Ready at Dawn Says Goodbye To PSP

You get to a saturation point technologically. The average gamer today, although they do appreciate graphics the same way everybody does, at some point I don't think they discern the difference that much between a few games that are out there.

They see it on PS3 and then they want a great game. After the first 30 minutes of gameplay, that whole novel feeling of it goes away. If you don't get a great experience, it doesn't matter how cool your game looks.

Doing God of War, we did exactly that. We were worried about how graphically we could change the game. We did. I can run you the intro of God of War with full PSP assets running at 1080p – just a quick capture – because our engine is able to output through PSP. We can output exactly the same assets with no touching up of anything.

Yeah. Basically, everything that's running in game in real time we're able to output in 1080p. Our engine is cross-platform, so it's always been able to do that. So finally you'll see how it looks on a big screen, which is the way we develop it. We develop this game not on PSP. We develop it on PC.

We don't just make PSP games. We make games. We make a game first and foremost, right? And then you try to translate to PSP.

We had to cram a lot of things in there. At this point we truly feel we've leveraged the full power of the PSP. To tell you the truth, the model we're using on Kratos right now is as high-resolution as the model God of War II used on PS2.

If you look at the way the game works you will definitely see it holds up really well, even at 1080p on a big screen. It holds up better than most PS3 games.

I'm not saying it's God of War III. I'm definitely not going there. But you'd be hard pressed to think this is a PSP game if I was to show it to you in 1080p on a big screen.

I have no idea. That's not something we've talked about. To tell you the truth we haven't had time to even think of all of these things after the fact because we've just finished the game and it's been exhausting.

Yeah, we are. We were a little rushed to think that way in the past. We were so eager to do some other things we had in our head that we lost track of the reason why we were doing the games we did. We wanted to push this hardware, and truly close the chapter for us at least, and know we did everything we could on the platform. At the time we had doubts about whether or not we did everything. Maybe it was a little presumptuous for us to say we're done.

This game, actually, was our chance to not be affected by learning new things and new mechanics. This game was the chance for us to say, we know God of War, now, what can we do with this hardware to give the players the same experience they expect from home consoles?

We know now, yeah, this is our last PSP game.

There are a few things in the works right now. We have some ideas. We have been developing stuff ourselves for a while. I can't tell you what they are but there are things that are in motion right now that people will hear about soon, hopefully.

No I can't.

Actually no, not because of that. It's just because right now we're not talking about the next projects. I can tell you it's going to be whatever platform our engine runs on. Right now our engine runs on pretty much anything that's available out there.

Exactly. We made a cross-platform engine. It gives us the choice to move where we need to move for the games we want to do. The most important thing is not the platform. It's the game. We know what type of game we want to make. It's what we've built our skills around: character driven, story-driven action-adventure games.

Yes. We haven't narrowed down mechanics. I love combat games. I love shooters. But I love playing story-driven games. I love movies. I love things that involve me from start to end and give me a complete experience, like I feel entertained from start to end. That's where our heads are. It's definitely that kind of game we're going to make. We're not going to go off and make an open-world, or an MMO, like everybody expects ex-Blizzard people to do.

That's a question I get asked all the time: so your next game's going to be an MMO right? I'm like, why? Because you're from Blizzard, right? Yeah. So? We know what we'd like and we know what we're good at.

Yeah, most likely an original idea. We're always open to other things. We had the chance to work on our own IPs in the past. We started the company with offers for us to go big on PS3 and do our own thing.

The point of what we've done in the past six years was to learn our craft before we shoot ourselves in the foot. We could have done that and probably failed at the very beginning. But we decided, you know what, let's be healthy, let's do this.

So, our own IP, but we've never shied away from working on an existing IP as long as the team is passionate about it.

We work on one game at a time. It's just the way the studio is built. We work on one game, we finish one game. We like that thinking and culture. We're small and that's where we want to be.