Capcom and console gaming

We’ve already brought you our interview with Capcom’s Christian Svensson, vice president, business development and strategic planning, on all things PC, but the Capcom love doesn’t stop there. Oh no. Here, in the second part of our mammoth chat with Svensson, we talk all things console, from Lost Planet 2 to Dead Rising 2, taking in Street Fighter IV and HD Remixes along the way. Love Capcom? Then love this interview.

VideoGamer.com: What’s the latest on bringing Tatsunoko vs. Capcom to the west?

Christian Svensson: Aha! Do not rule it out. That is all I can say right now. We are still actively working on having that happen. I can’t say it’s happening definitively. I couldn’t give you a time frame, but as badly as the fans want it, we want to bring it.

VideoGamer.com: What are the challenges associated there? Is it simply a case of not enough interest?

CS: No. There are licensing issues to contend with. The Tatsunoko rights are split as far as how they are held in the west. Tatsunoko obviously holds all of the rights in Japan so they can grant all of those characters usage through Japan very easily. But when they license those properties out to various stakeholders in the west, aligning all of those things properly, and to be fair the team that did it is working on something else now, so actually also clawing back the resources to do a localised version, to make any changes that are needed to get through those licensing issues, these are all things that need to be aligned before we can actually profit from this happening. The team that did it is a very talented team in high demand. And unfortunately they’re not an internal team so we don’t have 100 per cent control of saying OK just pull those guys back in. They have their own business to run.

VideoGamer.com: The recent HD Remix of Super Street Fighter II Turbo has proven incredibly popular. Is the HD Remix treatment something Capcom is looking to apply to other fighting games in its back catalogue or are you done with it?

CS: I’m going to say potentially. Not every game needs it.

VideoGamer.com: Give me an example of a game that doesn’t need it.

CS: Let me ask you this: I’m going to hold back on giving you a game that doesn’t need it, simply because that tips my hand a bit more than I’m able to do right now. Let’s just say that HD Remix taught us a lot of things. It taught us a lot of things about online technology for fighting games. It gave us a really good insight into what fans found valuable and how they actually really played, how they enjoyed it, what they found value in most, what has helped reinvigorate the competitive community, and not everything has to do with the HD-ification of the art.

Some of the other things we learned are changing what people know and love as dramatically as we did polarises people. People love it or they hate it. There seems to be no middle ground. We also learned what it takes in terms of cost, manpower and effort. Effort as attention to every last detail in a project of that nature. I will say it is no less than what it takes for a full retail release. It’s a massive undertaking. When we started that project we in truth underestimated that pretty grossly. We had to back to the drawing board budgetarily, schedule wise. It was a great, fantastic learning process. Are we done doing HD Remixes? No we’re not done. But the next ones that we do will be even better, based on what we learned.

VideoGamer.com: It would be great to see a HD Remix of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Is that one of the games that doesn’t need it?

CS: I won’t say it doesn’t need it. Marvel would be great to do. There’s obviously a fan base for it. It’s probably our most requested title. But unfortunately I wish I had news to share on that front but I don’t.

VideoGamer.com: What are the chances of doing a brand new Marvel vs. Capcom game?

CS: I would never say never but I would say the barriers to doing that are much higher than the barriers for MvC2.

VideoGamer.com: Have you seen David Sirlin’s blog lately?

CS: Lately? I haven’t looked at it myself but I understand he has some issues with Street Fighter IV.

VideoGamer.com: His main beef is it’s not as accessible as it should be. He’s saying things like pressing two buttons to throw, three to do an Ultra, make it too hard.

CS: I’ll back that up two seconds. On some level he’s partially right in the sense that… let’s refer to HD Remix. Part of HD Remix’s goal was to make the move input a bit more accessible, a little less memorisation on very specific moves, such that you basically had quarter circles and dragon punch moves mapped to what were traditionally much more difficult moves to do. We reduced the number of button inputs on certain things such that they were easier to do. All of those are steps towards accessibility. In that regard I think that Sirlin has a point. I think it is less accessible than HD Remix is.

Doing a Focus Attack and understanding how that works versus how parries worked in three, I think it’s drastically more accessible than 3 ever was. And what’s more, on a single-player AI basis having as many levels as difficulty as we do, easy, very easy and easiest, I’m not going to say a brain dead monkey could win on easiest but pretty close. You can get enjoyment bashing out some moves, making it quite frankly pretty accessible. Being successful is the fun part. You don’t need to understand how to Focus Attack Dash Cancel to have a good time with Street Fighter IV. That was never the objective. We didn’t want to make it so hard. At the same time for guys like Sirlin we needed to have depth that could make this a competitive title that people are going to play for years. To some degree some of those goals are mutually exclusive.

VideoGamer.com: You sound like you know your stuff when it comes to fighting games.

CS: I spend some time with them.

VideoGamer.com: Regarding Resident Evil 5, we’ve seen some fantastic success with Street Fighter IV recently. I guess you’ve got even higher expectations for Resi 5 then.

CS: I think that’s fair to say. We have an embarrassment of riches this year. There’s no stress involved in the fact that both of these titles come within the last six weeks of our fiscal year! No stress at all with that! We’ve been very fortunate that things have come together. Leading up to this quarter it’s been a lot of work and thank God things are playing out how we hoped they would.

VideoGamer.com: How excited should fans be about Lost Planet 2 and Dead Rising 2?

CS: Super, in both cases. I’m a big Lost Planet fan myself, and I’ve seen a fair amount of the game at this point. Takeuchi-san and the team here have had numerous meetings over what went right, what went wrong on Lost Planet 1, how we can make a better game for the second. Takeuchi’s approach was, you know what, we’re not going to sit back on our laurels and just s*** out a sequel, we’re actually going to take it up five notches. We’re not going to under invest in this, we’re actually going to over invest in this, and we’re going to build it bigger. This is tech overhaul, game overhaul. Takeuchi-san is a huge Call of Duty 4 fan and player, as is much of the team. So I think you’re going to see some influence from that sneaking in. And at the same time there are going to be elements that are still distinctly Lost Planet. Some of those elements are things that were not universally accepted by Halo or Gears players, but they are definitely uniquely Lost Planet and I think you’ll see those returning. Lost Planet 2 will be big.

On the Dead Rising 2 tip, Inafune-san directly is engaged in managing the project. It’s one of the first projects he’s directly managed in years. He’s that engaged. The original writer and the original game’s director are also working intimately with the team. The original director was actually acting as producer for a while, and is still engaged on a day to day basis, but Inafune has actually stepped up to do more of the day to day producing. It’s a huge and interesting project obviously working with Blue Castle, different than pretty much anything we’ve done before. We basically handed one of our newly minted franchise jewels to an outside company, and a western company at that, which is an interesting pitch. And the fact that it’s been managed out of Japan is another interesting twist.

VideoGamer.com: Fans of Dead Rising 2 should be equally excited then?

CS: They should be. The guys at Blue Castle are massive fans of the original, and frankly it’s that fact that caused Inafune to pick them. If they weren’t and if they didn’t respect what the first Dead Rising was, they wouldn’t have been selected.

VideoGamer.com: Bringing it back to Street Fighter IV, what was your reaction to gamers’ reactions to the decision to charge for costume packs post release?

CS: What’s funny is, frankly I expected a larger reaction. The reaction that I actually saw was not as polarised as I thought it would be. There were actually a good number who said, oh I’m totally in, I want the Femme Fatale pack tomorrow, and didn’t bat an eye. I had hoped that that would be the case and to some degree it was. Sure there are the people who claim the nickel and dime situation. The reality is the guys in the arcade who received the unlocks for the arcade costumes have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars unlocking them. To turn around and throw that content straight into the console for free probably is something that would have caused a different uproar among a different audience. To some degree we’re playing the middle ground and if we happen to actually generate enough revenue that allows us to chase that content with more content then fantastic.

VideoGamer.com: What’s next in terms of DLC for Street Fighter IV?

CS: Obviously we have the remaining costume packs to arrive over the next several weeks, then we have the Championship Update, which is free. It’s free in part because the costume packs are supporting it. The Championship Update will introduce a couple of online features, chief among them, as we see it is the capture and share of replays. Obviously there’s a whole audience of people who love making combo videos, or fans who like showing off their best matches. We’re trying to provide a mechanism whereby people don’t have to have capture stations always set up next to their machines if they want to post something on YouTube or what have you.

VideoGamer.com: Will it allow you to upload videos that are viewable on your PC or your console or both?

CS: Right now they’re viewable only in playback on your console. There was once upon a time this question of how do we get it out of the console into either Capcom Unity or into YouTube. Unfortunately the scope of doing something like that was a bit beyond what we had budget or time to do. Again the team is still making that work. The code doesn’t exist today. They’re still working on it. So it’s not like we held it back, it’s working and oh, we’ve got it all figured out. No it’s still in progress.

VideoGamer.com: When are we likely to see the Championship Update?

CS: That I’m going to remain coy on. My fear is I give you a date and we miss the date. It’s not going to be a year, I’ll say that! Sometime in 2009!

VideoGamer.com: Beyond that, are you looking at new characters?

CS: I think we’re going to ask what people want to see from us. Does the potential exist? Maybe. I will also say there’s nothing in development right now on that end.

VideoGamer.com: Can I put my name down for Dee Jay please?

CS: Sure. Ono’s already said Dee Jay is sort of half finished sitting on the cutting room floor. Maybe we can polish him up, finish him, balance him. Don’t know. That team, again, while and I want to emphasise this, there were a lot of internal resources used on Street Fighter IV. Dimps was the workhorse group that did a lot of heavy lifting. I think it would be fair to say that that game would not be what it is if we had not marched the cavalry in there to make it what it is. Any expansion content would obviously have to be worked in association with Dimps and I don’t know what their resource available is either. They’re an external company. We don’t monopolise their time, we don’t dictate what they work on.

VideoGamer.com: Given the success of IV, you must be thinking about V, right?

CS: Franchise management is always at the forefront of what Capcom has to worry about. Exactly what V is and what form it takes, is it a reboot? I think Street Fighter IV if anything was a fantastic relaunch of the franchise. Exactly how we manage that looking forward is a matter of great debate internally. Let’s put it this way, not everyone was in 100 per cent alignment with the approach internally taken with IV. I expect the alignment that will be required to figure out where we go, and if there is a V, will be an equally heated discussion.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks so much for your time Christian.

Capcom has a raft of titles due out in 2009, including Dark Void, Bionic Commando, Lost Planet 2, Dead Rising 2, as well as updates to Street Fighter IV in the works.