Lazygamer Interview – Ninja Theory gives us the low-down on Enslaved

We had a chance to get a bit of hands-on time with Enslaved at E3 this year. We liked how the controls felt, so what goes into the design decisions behind how the game will control?

You assign your buttons using a mix of logic, precedence and intuition. Those elements often clash though. For example, what is intuitive is not always logical. So which method do you go for in those situations? Always with intuitive!

At a higher level, Monkey is not a robot, he is a human being so he won’t do things that are utterly stupid like jump to his death. If you ask him to jump and there is only death below, then he will stumble. This to me makes sense.

During our hands on time we noticed you swap between Trip and Monkey throughout the game, sort of like a 1 player co-op… Would that be an accurate description and why this design choice?

You can command her to do stuff but not control her directly. So for example, you can ask her to follow you but she will refuse if there is a turret out there. Again she will use her own brain according to the situation and react like a real person would. In that situation, you can ask her to decoy the enemy so that you can flank and destroy it. You can also get her to heal you, upgrade your equipment or activate machinery.

What this adds in terms of gameplay is teamwork. It’s adds a more tactical element to the action and puzzles which adds challenge and satisfaction.

The demo we played also had a fair amount of puzzle solving involved, is that going to be a large part of the whole game?

I’d say tactical or puzzle situations will occur about a third of the time, the rest being combat and exploration. While there are a handful of pure puzzles, usually all three will be mixed up in any given scenario.

How long will a single play-through of Enslaved take, roughly?

A lot longer than Heavenly Sword and on par with other games of the genre. We strive as a studio to make each and every moment fun and different. We don’t try and pad things out. The question you should be asking everyone is “how many fun hours of gameplay will it take to complete”!

How long have you been working on this project?

Its taken two and half years from concept to completion.

Enslaved has fantastic art design, was the art from your team or did you bring in some external industry veterans to assist?

Alex Taini our Visual Art Director set the visual style in 2D. Stuart Adcock, our Technical Art Director and his art team translated it expertly into 3D. We have a great team of people in-house and we are all veterans!

Thanks so much for your time, we look forward to playing Enslaved again when it hits the shelves.

Last Updated: August 25, 2010