LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias (Wii)

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David Braben is a game industry legend. As co-creator of the seminal Elite, and founder of UK-based Frontier Developments, David's had a hand in some of the most innovative and influential games of all time. At a recent Nintendo Media Summit David gave press their first hands-on opportunity with LostWinds: Winter of Melodias, the sequel to 2008's enchanting WiiWare launch title. In between demos we snagged David for a chat, quizzing him on LostWinds, the Wii's online capabilities, and, of course, the long-awaited Elite 4.

VideoGamer.com: What changes have you implemented for the sequel? What feedback from the first game did you want to address?

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David Braben: The first thing, with any games creation process, is we always want to make the game absolutely as best we can. Quite often, saying a new game's got new this, that and the other doesn't mean we didn't enjoy the first one. One of the things we saw is, even before the first game was made, we had designed and put together so many ideas and richness in the world. Steve Burgess, the lead designer, is just absolutely… the amount of story we've got, even beyond this game, is phenomenal. It's all starting to unfold. The nice thing is it all fits together.

The most noticeable thing with this game is we've been able to spend time optimising imprinting more into the space, and so visually you'll see a lot more. But more importantly gameplay wise - there is tons more gameplay in there. The most obvious thing you'll see when you first see the game is the fact you can switch between summer and winter. You can see the same locations in summer and winter but they feel very different. For example, Toku now gets cold in winter and needs either to stay near fire or eventually will get a coat to keep him warm. The water freezes so you can no longer swim in it, but you can now swim, which is something you couldn't do before. You can swim underwater. We've got new wind powers as well. One of those is the cyclone, which is like a little tornado. Interestingly, for those who remember the first game, it was in some of the concept art we released for the first game. It allows you to do things, for example lifting up Toku, lifting up enemies, but also you can lift up water to make rain clouds, you can move the rain clouds about and make it rain - which is good from the first game - as watering the plants. Everything's been carried over. Nothing's been lost. All of those mechanics are in.

But the beauty is they all work in combination with the new features as well. As I say, you can make it rain on plants. You can move water around, so we use that for puzzles. Also, when it's winter, if you do a vortex, as you do in the first game, it will make a snowball. You can then use that snowball to smash things. You can use it to weight switches. The mechanics are quite different in a sense. There are also new enemies. We've got fire glorbs, remember the glorbs from the first game, which burn you, but they keep you warm as well. So in winter, bizarrely, there's a balance between keeping one of them alive to keep you warm until you get to the next fire.

VideoGamer.com: Take me back to before the first game was released last year. How did it come about that it was released on WiiWare?

DB: The game's published by Frontier. WiiWare is a channel made available by Nintendo, for which of course we're very grateful. It's enabled us to publish a game like LostWinds that I think would otherwise have been very difficult to publish. Probably wouldn't have got published, mainly because it's seen as very different to the games around. People, because that's seen as a risk, want to see a fully formed game before they can play it, but actually when you think about it, that's what WiiWare is.

There are a lot of other issues with producing a disc-based game, you know distribution around the world. Clearly digital distribution is something that's growing very rapidly and it's something for the future. So for a lot of reasons, Frontier, we wanted to give it a go.

VideoGamer.com: Why did you go with WiiWare as opposed to Xbox LIVE Arcade or PSN?

DB: The original concept of the game was, Steve was apparently looking out of the window - we used to be based in a farmhouse just outside Cambridge - and all of the leaves and blossom and all that sort of thing would be carried up and over the house, particularly when it was windy. There were a whole load of trees outside. It just made the most amazing patterns. We thought, we've got to have a game something like this, somehow. That was where the original concept came from. Well maybe if you could blow your character around a bit - it all flowed from that. Originally we weren't going to have Toku moving. He was going to be controlled purely by the wind, but we thought, nah, this adds a lot more richness. That's where the idea came from.

When we first saw the Revolution, as the machine was then, Nintendo's exciting new machine, the controls just seemed absolutely perfect. So for that reason we wanted to do it for Wii. It became logical to do it for WiiWare for reasons I've already said.

VideoGamer.com: Is LostWinds, then, a game that will never come out on XBLA or PSN? Would it have to change too drastically for that to happen?

DB: What we try and do is do the best game for each platform as appropriate. It's very interesting, as control methods are changing, opportunities may also change.

VideoGamer.com: Are you talking about Natal and Sony's motion sensing wand?

DB: Well who knows? All of these things are enabling new gameplay mechanics, some of which could be quite close to something like LostWinds. What we're really trying to create is new game experiences. What I like with LostWinds is it does feel very different to games you've played before. What I applaud is the way people are experimenting. We do see people experimenting on iPhone as well. It's great. If you look at the promise the games industry had just in the last few years, the number of new things, i.e. the Wii, iPhone and now talking about Natal and Sony's wand, where that will go is really interesting, really exciting.

VideoGamer.com: So once those control systems come out it might be time to have a look at those and see is you can make something work with LostWinds perhaps?

DB: We're certainly doing more in the world of LostWinds anyway. The very fact that we're doing this sequel shows it's been successful. But also, what those opportunities are, we'll look at.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned a lot of the LostWinds universe has already been fleshed out. What else beyond the two WiiWare games we've already seen has LostWinds the potential for?

DB: It makes it sound horribly commercial. Just talking a bit more about the LostWinds world, which a lot more of it is revealed in Winter of Melodias. You find out about another character called Riverin, who has a similar experience to Toku in discovering Enril, but he's discovered a bit of Balasar, who is the ultimate bad guy in the LostWinds world, which is where all the glorbs come from. So he becomes turned evil, so think of him as a sort of anti Toku. He features in this game. Also Magdi, Toku's mother, has gone missing. That's what the story's about - finding her. So there's a lot more richness in the story for people who care. It doesn't get in the way but you meet new characters. We've also got cutscenes in there, which we didn't have before, explaining a bit more of the story.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned Riverin - perhaps someone you might look at for their own game?

DB: [Laughs] You never know!

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