GC'07: Heavenly Sword Q&A Feature

Heavenly Sword sits firmly astride the genre that games such as Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia and God of War have made popular. These story driven games, with a firm emphasis on combat and puzzle solving, tend to be an entertaining way to help wile away a rainy weekend and as the PlayStation 3's first console exclusive from this genre, Heavenly Sword certainly looks the part.

TVG: In what we've seen of Heavenly Sword so far, only a portion of the combo moves were unlocked. How much does the library of combos expand in the final game and are there any other variations on what we've already seen?

There're three core stances. In the preview code you only have the first few combos unlocked and then there are all these other ones that accumulate on the list as you go through the game. That's true of all the stances.

Aerial combat is quite cool. You can get into it using SixAxis, or you can change the controls in the options to just use the buttons. So there are all these combos in aerial combat and things like that. You can switch the SixAxis off - whatever you prefer. Some people love it, some people don't, so we decided to give everyone the option.

The amount of combos that were unlocked in the preview code would certainly be less than half of those available in the final version.

TVG: Did you break any records with the amount of motion capture sensors you put on peoples faces? Because the facial animations are incredible, we were blown away by the cut-scenes.

I don't know if we actually broke any records with the amount of dots on the faces, but what we did do was capture body, face and voice all at once on a sound stage, with up to five actors at a time. That allowed us to have that true performance of two or more actors actually looking at each other and engaging like you would in film, theatre or anything like that, which really brings the performance to the fore.

To put that in perspective, in Lord of the Rings when they captured Andy Serkis as Gollum, they only did body - the face was all hand animated and matched to video. When they did Kong, they did the body first and then Andy had to head match separately. Then he over-dubbed the voice on top again. We tried all our stuff out at WETA [the effects studio of Lord of the Rings and Kong fame], in New Zealand, with Andy Serkis as our dramatic director. So, when we shot our stuff we had to develop the technology and so forth that took it from those three separate elements, to all of them together with multiple. So that was certainly groundbreaking.

Andy was wonderful. He is our dramatic director which is wonderful given his level of expertise in this field. He also plays King Bohan who's the big evil guy.

TVG: Are there six chapters in total and are they all similar lengths?

That is the case and they all vary in length a bit. Overall, I think we're looking at about ten to fifteen hours gameplay.

TVG: We've seen the SixAxis aftertouch used for Kai's arrows and for various problem solving sections involving throwing discs. Are there any other uses of it throughout in the game?

Using it for aftertouch is definitely my favourite - I think it feels really nice and natural. You can turn it on for camera control, so instead of using L2 and R2 to look around you can just tilt the camera with the SixAxis. We also use it for combat in a couple of instances: in order to get into aerial combat you can jerk yourself up into the air with that, and also for KO recoveries if you time it just right you can use it to get back. So we use it in a few places, yeah.

TVG: How much will we get to play as Kai in the game? She seems to be quite an agile mover. Will we get to play with her in open combat and how much will that make up the rest of the game?

You get to play as Kai for probably about 20% of the game. Kai is very agile; she's very cat-like. She'll leap over things and of course she's got her sniper crossbow, which again you can use with the aftertouch that you saw in chapter 2. What you saw of her at the back end of chapter 2 - she's effectively a turret, but later on in the game you get to run her around. You predominantly want to keep your distance from the enemies, because they're really too powerful for her, but if you get up close to them you can stun them to get away.

TVG: At the end of chapter 2 Nareeko disowns her dad. Can you tell us whether she manages to patch things up with him?

Yes, I guess she does. There is a family bond there and all does have to be forgiven ultimately. It is a story of revenge and redemption, so her journey through this is about her finally getting it right at the end, after going kind of Berserker for a little while there.

TVG: With the puzzles, do they get more taxing as the game goes on?

They do get a bit more tricky as time goes on, yeah.

TVG: Will there be a Heavenly Sword 2?

We haven't announced what we're doing yet but, certainly, we love the franchise so I hope so.

TVG would like to thank Nina Kristensen for taking the time to speak to us about Heavenly Sword, which is due out on the PlayStation 3 on September 14th