PAX 2010: Vanquish Q&A

At PAX 2010, I had a chance to sit down and talk to Julian Mehlfeld, Community Manager at SEGA about their upcoming title, Vanquish.

Question:  So tell us a bit about the title, it looks awesome.

Answer:  It does look awesome, there’s a lot going on at any given moment. Just before we get into the game itself I’ll give you a little background. It’s developed by Platinum games and Shinji Mikami. So Platinum games, if you played Bayonetta, you know they know their shit for really hardcore intense action. Shinji Mikami of course is a gaming god he’s done Resident Evil among other titles. The mixing of these two worlds can only bring awesome and that’s what it is.

So the title is Vanquish, you play Sam Gideon. You’re in the future; it’s basically a resource game. The Russians are attacking America and they’re making a play for this space station you’re on. So this space station is harvesting power off the sun and you’re coming on to take these guys out, restore order and make sure they don’t attack other stations, then you want to get your guys and get out of there.

Question: So, third person shooter, high action, Sci-Fi?

Answer:  Right so if you look at it just on the cover it’s a third person shooter its got high action, there’s a lot going on but, the key difference from this game and other third person shooters is the speed and timing. For one, you can move cover to cover in this game and play it like a cover to cover shooter, jump in take a couple shoots, pull back, but you’re only getting about half of the game. There’s a boost mechanic that you can use to move about the environment. So as we are looking at it we can see that there’s just a ton of shit going on at any given time, but you can take it a step further where your suit has boosters that you can use to move around the level. You can use them to move into cover quickly, either being really evasive, or use them to be super aggressive, get up in people’s faces and do melee attacks and knock em back, it really is up to you.

Question: What have you done with the cover system in this game?

Answer:  Yeah, with that dash mechanic you can just drop right in with the X button and from there you can pop out to take a shot or move on to the next piece, your choice. As well as the dash we have what’s called augmented reaction time. This basically gives you a chance to slow down time, bullet time really isn’t the best way to describe it but if your familiar with that, it’s a good point of reference. It will slow down everything around you, giving you a chance to line up shots, or if your dashing and you can’t get a good shoot because your moving so fast you can slow it down. Do a dash from one piece of cover, take out three guys along the way, land behind the next object, boom you’re on your way. Very fun

Question: Can you talk a bit about the length of the narrative?

Answer:  The length of the game is something we’re not discussing at this point, the game is quite long, it will take you to a lot of different areas but in terms of hours or play through we’re not there yet.

Question: Fair enough, what about multi-player?

Answer:  Multi-player, there is none. I know this might come as a bit of a shock to people but, I think when you hear the reasoning behind it, you will understand. People see a game like this and they think how is the multi-player going to work? Shinji Mikami again, this guy knows his single player experiences and so he’s worked on a game that is a really true, really clean, single-player game and that’s what he wants. If you took this same game and made it into a multi-player game, you would have multi-player, it may not be fun but you would have multi-player and it would have a little check box on the back that says “oh we have multi-player”. So what they did was put all their time into a really solid single-player campaign and that’s what we have here.

Question: I can get behind a company that knows not to overreach.

Answer:  Yeah, you can do a bunch of things mediocre or you can do one thing really well. On top of that too I have not seen a game that does a slow down mechanic in multi-player yet, I know a lot have tried. When you look at this game, that is a core part of the game-play. You change that, you’ve changed the game.

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Thanks to Julian for taking time out to chat with us!  You can pickup Vanquish for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on October 19th.  You can find out more info about the game at www.sega.com/vanquish.