TGS 2006: Interview with the Dragon
Factor 5 finally lifts the veil on its anticipated PS3 exclusive, Lair.
September 21, 2006 - Since making its debut at the 2005 PlayStation Meeting, Factor 5's PlayStation 3 exclusive actioner, Lair, has been one of the most talked about (and mysterious) next-generation games around. All those involved -- be it Sony or F5 -- have kept eerily quiet regarding almost every aspect of its production. What it's about, where it takes place, and how it works have only been spoken of in generalities and concrete details have been scarcer than a retailer offering PS3 pre-orders.
In celebration of TGS, Lair's big coming out party, Factor 5 President Julian Eggebrecht agreed to speak with IGN to discuss all things dragon. Here's what he had to say:
GN: This is the most quiet we've ever seen Factor 5 in regards to a project prior to release -- why all the secrecy?
Me:Julian Eggebrecht: Because we have been so terribly busy. And of course we wanted to be a bit secretive about Lair and our next-gen projects in general, just as we were between N64 and GameCube. It has been an interesting time, not only getting a completely new, hand-tailored engine off the ground on a machine as complex as the PS3 but also at the same time creating new franchises.
IGN: For the past few generations, Factor 5 has been leaned towards exclusive games -- namely on Nintendo systems -- is the announcement of Lair an indication that you'll be a PS3-exclusive developer?
Eggebrecht: First of all, we never have been manufacturer-exclusive. We did games for the SNES, Genesis, PlayStation, N64, GameCube, and many others. It's just that we prefer to pick one platform for any given game. We don't like ports that compromise features.
From the technology perspective we are multi-platform as we always have been. We have updated the DivX toolset for the PS3, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 for example. And we do have extremely strong engines on the systems. I think Lair proves how much you can get out of the PS3 even with a first-gen title if you hand-tailor your engine to the platform and take full advantage of Cell, RSX and of course the motion-sensitive controller. It's amazing to work on the most powerful real-time hardware platform ever created without having to worry about porting to other systems.
As for the publishing side of our games, we try to find the best publisher and the best platform for every title we want to create. Sony is extremely cooperative and supportive when it comes to new franchises and that, combined with the technology requirements made Lair a perfect PS3 and Sony-exclusive title.
When we thought of hundreds of dragons in air, thousands of troops and creatures on the ground, a gritty, dark, and photo-realistic style, and taking controls to a new level there really was no other option than the PS3 -- it was a match made in heaven. Sony believed in us and the vision behind Lair and we couldn't be happier with the relationship.
IGN: Since we're talking exclusivity, what do you think of the Wii announcements and Nintendo's direction, the choice not to support high-definition, the controller, etc? How do you see development differing between that system and the PS3?
Eggebrecht: I think Nintendo is doing exactly the right thing. They would have been crushed between the two others if they tried to go the same route. The all-in-one HDTV media monster is something I love and want at home, but Nintendo is simply not the company to create that beast. Sony is.
I personally believe that Iwata-san, Miyamoto-san, and Takeda-san saw with GameCube that following down the path of the other two would be futile. Nintendo is embracing their destiny, being an interactive content creator whose content and platforms are very unique. Many people could do with just a PS2 and no GameCube, but the Wii is so radically different and fresh that everybody who buys a PS3 might also get a Wii in addition. If their strategy pans out and the consumer get's it, they can and will be much more successful then in GameCube days while happily co-existing with the other guys.
Developing for the PS3 is completely different from the Wii. The Wii technology for graphics is well-known; it's essentially a turbo-charged GameCube -- which for 640x480 resolution games is a very formidable chipset. The Wii PPC CPU is well known too, so especially if one has worked on the GameCube, you can just jump in and focus on the main thing -- the controller and all its myriad of details.
The PS3 challenges the developer on all levels -- and I mean that in a positive sense: There is this massively new CPU that seems to have almost unlimited power -- the more programming time you throw at it the more power you get. There is the GPU, which is so flexible due to the parallel Vertex and Shader units that you can implement any effect ever dreamt of in several ways. The hard drive and Blu-ray can be used to stream enormous amounts of data. All of these things add up to a completely new paradigm already, even before you start exploring the endless possibilities of motion control, be it simple tilt, yaw, and roll, or much more advanced gesture recognition and position in space computations.
IGN: Was Lair a project that stemmed internally or did Sony come to you with this idea to produce for them?
Eggebrecht: Lair is completely our creation. Sony doesn't go around and ask for developers to work on properties -- they want you to have the vision and then will work with you to realize your vision. They are very good about giving creative freedom, while at the same time bringing in this wealth of experience that a first party can provide. We have been in contact for a long time and it just happened that the first pitch for Lair and the early days of the PS3 coincided and both sides realized that we had something here.
IGN: One of the biggest early misconceptions out there is that Lair is just Rogue Squadron with a dragon. Now's your chance to tell people what it really is -- go for it!
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TGS 2006: Interview with the Dragon
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I personally believe that Iwata-san, Miyamoto-san, and Takeda-san saw with GameCube that following down the path of the other two would be futile. Nintendo is embracing their destiny, being an interactive content creator whose content and platforms are very unique. Many people could do with just a PS2 and no GameCube, but the Wii is so radically different and fresh that everybody who buys a PS3 might also get a Wii in addition. If their strategy pans out and the consumer get's it, they can and will be much more successful then in GameCube days while happily co-existing with the other guys.
Developing for the PS3 is completely different from the Wii. The Wii technology for graphics is well-known; it's essentially a turbo-charged GameCube -- which for 640x480 resolution games is a very formidable chipset. The Wii PPC CPU is well known too, so especially if one has worked on the GameCube, you can just jump in and focus on the main thing -- the controller and all its myriad of details.
The PS3 challenges the developer on all levels -- and I mean that in a positive sense: There is this massively new CPU that seems to have almost unlimited power -- the more programming time you throw at it the more power you get. There is the GPU, which is so flexible due to the parallel Vertex and Shader units that you can implement any effect ever dreamt of in several ways. The hard drive and Blu-ray can be used to stream enormous amounts of data. All of these things add up to a completely new paradigm already, even before you start exploring the endless possibilities of motion control, be it simple tilt, yaw, and roll, or much more advanced gesture recognition and position in space computations.
IGN: Was Lair a project that stemmed internally or did Sony come to you with this idea to produce for them?
Eggebrecht: Lair is completely our creation. Sony doesn't go around and ask for developers to work on properties -- they want you to have the vision and then will work with you to realize your vision. They are very good about giving creative freedom, while at the same time bringing in this wealth of experience that a first party can provide. We have been in contact for a long time and it just happened that the first pitch for Lair and the early days of the PS3 coincided and both sides realized that we had something here.
IGN: One of the biggest early misconceptions out there is that Lair is just Rogue Squadron with a dragon. Now's your chance to tell people what it really is -- go for it!
Eggebrecht: One part of Lair is the logical next step for us in flight action. Planes are limited and soulless; beasts and creatures provide a new level that we could never reach with a purely craft-based game. So in that sense there is our heritage as the creators of the accessible free-roaming flight game with the Rogue Squadron series in Lair.
But that's only the start: As a so-called Burner, one of the elite air-force in the Lair world, not only do you slip into a human hero with an epic journey and story, but the interactions between you and your enemies are all driven by the fact that they are alive. They fight, they get personal, they bleed, they scream. And all of that takes place in air and on the ground as well, so imagine riding and controlling this awesome beast and doing seamless, close-up battles everywhere you want to go in your game world. Dragons bring up all of these ideas, from the mythical fire-spewing creature to the dinosaurs straight out of earths history -- Lair is embracing all of that.
One unique element that made it all come together was the motion control. You virtually hold the reigns of the beast purely with motion control in ways you might expect -- but we also break new ground by utilizing our radically new gesture recognition system: If you pull on the reigns, the dragon does a 180 turn, if you punch it in a direction, you dash towards your enemies, if you dodge with the controller, the dragon on-screen dodges. If you latch onto certain objects in the game, you can tear them apart by wildly shaking the controller.
On the ground, you stomp your enemies by ramming it down - and these are only a few examples. It's a whole new paradigm and certainly the most exciting thing for me as a game creator since the analog stick came about. It makes very complex moves very, very accessible for a broader audience. People who traditionally cannot play these types of action games due to the lack of analog precision and too many button combinations intuitively get it, while the pros get moves and a level of control that simply aren't possible on a stick.
Finally, in addition to the radically new gameplay mechanics, our take on fantasy has a darker, more contemporary tone and story, and we aren't shying away from themes that are very relevant right now - moral choices in wartime, religious extremism, political pretense and separation of church and state, global climate catastrophes. It's an epic story which we tried to put as many layers as possible into.
If games want to be recognized as the next relevant media after movies, we as creators need to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk. We need to take on themes that are relevant to society and actually comment on them the way other media have done for hundreds of years. You can gun down hundreds of soldiers in virtual battlefields, but none of those games ever even tries to make you think about what you are doing and maybe second-guess your choices. Movies give you the multi-layered part, sometimes pretentious, sometimes too simplified, but at least they try. Games need to get to that and we certainly try.
IGN: That sounds pretty awesome. Is Lair strictly a flight game?
Eggebrecht: Absolutely. When you are in air you can take out only certain enemies with fireballs. For the tougher set you need to lock-on, and get in close combat using the motion control gestures. If you ram your enemy often enough, both of you tumble out of the sky and enter a combo-driven fight mode which makes things very personal. Then, on top of that, we have a system of killing moves in which you make the hero kill enemy riders and dragons in a ton of inventive ways. One of them you saw in the trailer.
IGN: Will the game have multiplayer elements or is it strictly a single-player story-driven actioner?
Eggebrecht: We carved out enough to do for us with Lair being a single-player experience, so multiplayer is reserved for any sequel if this first one is successful enough. The design group and I have a ton of ideas around it, so there is plenty of room to explore in the future, but we first need to focus on getting this one right.
IGN: The original teaser shown at PS Meeting said that the footage shown was "in-game." How far has the project come since then and what improvements have you made on those original visuals?
Eggebrecht: It was footage directly grabbed out of the engine, running in real-time on the PS3, and with game assets. In levels that have our rain engine active the dragons are still as shiny as they were in that trailer. The teaser deliberately didn't show the hero or any other bits of the world of Lair because we wanted to introduce our technology, and what is possible on the PS3 in real-time.
That demo, as nice as it looked, only used a very primitive lighting system. Nowadays we have a full atmospheric light simulation running on RSX, so if we re-did the demo it would look considerably better. And then there is of course the dragon art: The Dark Dragon looks quite different these days because it evolved visually, but the Flame Dragon is almost unchanged in the game. We'll probably have that very demo as one of the extras in the final game, with a fully customizable camera as well that allows you to examine the dragon models.
IGN: We've coined a term around the office known as "Pro-Pixel Leatherization Diffusion" to describe your rendering technique on dragon scales. We've also started using it when describing other games with similar effects, but you guys were first. We're giving you this term for free use on the back of your box. But anyway, regardless of what you (must) call it, can you talk a little bit about the technology behind Lair and if what we've seen in the trailers will be reflective of the final in-game product?
Eggebrecht: Thanks for the shader compliment, I'll hand it on to our incredible tech and art team. All kudos goes to them! As I mentioned, as proof we might have the teaser demo in the final product fully interactive, and all the models are still the same as they were back then, in fact many of them are even more detailed. If you look at the newest rev of our hero's dragon, the so-called Plains Dragon, it has even more detail then the one we used for the E3 2006 trailer. All of the models you saw there were right out of the engine.
We are releasing a lot of new shots of the game straight and un-scaled over the next few weeks, so you will see a lot of the technical features in those. One of the things people need to realize is that you go seamlessly from ground to air --thanks to Cell we are running every single object in the game through a real-time LOD method called progressive mesh, something that makes the incredible detail was well as loads of objects on screen possible. We also have a unique and extremely flexible shading and light system, all real-time and of course all in HDR. Every light and shadow in the scene is real-time generated, thus making it possible to change the time of day dynamically while the level progresses. Nothing is pre-baked as many other games do it.
We are also quite proud of our landscape engine, which allows us the seamless transitions from high altitudes all the way to the ground. We have levels the size of the Bay Area in Lair in which you can land in any spot and have dirt and gravel detail right in front of you and all of the texturing on the landscape is done based on erosion shaders which are running in real-time on RSX. So artists can get these huge areas together in relatively short-time-frames.
Another area that is really cool on Cell is the real-time dynamics. We simulate hundreds of cloth and physics objects in the scene at any given moment, the enemies and heroes of course all are running ragdoll and physics-driven animations. The single hero dragon you ride is more complex than all objects in our prior games combined, down to little details like the flutter of the wings being dynamically driven.
On top of all that, there is a real-time fluid dynamics simulation running on Cell for really complex ocean wave and water dynamics. We built our whole engine, including the physics part, on our own, without using any middleware. That way we have much more control over every aspect and can cater every detail to the PS3s and the games´ needs.
In terms of shaders I could go on for a while -- you'll find everything that is possible right now and a few cool new ones. Our fire is not made out of pre-baked textures but is a real-time simulation running on RSX, we have advanced parallax shaders, volumetric clouds, fog, and smoke, real-time rain, wetness, lava, fur, and much, much more.
IGN: How long have you been working on the project? And how far into the game were you before you had proper PS3 dev kits? Also, have the final specs changed anything about the game at all?
Eggebrecht: Lair has been in production since 2004. For a long time the team was quite small, by now we have a whole army on it. The dev-kits evolved throughout that time, but the specs really didn't. We started with Lair at exactly the same time as the PS3 specs were specified and the hardware partners were locked-in. So we knew what to expect. Cell already was far along, the NVIDIA partnership made things very clean and clear on the graphics front, and Blu-ray never was in question, either. The final decisions about the hard drive as a standard inclusion took a bit longer, but we planned on using it from day one anyways, so we were prepared.
The final dev-kit delivered exactly what we expected in terms of power; there was no nasty last-minute surprise or anything. I've read the rumors of Cell being so hot that they had to downgrade clock-rate and quite frankly, I don't know who is spreading those. Cell specs didn't change, its speed didn't change, in fact the final retail unit is so quiet that when we first had Lair booting from disc on it we thought the PS3 wasn't running at all.
IGN: What are your thoughts on 1080p? You're rendering some stuff out at that resolution now, do you think it's necessary for games to be standardized as 1080p and is it doable?
Eggebrecht: First of all, we are not only rendering some part of Lair in 1080p. The whole game is in 1080p native, from front-end to all in-game bits.
We absolutely love 1080p because of the detail that you can see. When we went up from 720 to 1080 I was blown away how much more of the artwork was visible. We started out being true 720p proponents, but since switching over to true 1080p via HDMI a few months ago I can't go back.
Lair is not upscaling or cheating to get to 1080p, we are natively running at the full 1920x1080 progressive resolution. Earlier this year we were quite skeptical if that would be possible, but the final kits really were a revelation in terms of power. Sony delivered what they promised and after a bit of tweaking we had the game up-and running. One thing that did help us was that our engine always was heavily reliant on data streaming, so the larger frame buffer memory never was an issue. By now half of our staff has 1080p monitors, and believe me, the 720 guys are jealous.
IGN: Quick Fanboy wars question -- Could Lair be done under its current spec on the Xbox 360? If so, why go with the PlayStation 3 "only" instead of going cross-platform?
Eggebrecht: Lair in its current form couldn't be done on 360. We are using large amounts of Cell's SPUs for all of our geometry, landscape, simulations, animations, even troop AI. When we create a game, we absolutely focus on the platform it is designed around. Would we do one for 360, it would be a different game and a different engine -- most crucially perhaps though: Lair is an entirely different game without the motion control and gesture recognition since it was designed around it.
IGN: What advantage does Blu-ray afford you now? Everyone talks about how great the extra storage space is but are you actually using it for Lair?
Eggebrecht: The single level at TGS alone takes up 4 Gigabytes of data. We are using every ounce of that due to streaming of our textures. Sure you could chop them all down to tiny sizes and we would fit, but then again, it would not be the same game. In addition to all the textures and geometry, we also do have video on the disc, and all of that is in native 1080p resolution. Thanks to Blu-Ray we don't need to worry about that and can still fit the whole game on a single disk.
IGN: Are you going to use the tilt function or HD IP camera in any way?
Eggebrecht: The motion controller is not only about tilt and Lair will open your eyes about it. It detects tilt, yaw, and roll with extreme precision. But it also detects accelerations in space, and in the combination of the two it's a full-blown and very complex motion control system. All of Lair is built around the controller.
in fact I was begging the PS3´s controller designer early on to include full motion-sensing capabilities. It was something I was hoping for since the N64 days. For a short while it seemed to be an option for the GameCube but apparently the cost made it impossible at the time. I was certain that with the next round of consoles for a true next-gen jump it needed to be there. Graphics and sound are very important, but without a big generational jump in controls a new console is not truly next-gen for me as a creator. So remembering that PS3 controller meeting, I promised that our project, which would become Lair, would be the perfect showcase for the functionality.
IGN: Is downloadable content something you're looking at? If so, to what extent?
Eggebrecht: Absolutely. When we are finished with the game we will continue working on content. There is always stuff you need to abandon which in previous generations was lost forever. With the downloadable content option these oftentimes truly great ideas can be finished the way the team imagined them. We also have the opportunity to react to gamers and incorporate their feedback at that point. The possibilities are really fantastic.
IGN: Tell us something about Lair that will separate it from every other PS3 game on the market... other than the fact that it has badass dragons in it.
Eggebrecht: We are doing our best to make Lair stand out in every respect but if I had to pick one aspect it's the controls and how they tie into your experience with the beast. It's the thing that elevates it above any game I have directed before.
IGN: All right then, when is Lair coming out?
Eggebrecht: Uh, oh. That's the million dollar question, isn't it? More information will come on that in the near future.
IGN: Any last words for IGN readers?
Eggebrecht: I think you guys will be blown away by the PS3 in every respect -- and LAIR will be one of those games that shows what this incredible hardware can do!
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