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Lair dev critical of Warhawk's motion controls
Factor 5's Julian Eggebrecht has been thinking about motion controls a lot lately. While still content with Lair's much-maligned input system, he has found issues with Warhawk's use of motion controls less-than-stellar. In an interview with Games Radar, Eggebrecht said that "Warhawk's controls are... eurgh!""I see motion-sensing as a complimentary, additional new step in terms of controls and where it fits you should use it and where it doesn't fit, don't force it. Please don't force it," he said. You see that folks? Eggebrecht just redefined irony.Note that Warhawk can be played entirely without using the Sixaxis' tilt capabilities -- hence, they are not "forcing it." Is this a sign that Factor 5 might resign themselves to releasing a Lair patch enabling analog stick flight, or do we need to tell the Emperor he is strolling through the village without any clothes on?%Gallery-3198%[Via Joystiq]
Lair dev laments hideous Wii games, blames budget issues
Factor 5 president Julian Eggebrecht sees potential in the Wii's graphical hardware, despite its technical inferiority to its competitor's consoles. Speaking to RevoGamers, Eggebrecht laments how Wii titles whose aesthetic is more geared toward "traditional, more photorealistic" visuals do not push the hardware. "There you really have to push it," he said, "and they're really not pushing it. Why not? Hmmm. I don't know, the hardware is very, very easy to understand."As for the reasons, Eggebrecht speculates it's a mixture of developer's laziness and a publisher's unwillingness to provide a large enough budget, both related to the Wii's image. Factor 5 has previously shown the GameCube hardware more than capable of gorgeous visuals with the Rogue Squadron series, and Capcom has also shown off technical prowess with Resident Evil 4.If more games show off the Wii's graphical capabilities and consumer expectations increase, perhaps developers and publishers might be more eager to step up their own visuals / budgets. Imagine the possibilities now that there's more memory (and duct tape!).As for returning to work with Nintendo, Eggebrecht showed willingness but revealed no plans. "We're honestly at this point thinking about several titles in development and we haven't settled quite yet on which platform or which platforms if one of them is," he said. "So might be PS3, might be Wii... we're totally open to that."[Via CVG]
Lair cursed from start to finish
Sometimes when you combine things, they form something even greater than its parts, like peanut butter and jelly, or the five robot cats that form Voltron. Other times, like when you combine Factor 5 and ghosts, you get Lair. "I am not a believer in ghosts, but this one was haunted," Lair director Julian Eggebrecht explains to MTV's Stephen Totilo.Factor 5's Eggebrecht and producer Brian Krueger even admit in Lair's in-game commentary that there was a "dragon-game curse". Ranging from contrast problems with the very first trailer, to power outages during the writing of the master disk, nothing would go Factor 5's way during the development of Lair.Eggebrecht and his team's struggle with the creation of Lair may be the exception rather than the rule in the video game development business, but it does help people outside of the industry understand just how tough making a game can be. The Lair director explains that "every single time there was a crucial delivery, something bizarre went wrong", even sickness and deaths within employees' families.Maybe Lair is not everything PS3 owners were hoping for, but maybe they deserve some credit too for completing a game under such trying circumstances. It's good to know that even with all that they had going against them, the Factor 5 team still had time to have a little fun and hot coffee.
Factor 5's Eggebrecht annoyed at ESRB's censorship
Perhaps comparing the ESRB to the Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy is a little extreme, since there's not really a Red Scare in videogaming, but Factor 5 President Julian Eggebrecht made the allusion when stating the ESRB was essentially choking the creative life out of games during a speech at GCDC. What we mean by that is the ESRB fails to approach games as art. Eggebrecht voices his wishes: "I would be happy if in games we could talk about homosexuality, but we're not even at the point where we can admit that humans have heterosexual relationships, and that is a real problem - and it tends to show that games are not being seen, even by our own ratings boards, as an artform."He mentioned a cheat code in Lair that unlocked a "Hot Coffee" pot -- an actual coffee pot, which others at the GCDC got a kick out of, but he digressed from the humor behind the GTA: San Andreas fiasco. "If you cannot have satire about these things, that is approaching the realm of McCarthyism." Pressing further, he mentioned the movie Eyes Wide Shut, which dealt with relationship issues in marriage, among other things. Eggebrecht wants to see games with that much ... ambition hitting shelves, which require games to be placed on the same art pedestal as film.Eggebrecht finally got to the meat of his argument -- censorship in Lair. Sony sought a "T" for Teen rating, since the game appeals to teenage gamers, but the ESRB continually knocked it to an "M" for Mature rating due to blood and visible "chunks" of other dragons getting slapped away in fights. In the end, Eggebrecht said, "they let us through with a Teen even though you can use fire - you can set up to five, six thousand people on fire. They burn, they run around and they scream, but of course that wasn't a problem [due to the absence of blood]."
