In a year of big sequels, Resistance 2 stands out as one of the 2008's biggest releases. With modes that include massively multiplayer 60-player battles and an 8-player co-op, you’ll take on what feels like an overwhelming level of enemies. We spoke with Ryan Schneider, Community Director for Insomniac Games about the making of one of the most epic games we’ve ever played.
Scaling up from Resistance 1
I don’t think it was ever a goal to make the game larger from like a size perspective—scale meant something different to us. Scale could be the volume of enemies. It could be like the size of the creature. It could be the variety of the game. We definitely didn’t want to make a bigger game for “bigness sake”. It was designed to give you the feeling that you are in a besieged America and that you were very insignificant compared to the size of the Chimeran invasion. We wanted to focus more on a massive experience to convey the depth of despair that you should be feeling at this Chimeran threat.
More Enemies
There are certain parts in co-operate where the Grims attack, and there are just absolutely dozens upon dozens of enemies that are streaming in. In co-op, you can get up to about 100 enemies [on-screen at the same time]. Those Grims attacking the theater [in the Twins Fall, ID level] is one of my favorite moments in the game because there are so many ways to progress through it. You still have that overwhelming sense that you are totally outnumbered. It’s panic-inducing.
The Leviathan
The Leviathan represents the largest enemy we’ve ever done at Insomniac. It represented a goal we’ve had for a long time: to truly create an enemy that stood on its own that created a water-cooler kind of moment. After you beat it, hopefully the next day, you’re talking to your friends about it online, saying how massive that battle was and that you got such a real sense of just how large and impressive the Chimara are.
Big Views
One of the things that we’re proud of is creating the Longview. When you get held up in the air by that Leviathan, you can see the Chicago skyline. In many instances, you can play to those locations, and the detail in the skyline should hold strong.
60-Player Skirmishes
Our philosophy at Insomniac, when it comes to multiplayer, is massive battles, greater intimacy. While it seems oxymoronic, the point is to focus action where you feel like you’re engaged in an intimate combat situation, but still participating in a larger war scenario. That’s what Skirmish is all about. You have dynamic objectives rallying teams to accomplish a certain goal and there are rival squads trying to accomplish the exact opposite. When you have enough of those objectives and rival squads, and the player count is still high, you can focus the action and at the same time retain a sense of epic scale.
8 is Enough
What it comes down to is, we did talk a lot about that number, we felt with having three player classes, it gives you the best the chance to kind of mix and match player classes and really experience the mode in the way it was intended, which is to focus on teamwork and give you variety of choice and experience
We wanted to do something different with online co-op, instead of just making co-op playable through the story mode like everybody else, we wanted to do something that nobody had done before. And the fact is nobody had done, eight player class based co-op on this scale before. There was some cache to really having really essentially double the largest number of co-op count in console games, and at the same time it made the most sense from a balance stand point when we were factoring in the classes.
Getting Bigger
The PSP game Retribution will come out in February and we’re close with the Sony Bend team that’s working on it. There’s been some integration with how the PSP game will talk to the PS3 game, R2.
Our website, MyResistance.net is a great example of extending the universe. We’re bringing social networking features to a stat site that is going to offer near real time stats. The volume of stats is staggering, literally hundreds of different stat types that you can compare with your friends. There’s a lot of love left for Resistance, in addition to whatever comes in the future from Insomniac.
Resistance 2 is in stores now.