It wouldn't be unfair to say that, until recently, High Voltage Software wasn't exactly one of the biggest names in gaming. Despite the fact that the company has been going for 16 years, most of the games it has developed in the past have been mainly promoted by their various publishers, with the development team taking a back seat. With the The Conduit however, High Voltage decided that it was time for the developers to take centre stage. We recently sat down with Eric Nofsinger, the studio's Chief Creative Officer, to find out more.
ONM: How did the idea for The Conduit initially come about?
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Eric Nofsinger: Well, over the last 16 years we've primarily made licensed products [such as Ben 10, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy]. Some of them have been decent, and some of them have... not been so decent [laughs]. But we learned a lot and it was a really good lesson in how to make games.
We developed a lot of really high quality individuals as we learned the skills of our trade, and when Kerry Ganofski (our CEO) secured funding for an original game, it was a great opportunity for us to get off the licensed game treadmill and start stretching our legs with different types of games.
When we were discussing what type of game we should be making, it was round about the time of the Wii launch, and we were so excited by it as a platform. We immediately latched onto first-person shooters, because we just thought the device would be well suited to it. And we got really excited about games like Red Steel when we saw the potential of them. Then when we got them in our hands and they were a bit disappointing for us. This really resolved our decision to go with a first-person shooter, because game after game was coming out and there was more casual... well, games that weren't catered towards us.
It was exciting to see a whole new market opening up. My mom purchased one and it was great to see her playing games. But more and more we felt left out in the dust. We wanted to try and resolve that because we were feeling left out by everyone but Nintendo, who was still doing high-quality stuff like Zelda and Mario and Smash Bros. Even today, when you look at it, there have been 12 first-person shooters on the Wii, six of which have been WWII-themed, and almost all of which have been ports from other consoles. The only two that have gotten good reviews are Call Of Duty: World At War (which is fun but is only a port and doesn't take full advantage of the Wii), and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, which isn't really a first-person shooter. It's an adventure game. Long since these 12 games came out we'd already decided what we were going to do, but as more and more came out it justified our decision.
ONM: So you felt like you were doing a duty to 'core' gamers?
EN: Well after the first few months of the Wii's launch there weren't alot of games for core gamers to play. And as more and more casual games came out I think analysts started coming out with "oh, well Wii consumers, they want casual games."
But as we asked our friends and other developers they were saying "well, no, we want something with unique, exclusive content specifically made from the ground up for this system". It's not that we're adverse to the Wii, we just want something that takes advantage of it instead of being lied to and being told that some poor-quality game being ported over from another console was just as good when it's not.
ONM: Alot of hype surrounded the game's graphics. What can you tell us about your ambitions in this field?
EN: We had concerns that nobody really seemed to be doing anything spectacular with the Wii, so we had concerns that perhaps the Wii just wasn't really capable of it. So we did some early technical demos to prove the system was capable of it, and everything we challenged our Advanced Technology group to do, it turned out the Wii could do it, and do it at a pretty decent frame rate. And we realised that when we optimised it, we could even cram more things in there: normal mapping, environment mapping, material based effects, blooms and blurs. We could do depth of field, dynamic water with refraction and reflection, specularity, dynamic shadows on characters... the list went on and on. So we were like "well, it can be done. Sure, it's not easy, but it can certainly be done."
ONM: So there were a lot of different challenges to get the Wii to do all those things?
EN: For sure. To be honest, some of the challenges stemmed around our own hype. Nintendo fans are the best fans in the world and I consider myself lucky to have been able to reach out to so many of them and get their feedback. But as the momentum began to build... I won't say we started to doubt what we were doing but it became a challenge to ourselves. "If people are saying this is going to be the best graphics ever on ANY game, we'd better do more!" It became very challenging. We'd actively go out and seek feedback by going on forums, and we'd get emails from people saying "I saw a screenshot of a level and the texture-mapping was a little bit blurry" and we'd look at it and go "you know, they're right" and fix it.
ONM: How about the online side of things?
EN: It was challenging to work on a system that hadn't really been well-defined by other developers. There are still very few Wii games that take advantage of its online components so that was very challenging. To do 12-player multiplayer at a good frame rate, and then to also use Wii Speak (and when we started integrating it, it hadn't even been released yet), that was also challenging. But Nintendo has been very supportive and we worked with their engineers to get the most out of Wii Speak and optimise the online gameplay to support 12 players at once.
ONM: What are the main influences for visual style of the game?
EN: Well we wanted to make a game that was accessible. We've even received a fair amount of criticism for our graphical style, from people saying it's not extreme enough and doesn't really make an artistic statement. And I'm okay with that criticism, I think it's fair. But that was a conscious choice because we didn't want to go down the same route as other games that went out on a limb visually. Those games get great reviews, but it can be a turn-off to the consumer. As much as we tried to make this game for core gamers, that's accomplished through depth and variety and detail.
The other side was we wanted to make sure we had as broad an appeal as possible. There are over 50 million Wii users out there, and I've seen first hand that there are many folks out there who own a Wii and have never played an FPS before on any system. And we strongly feel that it's far more intuitive to pick up and play an FPS with the Remote than it is with dual analogue sticks.
We wanted something with a real-world setting that looked iconic. So we looked at a few cities in the US and settled on Washington DC because we'd been there before and it's a very iconic area. Even if you're not from the US you've probably seen American films with DC landmarks in them. It's also an environment that hasn't been done to death in games because it's usually New York. Plus, locations like the Library Of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House all fit in well with the conspiracy storyline.
ONM: How about the Drudge character designs? What was your inspiration?
EN: For the creature designs we looked a lot at sea creatures and insects. Even their weapons. There's a weapon where you can shove a slug-like creature into it and when you turn it upside-down it sort of sloshes out in a gross kind of sound. We wanted to do a lot of organic stuff which let us show off the normal mapping and the specularity, and make them really shiny. It's something that people aren't doing much on the Wii. They're going with this very flat look as opposed to making things look shiny and crisp.
We looked a lot at other games too. One of the games we get compared to a lot is Perfect Dark. We're happy to be in its company! We certainly looked at Perfect Dark, GoldenEye and Resistance: Fall Of Man and visually I think it all came together in a nice way. I feel really good about it because the people who have the biggest complaints about our visual style... I don't know if we could have ever made them truly happy because we would have ended up with a really extreme style, but it would have been so niche and so boutique that we'd have ended up only selling the game to about four people.
ONM: After the poor sales of Madworld, how well do you think Wii owners will react to The Conduit?
EN: Well, we did have a selfish reason for making this game. It became "everyone's game" as the media picked up on it and started getting involved, but early on this was very much a game we were trying to make because it was a game we wanted to play. We were really hoping to raise the quality bar of games on the Wii. All the developers and publishers we've talked to, I think they're playing sort of "wait and see" just now. If it does well and the gamers support it, then I think we'll see a lot more titles like this. Otherwise we're going to see a lot more videogames with "Fit" and "Sports" in their name!
