Rise to Honour Interview

Australian GamePro spoke to Rise to Honour’s Producer Jim Wallace at Sony’s motion capture studios in San Diego.

Can you please tell us about the story behind the game? The Jet Li character’s name is KitYun. He’s an undercover cop with the Triad Crime Bureau in Hong Kong and assigned to infiltrate a Chinese Triad family. The ironic thing is that Kit’s family actually has a Triad background: his father was very good friends with the boss of the family that Kit is assigned to go into. He’s assigned as a bodyguard to a character called Boss Chang, who is ultimately assassinated in the game. His final wish is for Kit to seek out his daughter Michelle, who is based in San Francisco. Once he finds her, that’s when things really kick off.

This genre has traditionally had a problem with repetition and lasting appeal. How are you going to combat this? The depth of the fight system definitely helps with that. There’s a lot of things that you can do, and the fight system evolves as you play. Not that we’re holding back any functionality, but there are definitely more and more things that you will find as you progress through the game. There’s a lot of interactive objects in the game, the environments are very reactive and there’s also weapon play. And chases, too. So the fundamental gameplay of hand-to-hand combat is pretty deep in itself but then we throw in gunplay and weapon-play scenarios, lots of interactive elements and those chase scenes and there’s a lot to do.

What kinds of objects can you interact with? If you see something logical in the environment that you would like to pick up and bash someone over the head with, you will probably be able to do it in Rise to Honour. There will even be things that you’ll find that you won’t necessarily even think about on your first pass that you can use.

Has the artificial intelligence of opponents proved challenging? It really is important to this style of game because you want the action to unfold like it does in an action film. So you need a variety of different types of AI to get fighters into formations, stay away from each other, and know when one gets hit. In these melee battles you’ve got 10 guys piling up on one so it needs to be fairly sophisticated.

What are you most pleased with? The way we’ve been able to get the motion capture to translate into in-game interactive animation. That was one of those things you kind of scratch your head about. You have an idea and it was definitely one of the highest risk things that we did. We’re trying something new and our initial tests suggested it was going to be difficult. We’re not just going for raw motion capture data and popping it into the game, there’s a ton of processing that goes in. Our lead games designer has a long history at Capcom, working on titles like Marvel Super Heroes and X-Men Vs Street Fighter. The main thing for him is responsiveness, you touch the joypad, you get an animation immediately.

What are the advantages of using Jet Li? The quality of the performance equals the quality of the animation. When it comes to martial arts, you can’t ask for someone better than Jet Li. We were working on pre-production with all these much younger performers, they were still very experienced, but when Jet Li came on set he just blew us all away. The extra speed that he has is amazing. The very first motion capture that we did with Jet was a hand-to-hand move. All of a sudden I saw all the motion capture guys confer around, scratching their heads, looking at each other, wondering whether he was going too fast. The motion capture system captures at 120 frames per second and they were worried about whether they got the data. They have professional athletes coming in here all the time but it was the first time they said: “Did we get that?” His range of performance is also so dramatic, everything he does is so over the top.

Is one of your goals to give players the feeling of being Jet? Absolutely. That was always my reaction to Hong Kong action movies. When I see this stuff, I want to be able to do that. I want people to have that experience of feeling like you are Jet Li, and in our first meeting with Jet he said that too.

What makes Hong Kong action flicks so special? It’s all the over-the-top, wild action. So much of this stuff is done without the wire rigs and special effects. It’s a different style to Hollywood and you can tell that the actual performers are more highly skilled and actually do the stunts.