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This week we travelled to Microsoft’s campus in Reading to check out how Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is coming along. While we were there, we chatted to two members of Rare’s development team, lead technical artist Neill Harrison and senior animator Elissa Miller. Here’s what they had to say on one of our most anticipated 360 exclusives of the year.
VideoGamer.com: This game is quite a departure from the previous Banjo titles. Is the platform genre dying out, do you think? There are a lot of in-game jokes at the expense of “old-fashioned” platform games.
Elissa Miller: I’m not sure if it’s that – I think we just felt that another platform-specific game might be a bit boring. We thought we needed to be a bit more innovative. We look at it as an evolution of the platform game. I guess [the genre] had its peak in the late ’90s, and now we’re in the ’00s we’re trying to bring it up to date with more elements. I think today it’s about owning your gaming and just having fun with it – you make your own game, really. That’s what we’ve been trying to do with this, with the build-your-own vehicles. It’s more your experience, rather the developer’s experience for the gamers.
VideoGamer.com: Between this game, Spore and LittleBigPlanet, it feels that user-generated content is the big trend at the moment. What’s your take on that?
EM: Every type of media evolves. Now it’s just a different type of gaming. I guess everything is… like in your home, you’ve got your Xbox and that plays games or DVDs – it’s your own experience. That’s maybe gone back into developing games where you’re trying to create the player’s own experience.
Neill Harrison: It’s interesting that a lot of developers have simultaneously done this. Certainly on our part we started the development before we knew about those games, and I’m sure they started before they knew about us. So it’s strange that we all started to go down this route at the same time. I don’t know why it happened, but it is interesting!
VideoGamer.com: What challenges does this pose to developers? It seems that the player is now heavily included in the way the game actually works, as opposed to just playing it.
EM: You’ve got to make bigger worlds, obviously, and they have to be interesting. The testing side of things is also a big challenge. You have people making their own game and their own vehicles, so how do you test that?
NH: Balancing the game is much harder than if it were a linear experience. Every time someone plays a challenge they’ll do it differently, whereas in previous games you’d have 50 testers playing the levels and it’d be the same each time – jump here, grab this. It’s much harder to test a game like this, but it’s been testing for a long time now and we’ve certainly fixed an awful lot of bugs.
VideoGamer.com: Have there been any major changes made to the game during the testing period?
NH: Not that much has actually changed. We came up with the idea that we wanted to let people build their own vehicles out of components and then let them choose how they want to complete the task – and that’s still very much the core of the game right now. The biggest challenge was probably the vehicle editor, trying to make it functional and very powerful but also easy to use. I mean, the whole concept of being able to build things in 3D, being able to move components in three dimensions and rotate them about every axis – that’s something that could be quite complicated for the average person. So that went through a lot of changes to get it as simple as possible. But we’re quite proud of that now, there’s not much more we could have done to make it easy to build vehicles.
VideoGamer.com: The vehicle editor now uses an invisible grid to determine where components are placed in relation to each other. So far this seems like a pretty smart way of keeping things simple without limiting creativity. Did the editor always work this way?
EM: No. Well, I mean we’ve always had the grid, but in older versions you had to keep all the components attached at all times, otherwise they would fall and drop to the bottom of the screen. I remember this massive moment at some point during last year where I thought, “I don’t want to play it like this.” I wanted it to be like my Lego, where I’d be able to lay out the blocks in front of me on the floor, or wherever, and then decide where they went. So that’s kind of evolved from where it was before. It’s always been there, but all sort of tweaks have gone into it. We also looked at the way it related to game progression, so you can always get through challenges but equally we don’t throw too many components at you.
VideoGamer.com: Clearly people will experience Nuts & Bolts in many different ways. Do you think it’s almost the case that video games are moving in the direction of simply being toys for people to play with?
NH: The balance has shifted. You get a lot of sandbox games now, where you can create your own fun outside of the main story or quest. You can certainly do that in our game, you can have a lot of fun just messing around.
EM: For some people, that’s the most interesting part. I know it’s what I enjoy the most. Rather than play a game through from start to finish, I like to get lost in it.
NH: I think that it does give you increased replayability and longevity, in terms of wanting to actually play a game. There’s only so many times you can play a level if it has to be done just one way.
EM: Yeah. The amount of time it takes to actually complete a game is almost irrelevant, nowadays.
VideoGamer.com: So how does that change the way you approach the structure of a game like this? Elissa, you said you get more fun out of just messing around – but clearly you want people to play the game all the way through, right?
NH: That’s an important point. Clearly if we were to give everyone all of the components at the start it would just be ridiculous – especially for young players. It would be way too much. As you probably saw for yourself, the full list of parts is quite daunting the first time you look at it. When you play the single-player, you start out with a very small subset initially, and it slowly expands as you progress through. That’s really important, not to overwhelm people… But it’s pretty cool as well, because later on in the game you will get new components that will let you go back to earlier challenges and do them in a completely different way. Perhaps you’ve got your first pair of wings – before I had to do it in a land-based vehicle; now I can do it in a plane.
VideoGamer.com: We understand that there will be some degree of connectivity between Nuts & Bolts and the forthcoming Xbox Live Arcade remake of the first game. How will that work?
NH: There’s a Stop n’ Swap feature which harks back to the old games. It’s a bit of an in-joke really, a tribute to the fans. Basically Nuts & Bolts will detect your save game from the remake, and if you’ve progressed to a certain point then you’ll find things like new components have been unlocked.
VideoGamer.com: Any plans for DLC?
NH: We haven’t announced anything, or even really thought about it yet, but it’s certainly possible… People always assume we’re not allowed to to say, but actually most of the time we don’t even know! But yeah, we’ll finish this and then we’ll think about what’s next.
VideoGamer.com: The 360 is now as cheap as the Wii in most territories… do you think the console can achieve the same level of cross-market popularity?
EM: It goes back to what we were saying earlier. Games have evolved since the 90s, and I think the consoles have to as well.
NH: Nintendo have certainly done a great job of penetrating the family market.
EM: Yeah. It’s a massive market, and I think Microsoft is quite keen to take a chunk of it.
NH: I think they’re doing a lot of stuff with games like Lips, which works along similar lines – it’s the kind of game you can see everyone playing at Christmas, with your whole family as a group. Going down that route, I think games like SceneIt? are quite important to Microsoft and the Xbox. And then there are people like us trying to make games that appeal to people other than first-person shooter fans.
EM: And there’s stuff like Rock Band. There are a lot of good third-party games available now.
VideoGamer.com: The game is almost done now, and there’s been a lot of coverage of the game in the press. Will there still be a few surprises for us come launch day?
EM: Oh yeah. There are two entire game worlds that nobody has seen yet – we might be revealing those at Tokyo. The thing is, it’s such a massive game that what we’ve shown so far is barely a quarter of the actual experience. It’s an immense game, which makes it quite hard to develop, but it also means there’s loads to see and do. So yes, we’ve barely touched on it.
NH: There are lots of components we’ve not shown off yet. And there are over 100 challenges – we’ve only ever shown off a handful of them.
VideoGamer.com: So far, this generation, we’ve seen the return of the Perfect Dark franchise, and now Banjo. Is there any chance we’ll be seeing others…
EM: Like Killer Instinct? (laughs)
VideoGamer: Well, anything really!
EM: There’s always the possibility for franchises to come back, but as far as we’re aware… nothing at the moment. Never say never!
NH: There’s always the option. Obviously we’ve done Banjo, but we’ve taken it in a new direction. I think as a company it would be very easy for us to just churn out sequels to our old IP.
EM: It’s not like we just say, “Let’s do another Perfect Dark.” There has to be a reason: the right team, the right resources, the right concept.
VideoGamer.com: It’s been 10 years since the original Banjo Kazooie, and the industry’s whole treatment of mascots and icons has somewhat changed. Do you think Banjo and Kazooie themselves have changed?
NH: Someone who never played the old games might think of them differently, but Nuts & Bolts is still very much a Banjo Kazooie game at its heart. Certainly the humour and the characters themselves are always the same as they always were. It was very important for us to keep it the same.
VideoGamer.com: Where you ever worried about taking the series away from its roots?
EM: You’re always going to have concerns when you’re trying out something new. As a developer, all you can do is do the best you can and hope that people embrace it. [Creative director] Gregg Mayles, who worked on the first two games, is at the helm. He knows Banjo very well, obviously, so it was his vision to push the game in this direction. We just have to see if people embrace it. Hopefully you’ve seen for yourself it’s a pretty exciting game – we hope people will buy into it. Then it’s up to us to see what we’ll do with the next one, whether we push it a bit further or perhaps go back to platforming. Who knows?
VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is due out exclusively for Xbox 360 in November. Check the site later for our hands-on preview.
