To start, we brought up Andy Sites previous comments about PlanetSide 3 from October. In a community update then, he stated that “PlanetSide Arena is intended to be the stepping stone to PlanetSide 3, which we envision expanding from the current battlefields of Auraxis, to full-fledged galactic war with empires exploring, colonizing and conquering one another within an expansive galaxy.” While PlanetSide Arena ended up shuttering this month, DualShockers still asked about that vision and how Rogue Planet Games would keep an entry that large true to the series.

To that, Sites said, “we have some pretty epic plans for the sequel, but it’s likely a conversation for another time.” When asked where he sees the PlanetSide series going over the next 10 years, Sites once again teased a sequel, this time from the development side. “When the time comes to announce and release a true sequel, the community needs to not only continue to be engaged and playing, but confident that we are the right team to deliver it. The entire Rogue Planet team is fully committed to Planetside; many of whom have been involved since the launch of PlanetSide 2 and even the original Planetside back in 2003. So further progressing the Planetside universe isn’t just our job, it’s our passion.”

These statements show that Rogue Planet Games is heavily considering PlanetSide 3 and that its vision may not be too far off from Sites’ October 2019 comments. The press release announcing Rogue Planet Games, Dimensional Ink Games and Darkpaw Games also states that Rogue Planet “is looking to develop its next genre-defining game for fans of shooters,” so they are at least working on something cool.

Participant 6: Hello, it’s Michael from PKO BP. Could you elaborate whether the delay was caused by technical glitches and bugs or whether you weren’t happy with the gameplay. And a related question –you were pretty confident that the April date was good to go and that you would be able to release the game on that date. Did anything unexpected happen or were you just generally unhappy with the state of the game?

AK: Hello, Adam Kicinski. There’s technical bugfixing and polishing, but as we’ve said - we have the game. It’s playable; the whole game. It’s been like that for a couple of months. But it’s fairly complex –there are just some glitches, but we’re not talking about some fundamental mechanisms, but with the level of complexity, polishing is just a complex task. It’s about the number of things we have to take care of rather than some fundamental problem. As Micha? said, we are pretty confident with the date. Now we are at a stage of the project where we can measure things and we have all statistics. And the second question was –if I recall –why now? Why three months before release? Well, we have been waiting and there always comes the moment to decision. We are constantly evaluating the game and we decided if we are to delay this is the right moment, and that with the decision to add five months we would be really sure that we can deliver what we had planned. Of course, it was a tough decision, but we and our team –which was informed minutes ago –think that this was a good decision and that having an extra five months will enable us to deliver a perfect game.

P6: And is the development team required to put in crunch hours?

AK: To some degree, yes –to be honest. We try to limit crunch as much as possible, but it is the final stage. We try to be reasonable in this regard, but yes. Unfortunately.

We would love to be delivering a version of this that you could play with a mouse and a keyboard. But like as we said, it began as an exploration of VR. The more we used the controllers and the headset, we realized the the amount of interactions this gives, the amount of possibilities these things give us. The more we explored this, the more we realized that there’s so much opportunity that we can’t really translate back to the keyboard.

When you can track your hands separately from your head. They are all 3D space, all simultaneously tracking and moving, you just can’t get that with a mouse and keyboard. And when you put that into game mechanics, the kinds of interactions that we can do now, we couldn’t possibly do with a mouse and keyboard.

Hello im a fan of the id engine:(Doom, Wolfenstein Quake) im just wondering how long did it take to get it right and to make it work. Im going into programming and hopefully make a game one day. Thanks! level 2

John Romero:

The Commander Keen engine took a few weeks to get done.

The Wolfenstein 3D engine was mostly done in 6 weeks.

The DOOM engine was mostly done in 4 months.

The Quake engine took 12 months.

But.... we're talking about John Carmack here. :) Good luck in your game dev career!

Have you ever pirated a game?

John Romero: When I was a kid, most of my games were pirated. If it wasn't for all those pirated games, I wouldn't have done what I did in my career. So, giving my shareware episodes away for free always felt like I was letting people have fun without guilt.

I think simplicity is good, but it gets consumed very quickly. It’s like food: anything that’s really digestible, it just goes out. And it doesn’t remain in the body. But something that’s awkward, that is not really digestible, it remains in your body. And you don’t know what it is. And human has this intellectual feeling that kind of lingers: what is this? Like for instance a movie, if that lingers in you, you watch it again over and over, or you talk with your friends about them, what was that about? Or maybe take time to rewatch again, or rethink of it again. And you kind of start to understand the real meaning. And it begins to be a real body, your blood and meat. And it remains in your body fluid, and not just comes out. And I want to create that kind of thing.

I grew up watching movies or things like that, so I just do that in games. Everyone says it’s complicated, but I think everyone should just keep it and maybe nourish it for five or ten years, and maybe they will start to understand. And I really want to create those kind of things.

I think stimulation is needed to grow. You kind of find out things you don’t know, that’s why you grow. So anything you know, or anything [that’s] easy to eat, you won’t grow. Or your brain won’t grow. It won’t be an experience. So sometimes I want people to kind of eat something that is not really easy to digest. But I really want to make that thing delicious, mind you.

OnlySP: Can you talk about the excitement levels when Quantic Dream announced it was going multi-platform? What’s it like knowing an entirely new audience will now have access to the team’s games?

Cage: This is very exciting! So many times we heard people say “I love your games, but I can only watch them on video because I don’t have a console.” Now anyone who owns a PC will be able to experience our games.

It is an entirely new market for us, although we started as a cross-platform developer (our first game Omikron: The Nomad Soul was released on PC and Dreamcast, and Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy was also cross-platform).

The reaction from the PC community has been tremendous. It is like expanding our family. We will, of course, remain a part of the PlayStation family, but we will now also make our games available to everyone, no matter their platform.

OnlySP: Moving forward to future projects and a wider release, what is Quantic Dream looking to change about its development formula, if anything?

Cage: Until now, we have focused on just one platform, optimizing our engines for one specific hardware and controller. Now we will have to do the same job on all platforms with the same ambition of quality. As you may know, Quantic Dream has developed its own proprietary tech for 22 years, which allowed us to focus on specific features (high quality rendering, sense of cinematography, virtual actors, complex branching narrative, etc.). We have a permanent team of 60 engineers working on our own tech, and we plan to reinforce this team to expand our R&D on all platforms.

What’s it like designing quests for a less fixed protagonist like V, who has varying backgrounds, character builds?

As quest designers we were already used to tell nonlinear stories, so having a character like V gave us more of what we already like to do. The lifepaths are actually one of my favorite features, because they just give us more roleplaying opportunities. A nomad can of course solve some problems much better than a corpo, but put him into a board room and he might not really have the best way to lead a conversation the way he wants to.

So when we come up with challenges, we also like to think how different lifepaths could solve them effectively. This will hopefully give players lots of motivation to play the game multiple times, because they can have a completely new experience.

The new gameplay options thanks to our fluid class system essentially give us more opportunities to make our quests even more nonlinear. It’s a lot of fun to work with our level and encounter designers on locations for our quests, because there are always so many different options we can come up with. And sometimes, these options can then also change the story, so just like the lifepath, these gameplay abilities just make it easier for us to make the quest more nonlinear than ever.

“We cannot do everything and Japanese [companies] are not risk averse but we’re going slowly. So we have a full platform strategy. The main focus for us is the consumer and the brand. And for each brand we decide what’s the best way to satisfy the consumer and to engage the widest audience possible. So for instance, I don’t see any point of putting Tekken 7 (pictured above) on Epic Store. Epic is just another store. It’s fantastic, they have a lot of strength and [lots of] users, the business model is attractive to us because it’s more profitable but still, their interest is, if I’m correct, exclusivity. And this is not our vision. We want our content to be available for as many fans as possible. I don’t think we’ll deal with Epic in the short term, while we have this strategy. But of course, if they’re open, we’ll go there.”

Four styles they have presented after the e3: entropism, kitsch, neomilitarism and neokitch will influence how Night City looks like in general, not only affecting the clothing but also the architecture of different parts of the city.

Their goal is to tell a movie-like story for adult audience, touching subjects that we face in our times. He specifies that their games are not toys and are not for children, he says in todays culture we try to avoid difficult subjects, but they will not shy away from these, in fact, he says, the game is loaded with them – they want people to think for themselves and it will be up to us to decide what our morality is. He then continues – the game will allow you to look at things from different perspectives so knowing them it will rarely be a black and white situation we find ourselves in, the goal is to keep the player on the edge of his seat by telling a breathtaking story.

V’s main goal is to break free from NC’s shackles and find himself a better life, and finding the immortality chip is closely connected to this goal, which makes Johnny the key to the main plot and your relationship with him that you will build over time will shape the game’s ending – his precise words, I translated everything so that there won’t be any additional meanings created or lost in the translation, everything is as he said.”

GamesBeat: How long a game is this going to be?

Gustafsson: It’s a bit weird, because this is our biggest game yet, but it’s a pretty short production time. Like I said, the story is lighter in content as well as tone. But the level progression and the non-linear narrative gives us the ability to add a lot of activities and a lot of missions to do, so the total game time is actually longer than our previous titles. I think we’re looking at at least 25 to 30 hours if you play through everything.

In your opinion, do you think Telltale was too risk-averse?

Well, we were much more experimental early on. Like, pre-The Walking Dead, where we had things like Poker Night at the Inventory, Homestar Runner, that game had no text in it – all the choices were icon-based choices and it had a lot more puzzles in them. It was a lot more of a traditional point-and-click game. We had a lot more diversity early on.

I think one of the other big influences at Telltale, was, Telltale had investors. Originally we had venture-capital investors, and then Lionsgate, a big public company, invested in it. Then we had this big hit with The Walking Dead. And then everybody wanted more of that because it had a lot of notoriety and it sold a lot. When we would go out to license holders to get bigger and better licenses, it made sense to be more conservative there. You weren’t going to talk to [HBO] and say, “We’re going to run a big new experiment on Game of Thrones.” [Instead, we would say,] “We’re going to do what we did with The Walking Dead for you as well." So there was a lot of pressure from the leadership of the company to pursue bigger and more interesting opportunities and to de-risk those opportunities so the company could continue to grow and become more valuable. Is de-risking the way to become more valuable? It’s certainly subjective. I have had many arguments about what the best path for Telltale forward would or wouldn’t be. But those are the dynamics that were in play. We wanted bigger and more interesting licenses so we had bigger and more interesting market opportunities. And we wanted to make sure that we didn’t – really the most important thing was that we didn’t go backwards. We didn’t want The Walking Dead to be a fluke; or to be a one-hit wonder. That’s why The Wolf Among Us was one of the most important games we ever did, because we were terrified that if it wasn’t good, that would be perceived as a one-hit wonder.

Were you surprised about the closure?

I learned about the closure about eight hours before it actually happened. I was completely taken by surprise at the closure. It was unthinkable to me that the studio would shut down, and I certainly knew that there [weren’t any] circumstances that get us anywhere near that. It was very dramatic, very sudden, and I can’t really speak more [about it]. I’ve since learned about the circumstances that caused the shutdown, and I can’t really speak to them. But they had nothing to do with the studio, with the products that were being built.

You read Steam articles or articles about people saying, “Telltale’s sales were diminishing every year.” Compared against a Game of the Year like The Walking Dead, that’s true, but normalized out that’s not the case and certainly that wasn’t what impacted Telltale at all. It had nothing to do with the studio and the products that the studio was building at the time. I wish I could elaborate more.