Some players may take a little bit longer, but we're in a zone that's nice and comfortable now. It sort of fits into one tutorial experience for the basics, right? Because we really wanted to get you through that curve as quickly as possible. That was also

part of why we included the ability to play against bots, the ability to play, you know, with you just one-on-one, with your friends, just train up. I'm seeing online a lot of people like sharing stories about jumping into duels, meeting someone who's way better than they are, And then they get, they get stomped. But then that person says, hey, let me teach you something. Here's, have you tried this? Have you tried this? And two hours later, they're still training together one on one and kind of teaching each other the ropes.

Yeah, it's really an amazing, a bunch of amazing stories about that. So we know it's the big hurdle that we face. And, you know, personally, I'm looking forward to the day when this system is sort of built into gamers' brains in the same way that that shooters are. That would be great. Well, that's like, if there's something, you know, in the future that would be even more amazing than just this launch, it would be that. It would be to have people go, oh, yeah, this is just, this is just how the system works. But getting people through it has been a real challenge. Maybe by four on or five, which is given Ubisoft's history, not out of the question.

So you just mentioned the one-on-one duels and how satisfying that can be. And there is this lock-on mechanic and you're really hyper-focused on either the AI. or another person's moves. And that can kind of complicate things when, say, one team is losing and there's a mismatch in the number of players and suddenly you're getting double teamed and triple teamed. And it's hard to use that same sort of mechanic when you are surrounded by people who are just whaling on you.

So how did you try to balance that? That it's sort of this one-on-one focused engine, I would say, but you're going to end up with lots of non one-on-one encounters. Well, I mean, we were playing 4V4 in our first, the first like two or three months on the project, we were working one-on-one. And then as quickly as we could, when we had the basic fight system,

we immediately shifted to 4V4 because we knew that we wanted to do the battlefield, not just the arena. And so we've been working on that problem for a really, really long time. And it's a really tricky one. That's a hard one. We've done a bunch of things, right? There's a lot of systems that are running in the game to make that outnumbered experience better for the player.

But there's a catch-22 in there, right? Because if we make the outnumbered experience really good for the player who's outnumbered, then the players who outnumber that single fighter are going to feel like it's unfair. They're sort of unfairly and vulnerable for no good reason, right? But what we've done is we've found all these places where we can compromise. The revenge mechanic is a really good example of that. The way revenge works is that if you if you turtle, if you start just focusing on blocking against multiple opponents, which is what you really should do if you're being attacked by

more than one person, right? Focus on the person with the lowest health bar, right? And focus on defending yourself. You'll build up your revenge meter and then revenge gives you this big boost. If you trigger revenge mode now, you get a sort of a health shield for a short time. and your hits can knock people down a lot better, and you can ignore some of your reactions. You can do a lot more damage.

So in a brief period of time, you're able to kind of focus down one or two of the people who are attacking you in revenge mode if you can sort of earn it by blocking. So we did that. And then there's systems like the blocking system works for people you aren't locked onto. So if you've, if I'm attacking to, if we're dueling and someone comes up from my right side, if I hold my sword to the right, then I'm going to block all the attacks that that person throws my way, right? So stuff like that to make things more sort of fair, feel more fair for the,

for the person that's outnumbered. But in the end, what I've found is that there are people who get that who are like, who, who understand, oh, I'm on a battlefield. I'm going to get outnumbered. When that happens, I need to sort of make the most of it and try to die slowly, right? And they're okay with that because that follows sort of the rules of the battlefield. But then there are people for whom that just never feels good. So we have the 2B2 and the 1v1 dueling modes, specifically for those people. Because the point of this game was always, no matter what kind of play you want, if you've got a sword-fighting fantasy, come on in, right? We've got something for you. I just wanted that to be a, I didn't want to force you to play in a particular way. So we've tried to spread out

our modes across very different play styles, including, you know, we have the full story campaign if you just want to play alone, and you can play all the multiplayer modes against bots and all that kind of stuff. The game is very unique. First of all, as MMAS, we talked about, sword fighting games are rare. It's kind of like the undiscovered frontier in fighting games. But your game is, it's part brawler, it's part multiplayer. objective game, it's part action game. Like, how did you come up with the shape of this game? It's like, it's a bunch of different games in one, and it works really well together.

Well, I thank you. So it's very heartening to hear that on day two, right, as the launch is coming. So that's good for the soul. The simplest answer is that we did it by focusing, first focusing on what we really wanted to do, which was to create those emotions of the battlefield in you. We got really, really clear about what those are, right? This focus, exactly what you were saying, your focus on the enemy that you're fighting,

you're managing your own fight style, what you're trying, you know, your ability to kill that person before they kill you, and then that need to split your attention between the battlefield and your opponent, really nailed those and got really clear with the team, this is what we're trying to accomplish. And then we just tried everything we could think of.

Honestly, for years, we were experimenting with the fight system and with game modes that, and we tried a bunch of stuff. And what you're playing now is the best stuff that we thought really captured the essence of that that medieval battlefield, that epic medieval battlefield. And in a way that was understandable to as many people as possible and that was, you know, clear and that we could play for a long time. Dominion was the first game mode that we made. We built that mode from the beginning because we knew it was.

going to be the hardest one, right, to have all these hundreds of soldiers smashing against each other and multiple capture points and, you know, but we knew we needed to tackle that problem. But we, it was when, when it, when we had been playing Dominion for two, three years and we were still having fun in our play tests, like our playtests, like we would have our reviews, our weekly reviews at the end of the week and they would always go long, right? Because we wanted to finish the match, right? We were like, it was always like, oh, come on, and all the shouting and the floor and stuff. We'd have big play tests every week.

Everyone on the floor would play on Fridays. And, you know, we actually got sort of scolded by the building management, right? Because we're so loud. We're the loudest team on the floor. And every Friday afternoon, the shouting would just emerge from our floor, right? And, you know, the people below us and above us are like, shut up there. You know, and they knew we're having a good time. but at the same time, they're like, oh, we have a game to ship too, man, you know.

So we just, that was our, our method. Our method was to just follow the fun, just chase what we liked and be brave, bold enough to cut stuff that wasn't working. And we did that through what the project was structured into tournaments. We aren't what, where most project had milestones, we had tournaments. And so every three months or so, there would be this big tournament and everyone on the floor would play. And what that meant was, first, and anyone who was working on the game, they'd finish their feature, right? Like they wanted their feature in the tournament, right? And so they were motivated to get it in there and get it working.

And so anything that was risky or that really wasn't working after a couple of weeks of development would tend to kind of go away, right? Right around the time of the tournament, right? And then when we would play in the tournament, it was obvious to everyone on the team what was working and what wasn't because everyone watched, right? and everyone participated. And so you could see, oh, this is working, this wasn't. We would sort of post-mortem our tournaments. So our strategy was simple. We just tried everything we could think of.

And then we're brutally honest with ourselves about whether or not it was really fun. And if it wasn't fun, it got cut. So I guess this question is mostly about the campaign mode. But I think it's difficult in a game like this to make the battlefield environment and atmosphere feel real and immersive. and it can be because of technological limitations. There just aren't enough bodies on the battlefield sometimes in some games, or maybe it's overly scripted so that there's a sense that the whole battle is really dependent on you and all this motion is kind of going on in the background, but nothing's really happening until you show up. I kind of like the idea that it's a real battle and you are playing an important part, but things are transpiring elsewhere without your direct intervention. And I think this game does a good job of sort of hiding, you know, how much of it is maybe dependent on you and those sorts of seams that show in other games.

So can you tell us a little bit about how you went about crafting that look of the battlefield to make it seem chaotic and also as if it's something that you are just walking into rather than something that is waiting for you to show up? Sure. And it's, it's, again, you put your finger on what we're trying to do. It's, this is, this is great. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, echoing back to me all of our goals. We're getting, we're a game kind of source. I am delighted, I'm delighted that the message has reached you, right? Like, the game told it story to you. And then you're coming back and saying, it's fantastic. It's, I'm, I'm delighted. I'm utterly delighted. So first, we did a bunch of exploration about how much agency, the player would, have, like how much agency on the battlefield felt right? How much should the soldiers sit around and do nothing if you're not there? And how much should they just be fighting their own battle? And, you know, if you just sort of stand around, they're going to decide for themselves who wins, right? Right. And we decided that the number, like, there's a lot of agency required. If you all stand around and do nothing, the minions, the soldiers in the center are going to deadlock, right? We had

versions of the game where the game could play itself. And that wasn't very fun. And that wasn't very fun. You really have had this sense of like, well, why am I kind of, I'm not, I'm not really here, right? You don't want to win or lose the game because the, the AI did the right thing, right? And so the place we ended up placing the meter was pretty high on the agency level, like maybe 70, 80% of what happens, you know, in that center front, you know, that crashing place in the center where all the soldiers are smashing together is motivated by the presence of other players and you have a really big impact on what happens there. but they are all independent agents fighting their own fight, right? It's they're they're resolving their conflict regardless of whether or not you are there and happens actually happens, right? They're actually killing each other and that matters to the push, that forward backward push.

So finding that balance took a, took a while. And then we we have, you know, I mean, we added, you know, there are archers that show up on the archer point and reinforcements that come out when you capture that sort of stuff. So we added sort of a layer of that kind of immersive stuff in there. But really the core of it we found was that that lane, that front line, that crashing thing that happens in the middle, that B point B, right? Right in the center is really where you really feel that all that is happening. So we have that, we have those armies crashing together. And then what we did is we just throw a bunch of, you know, like here comes the catapult fire and here comes archer stuff and the sound and the crush and the roar.

And when we put those two things together, the sort of the illusionary part that sits around in the outside, and then that actual crush in the middle, we found that that really felt like we were on a battlefield. And it seemed to be working. So it took, again, it took like everything, it took a lot of iteration to find that right middle point for us. But we did want exactly what you said. That is, I'm showing up to this battle in progress. And my presence is what's going to turn the tide. That's that medieval special forces, you know, fantasy, right? I'm the most important warrior.

I'm one of eight of the most important warriors in this battlefield. And what I, what an hour fight will determine how many hundreds of lives or one are lost on each side, right? How much mocap did you do for this? And how did you keep your mocap stunt people from dying and getting their heads crushed? No comment. No comment on that. I did not see no mocap actors were harmed during the making of this game. Disclaimer anywhere, so.

Very few mocap actors were harmed in this game. We did a ton of mocap. We've been doing, we have at the, one of the secret weapons behind For Honor is a technology called ammo, which is a new way to get character animation into the game. all the animations that you're seeing in the game are running off of this huge sort of big data database of single frame animations like it or poses that are kind of handcrafted on the fly. It's an amazing breakthrough that lets us make the game that we're that we're that that we've made because each of those characters has a huge amount of motion capture behind them and we need to be able to sort of do all of that and then manage those production costs. and then also crunched all down and get it on the disc. And so the answer is we did a ton of mocap for throughout the whole process.

And we had to, we had to reinvent how mocap worked because the first our game was not like other games. We had, none of the, the mocap processes that had been used before would work for us. And so we had to invent kind of how we did it. And then we had to find people who were capable of pulling it off because at the end, our process ended up being stand in the middle of the field, stand in the middle of the mocap volume with this weapon and just do all of these strikes really, really hard in all different kinds of variations. So, you know, go for hours like this. So we ended up with stunt actors who had years of martial art experience as kind of the center point on it. But we broke like 40 weapons on the mocaps.

Like we went through a ton of gear. You know, we had stunt supervisors. Like we have some of the best stunt supervisors in the business working with us. So we were, you know, very conscious of safety because we're swinging these massive pieces of, you know, metal and foam at each other. But it was a, it was really the core of the game was figuring out how to mocap that and then turn that into, you know, and then get that all into the video game. Once we had done one, then we were like, okay, now we have that, now we know what that process is. And so then we were able to go faster for the other 11 characters.

Well, I have a soon-to-be brother-in-law who's a fight choreographer and a fight captain and an actor combatant and all of those things. And so when I watch Game of Thrones or the Vikings show on the history channel with him, he's very nitpicky and he will critique all the moves. And he'll say, that's not how they actually fought. And you have some training yourself. So I imagine there are some corners you had to cut to make a game work that maybe wasn't a perfect representation of medieval combat. But when I play it, I think, yeah, this is what it looks like when samurai fight Vikings and knights. This is very convincing. So I'm still very bad at the game, but I have a desire to get good, which I think means that you have succeeded.

So thank you for making it and for coming on to tell us about it. this was really interesting. Thank you very much. I hope you guys have a great time with it. And good luck getting good. Watch the tutorial videos, man. There's lots of hidden gems in there. And the online community has learned all about the system.

So there's lots of help. To anyone who's going to play the game, pick up the game, I would highly recommend watching some of the streams because the streamers are very vocal about what they're doing and why they're losing or why they're winning. So it's a great way to get good at the game. I completely agree. We have an incredible group of supportive community members. Our streamers are just amazing. The open beta period. It's just been incredible to watch people get into the system. They're way better at the game than we are. It's amazing. All right. Well, you can follow Jason on Twitter at the underscore Dark Lord with an old English E tacked on the end there. And you can go get for honor now. Thanks again, Jason. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

Okay, so that will do it for today. By the way, one thing we didn't mention in that interview, former podcast guest Jennifer Hale plays The Warden. She is the female voice of The Warden. She stays voice acting. She really does. Constantly working. Yeah.

So always nice to hear her. And that's it. And we'll be back. Same time, same place next week. Talk to you then. See you, Ben. One more reminder about this episode's sponsor. from legendary game designer John Van Canagan.

Creator of the Heroes of Might and Magic series comes Creature Quest, an adventurous RPG that brings a new level of depth and strategy to mobile games. It's available on the app store, Google Play, and at Amazon. So download Creature Quest for free today and be a part of the best turn-based collectible RPG. Your quest for creatures is paved with adventure, so Quest on.