Devil's Third

We had a lot of talk between THQ and Valhalla about the name, and we came up with this title that resonated on a lot of levels, which is why we picked it. The other levels sort of get into the fiction, so I don't know if we want to...

Not yet.

As more of the story becomes public, I think it will become clearer what the other meanings of Devil's Third are, but for now we'll stick with the music and... other meanings to be revealed in the future.

So everything you see in the trailer, everyone can do - it's not just one of the two people. The trailer is not about story, it's just to show a bunch of cool things you can do in the game. So everything in there you can do in the game.

So a lot of things you can do - game mechanics, vehicles - obviously aren't shown in the trailer yet, but the trailer was designed to give you a taste of every kind of thing you can do in the game, or at least a glimpse of it. But there's more of course.

So we wanted to make a mainstream game that is a type of game that only Valhalla could make, and something that is kind of a new paradigm in gaming.

I can give you a little bit of a clue about this. Everything you saw - if you could imagine that in multiplayer action, you've never played it. I've never played anything like that. And that's only one aspect of it.

[Laughs]

Not yet. We've got a long way to go.

They came in with a design and a plan for an epic game, but the first demo we saw was built and prototyped in multiplayer. The first day we met, we went down to our room where we can play, and most of my executives picked up controllers and were laughing and having a wonderful time in an experience we've never had before in game space.

And I'm only talking about the multiplayer side - I'm not even talking about the deep, epic fiction on the other side and the complete single-player experience.

I don't think it can be defined either way. I think it gives freedom and aspects of both and structure in others. I wouldn't define it one way or the other, certainly not yet.

The Ninja Gaiden games I've worked on before were kind of a hackandslash experience - combat with weapons. And of course there are games like Devil May Cry. So first of all I would say even though you can see things that look like both of those games, I want to make sure people don't confuse it and think that the game we're doing is either a Ninja Gaiden-type game or a Devil May Cry-type game.

Gamers who pay close attention to the trailer will notice there's a substantial difference there. So if you think of it as a shooting game that includes a level of melee combat and fighting that has never been done in a shooting game before, that's a good way to think of it.

The reasons for wanting to do this kind of game are that we were looking at the shooting genre and think someone should take it to the next level, and I think this is a good way to do it.

Also I want to have more realistic elements of military combat - and that's one thing where Danny and I have very similar tastes. We're both very knowledgeable about real military combat weapons. And we like killing each other [laughs].