A Conversation With Marcus Smith

Interview With the Creative Director on Sunset Overdrive

While only in Sydney for less than two days last week, I had the great pleasure of attending this years EB Games Expo, held once again at Sydney Olympic Park from October 3rd to October 5th. With many of the big name publishers and developers attending the expo in its fourth year, the crowds were once again huge as gamers once again descended upon the city for three days of gaming, cosplaying, Q&A’s, shopping at a giant EB Games store and even more gaming if time permitted.

Thanks to the team at Microsoft Australia’s Xbox division and the team at Ogilvy PR Australia, I was able to nab some time with their special guests – Ben Penrose from Playground Games (Forza Horizon 2) and Marcus Smith from Insomniac Games (Sunset Overdrive). These were the first two interviews I had scheduled early on the Friday morning, and will therefore be the first two interviews that I will be transcribing over the next couple of days.

My interview with Marcus Smith from Insomniac Games, Creative Director of Sunset Overdrive, can be found below.

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So just for the people who haven’t heard about Sunset Overdrive yet, can you share a bit about its gameplay and storyline?

Sure, the storyline’s probably the easiest to give you context for. The idea is that its 2027, the not too distant future, and there is a multinational corporation known as Fizz Co that’s about to release a hot new energy drink called “OVERCHARGE DELERIUM XT”. The dumbest name possible because that’s how products get named nowadays.

To celebrate the eminent worldwide release the company holds a pre-release party at their hometown city of Sunset City where you live. You are working at the party despite not drinking the stuff… but it turns out that they bruteforced their way through FDA testing and there are a few side-effects. The most notable of which is that everyone who drinks it turns into a horrific mutant.

At first it seems awful, it seems like a horrible place to be, but after a little while you realize you don’t have a boss any more, you don’t have to report to work, you don’t have bills…. And you can kind of do all the things you have wanted to do while growing up playing video games. It suddenly becomes the “Awesomepocalypse” as we say, which is basically… the world that video game players would much prefer than trying to scramble around and hunt down nuggets of food to survive.

The gameplay is all based on momentum and velocity, its super fast paced, its sort of a return to old-style arcade games where it is fun for funs sake. We kind of went the polar opposite of a cover mechanic and its more like you need to use the environment, kind of like a Tony Hawk game, where you can grind, jump, bounce and fly through the air. You do that while shooting crazy weapons.

It sounds like you have gone for a mixture of storyline and fun. Do you think you have managed to maintain a balance between the two?

I’m partial obviously, but I think that as an open world game it really depends on how people play it and how much story they get or not. I’m a player that when I get into an open world I am super OCD and collect everything I can and do every side/optional mission and I do everything. So by the time I get into the story I’m so overpowered its ridiculous and I kind of forget what the story was because I spent so much time doing other things.

But that’s the beauty of open world games as it gives you the option of how to play it and how much you want to vest in the campaign or not. There are also people who just flat-out view only the story missions and get through the game, then do everything else. I think we’ve hit a balance where its a unique and entertaining story that will hopefully leave people wanting to see what happens.

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Action third person shooters are plentiful on the market, and there are no doubt many on display this weekend. What do you think makes Sunset Overdrive stand out from the crowd and leave a lasting impression?

Well I think its the overall tone, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. We’re kind of in a world where a lot of games are kind of dower and take themselves very seriously. It is sort of a generation of “how do I play an interactive movie” almost. Which is great, but we just wanted to make a game that’s sort of a throwback – its colourful, its fun, its funny, there’s humour in it. And then the action / gameplay is much faster, its got a level of mastery that people need to get to move around and get better and better.

If you’re going to get your style meter up it means you will have to chain together traversal and killing while traversing, and as your style meter goes up your unlocking amps that you have been crafting along the way. So people who invest it in are going to have a great time as while you are building up your style meter you are unlocking all these crazy amps which get more and more insane. I think it is very unlike any other game out there right now.

Going from the demo  you have on display, Sunset Overdrive looks quite different from previous games that yourself and Insomniac have worked on previously. What sort of inspiration have you drawn from during the conception and creation stages of development?

One of the first bits of inspiration that Drew Murray and I had was the Gorillaz video “On Melancholy Hill” which was very stylized and just looked awesome. I thought that I would love to work on a game that looked like that. That helped influence the story, theme and tone of Sunset Overdrive.

Ultimately it was then that story and tone that we had developed that drew the style that we ended up with – we knew we had to have a world that the player could figure out what they could interact with. That meant we had to have a certain fidelity in the world so that people could say “Oh I can grind on that / bounce on that bush” for example. We have some very talented concept artwork that we worked with who developed that style. As soon as we thought of “Fun” and “The End Times”, that sort of drew out everything else. We have created a world that is fun, vibrant and inviting.

“The Last of Us” is a great and amazing game – but if it had the style of our world it would be insane and nobody would understand what the hell it was trying to do. The visual style of any game has to follow the rules of the central theme… and our central theme is the “fun” and the “end times’, which were the key parts of our visual style.

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It may not be a major component of a game to some, but I love having control over my characters. Just how diverse and extensive is your character customization system?

Early on, Drew and I were very adamant that we wanted no skill based functionality in our clothing or vanity. We want people to be who they want to be in the end times. Ultimately so many people in online games end up being dressed the same because they have figured out what the best cloak and armour pieces are going to be for their class. So we completely divorced ourselves from any functionality associated with clothing, much to the chagrin of the design time.

But we were adamant about it that we wanted people to look how they wanted to look and be who they wanted to be. We knew we were going to have multiplayer in the game with Chaos Squad, we didn’t want to make a game where you were playing “a character” but then you have to force everybody to be some other character. We wanted you to play as the character you have created along the way. But at the same time we want the game to be fast and accessible, so we trimmed down customization options to be very basic to give you the best amount of detail without spending way too much time in the customization screen.

I love Saints Row, a great example of extensive character customization. But I don’t need eight sliders to figure out the shape of my ear. So, we definitely simplified things a lot but have a lot of options to define your look. We have two body types for each gender, and that seems very limiting at first, but ultimately we had many many more but when we started looking at them in-game, they weren’t all that different. So we paired it back where we ended up with a really big guy and a very normal guy, a thin girl and a normal girl. Those two extremes on either side really gave us the most variety without overwhelming players with options. So it is a fine balance.

This is Insomniacs first Xbox One exclusive game. While I have no interest in starting up a console war debate, I am interested in what perks you had by aligning yourself exclusively with the console.

Well, Insomniac is in an interesting place. Because we are an independent studio, and one of the few remaining independent studios that have been around for 20-odd years, we have a proven track record but we are also a business and we need to figure out ways to do best for the business. A lot of that is diversification. We have a great relationship with Sony and are still working with them on a new Ratchet & Clank title for the PlayStation 4 that has already been announced.

It made the most sense at the time, an opportunity arose, Ted Price the owner is very pragmatic and made the decision to try to work with different publishers to see how things go. But, because we have a proven track record, we’ve always been sort of treated as a first-party developer and even though we are not and own our own IP… we get all the perks of being one. So we basically get access to all the low-level architecture people, all the platform people and everyone at Microsoft have been great as treating us as one of their own despite being an independent studio. That is one of the main perks, both at Sony and Xbox.

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So is Sunset Overdrive supposed to be a single installment or do you potentially see it as being  similar to Ratchet & Clank and enjoying a series of games?

I’ve always looked at Sunset Overdrive as a franchise. The reason I got into video games is that I want to build a universe, not just tell a story. I want to tell many many stories. I went to film school originally because I liked storytelling, but games was something that allows you to build something more. From the get go we’ve always thought of Sunset Overdrive as the start of something new. I can see us telling stories within the Sunset Overdrive universe in many different formats beyond just games and hopefully many games along the way.

You have a demo of your multiplayer mode at the Microsoft booth today. How extensive is your multiplayer mode outside that? Is it just the one mode or an array of different modes?

*A very manly voice invades the entire convention hall for approximately 20 seconds. Marcus’ guess that it was another announcement for the cosplay contest was incorrect. It was actually for the Good Game Q&A.*

It’s crazy being in an Olympic Village. This building is insane. I feel like I should be doing pommel horse or something, some kind of Olympic event.

So the way Chaos Squad works in the real game, this is just a small slice of it. This is what we call Night Defense where you have a fort and a cache of Overcharge and hordes of enemies will come and try to take it. You and your team have to defend against the waves. The way Chaos Squad works in the real game is that you form a group and you play a number of different objectives in the Open World during the daytime. These objectives can range from fighting enemies, taking on bosses to collecting different things. There are competitive elements to it – so there’s always bragging rights, but you play as a team despite not being strictly team based. Therefore new players won’t feel like they are failures.

In between each objective, you are confronted with the choice of two more objectives which you have to vote on. The vote matters because there are perks that go along with each one. It can either make it more likely you will survive in Night Defense but reduce the amount of reward opportunities you have. Or it will increase the reward but make it much more difficulty and unlikely you’ll survive Night Defense. So you’ll do a number of these objectives, voting on what one you want to take on to be more strategic and ultimately do a night defense like on show – but much more chaotic, because the demo is designed to give the controller to someone who has never played Sunset Overdrive before and not have an utterly terrible experience. But it is still probably crazy to most people. I don’t think players out of the 10 minute demo will be able to grasp the full extent of our traversal mechanisms and how to use the weapons strategically.

I really wish we could just put everybody infront of the first hour and a half of the game and go from there. But it is what it is.

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One final question. With a lot of people trying to get into the video game industry now, what advice do you have for people trying to get into a similar role to your own?

Its changed so much. I’ve been making games for almost twenty years now which makes me a very old old man. I used to say the best way to get into the industry was to take on a QA / testing job, and I think there are still merits to doing that. But nowadays there are so many schools and online tools… and I think if people can get into a good game design / game creation course at University or whatnot, that’s a really good way. But you don’t have to do that… there are so many tools now that allow an individual to make their own games and experiences. Ultimately thats going to prove their value way more than any other thing. My best advise is to pick up any sort of game making tool be it HTML5 editor or Unity or Unreal or whatever and start making your own stuff. That ultimately is going to be way more beneficial to anybody than even getting your foot in a door at an entry level position at a company.

Thank you very much for your time, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay in Australia!

Sam
Sam
Founder of The Otaku's Study. I have been exploring this labyrinth of fandom these last fifteen years, and still nowhere close to the exit yet. Probably searching for a long time to come.

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