Dante's Inferno Preview

VideoGamer.com: Moving away from the source material to the game, is it unfair to compare Dante's Inferno to God of War?

JK: It's not unfair. It's flattering and humbling, honestly. We set out to make a great game. We didn't want to make anything less than a great game. For me, a great game is, at its core, is great controls. We know that's hard to do. We play everything.

VideoGamer.com: Have you played the God of War III demo?

JK: Yeah, absolutely. I played it at E3 and a couple of other events. But we started out saying, let's do a fast-paced, responsive combat system. There are a lot of games in the genre. We could be compared to a lot of other games that I would be less flattered, because I feel like their controls might be a little sluggish.

VideoGamer.com: Care to name any names?

JK: No I'm not going to name any names. What do I want to say? It's a big genre. It's a proud genre. It's been going on a long time and it'll continue to go on. Visceral Games, in its previous incarnation, made Return of the King. A lot of the subsequent action adventures borrowed from Return of the King. I've got people on my team who worked on Return of the King. We're continuing that tradition forward. What we wanted to make was fast-paced, responsive controls at 60fps. We wanted a dual weapon character, which is a little more like Devil May Cry, frankly, than God of War. We share more with Devil May Cry than God of War, so it's a little weird that we got that so much.

VideoGamer.com: Is that just because God of War is big at the moment, whereas Devil May Cry isn't in vogue?

JK: It's probably because we're dealing with past mythology, and Devil May Cry took more of a contemporary vision. It took some ideas from The Divine Comedy and some other games and mashed it up in a Japanese contemporary thing with guns and swords. On the surface of it, our game, because it's 700 years old, and I guess God of War is a couple thousand years old... I don't know, I guess because it's the past, the surface of it may remind people more.

In terms of gameplay it borrows from a lot of things. What we're trying to do at Visceral to move things forward is more about that choice and that open-ended system. Like the relics you can equip - those are going to be things people get into. A little bit more customisation. It's not like you're decking out your character like an RPG, but you are going to be able to customise his abilities. That's something we focused on.

VideoGamer.com: Dante's Inferno will run at 60fps. Insomniac Games recently said it's unlikely to make a 60fps game in the future because it feels it's not important any more. What's your take on that?

JK:Yeah I read that. Obviously I don't want to question those guys because they've been quite successful. One thing that article didn't quite land on that we're finding for our game anyway, and every game's different, is that, they're basically making the argument that people care more about graphics than framerate. But I can't decouple the two. For our game, we're getting high marks for graphics. People come up and they look at the game and they play the game and they're like, wow, this game is beautiful. It looks great. A lot of what they're responding to is the framerate, because it is so smooth and it's so engaging and it's mesmerising because of the smoothness of it. Obviously because it's fast-paced, you want a framerate that keeps up with the pace of gameplay. You never want to be going, I tried to pull off that move but somehow the rendering felt it was lagging behind my controls. That's why we strove for 60 and hit 60, because we wanted the screen to be as responsive as the controls. The effect has been our graphics are better because of the framerate. So in that sense they're hard to decouple.

I do agree that in reviews and in customer satisfaction, graphics are a big deal, as they should be. People spend a lot of money on games and consoles. They want to show off the power of their machine. But 60fps does just that. And you don't have to compromise. You can have great graphics and 60 frames.

VideoGamer.com: Is it the case that most gamers pick up on the 60fps on a subconscious level, without realising why what they're looking at looks so good?

JK: Yeah. Consumers absolutely pick up on it. They just don't quite know how to talk about it. In the way that physics... We'll often get... You know we've got the Cleopatra and the breasts and so sometimes people say, wow, you've got great breast physics. In that particular case, not that we don't have good physics - we do - that's an animator hand animating those breasts to get them to look just right. I use that as an example of, maybe people don't know exactly the right technical way to talk about something but they appreciate the result. With framerate, people absolutely appreciate the results of it, and they don't quite know why it looks so good, or why it looks so crisp, but they do appreciate and value it.