The Suffering: Ties That Bind Wrap Report

Major Challenges Andre Maguire: Making the improvements to our pipeline was an essential part of Ties That Bind, but saying it was a major challenge is an understatement. It was an unbelievable challenge. There were more than a few times where we seriously questioned our decision to move forward. It seemed to be snake-bit from the get go. Luckily, everybody pulled through, and the results really do speak for themselves. That and simultaneously shipping five languages across three platforms on time was no small feat!

doing a sequel is harder than doing an original game, since you have to live up to the fan expectations built from the first title, while also doing enough new stuff that players feel they are getting a distinctly new game.

Richard Rouse III: Did we mention the really tight schedule? Six months before ship, it would have been pretty hard to find people on the team who honestly thought we were going to make our date. However, through heavy production oversight, realistically looking at deadlines, and a lot of hard work and backbreaking overtime, we were able to make it all come together in the end.

Another major challenge for us was keeping up the performance and frame rate of the game, particularly on the PS2. While on the last title, most of the development team had used PS2 systems to test their work, this time around, almost everyone was using an Xbox. This often meant we would make a section work on the Xbox, but when it came time to run on the PS2, it would run out of memory or perform only at 8 fps. Our new pipeline also sometimes made it hard to tell what was causing you to run low on memory in a particular area. All of this was fixed by the time we shipped, of course, but it was a giant time suck that we did not anticipate.

This was the first time we had tried to ship a game simultaneously in English and the PAL languages - Italian, German, Spanish and French. You might think this would have been a huge boondoggle as well, but there we had production personnel dedicated to managing that risk early on, and that was a fantastic decision. What could have been a major stumbling block actually worked out quite painlessly.

Best Decisions Richard Rouse III: With a tight schedule, sticking with a lot of what we knew worked from the first game gave us a fighting chance to ship on time with a quality game. We tried to innovate and refine in a lot of ways, but we also would fall back on game design techniques that had worked once, which was a pretty good predictor for them working again. A lot of the reviews point out that The Suffering: Ties That Bind bears a lot of resemblance to the first game, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I talked a bit before about how much we cut out of the game, and I think we came really close to cutting out too much. I think we pulled back just in time though, which was one of our best decisions. Levels like the drowning pool area, the underground tunnels at the beginning of the game, and the truck chase were all definitely on the chopping block at one point or another. It took a massive amount of work from key individuals to keep those areas going despite the tight schedule, and the game is much, much better for having those parts still in it.

Also, deciding to do the bulk of our voice-over work in LA this time worked out very well for us. For previous projects, we had recorded everything in Seattle, and though there are a number of good voice actors in Washington state, there's a much smaller number of them than in a major acting city like LA or New York. For Ties That Bind, this meant we had a much wider array of talent to pick from, giving us more varied voices across the game. In addition, our celebrity voice talents worked out quite well. Interestingly, the Blackmore character was originally going to be played by a different actor who, at the last second turned, out not to be able to do it. This led to us having to put the part on hold while we found a suitable replacement. And in that roundabout way we found the absolute ideal person to play that part, Michael Clarke Duncan. At this point, it's hard to imagine anyone else ever playing the part, since he did such a phenomenal job.

Areas for Improvement Andre Maguire: I'd like to have seen more done with rage mode in particular as far as gameplay goes. There's so much potential there. I could see expanding on the monster attributes and really giving him some over the top powers. That and expanding on the destructive environments could make for some incredible gameplay scenarios. Tearing up the environments along with your enemies would be really satisfying, particularly with an advanced physics system.

Richard Rouse III: As I said before, in terms of game design and the general play experience, we ended up sticking with a lot of what we knew worked from the first game. Looking back, I wish we had managed to take a few more risks and in particular, to add a major gameplay element or two that would more clearly differentiate Ties That Bind from the first game. A lot of what we did was refining what we had, and in retrospect, I would have liked for us to have gone a bit beyond that. In a lot of ways, doing a sequel is harder than doing an original game, since you have to live up to the fan expectations built from the first title, while also doing enough new stuff that players feel they are getting a distinctly new game. Of course, if your new game mechanics don't fit in with the old game, then you'll get in trouble for that. So, it's an extremely delicate balance, and in the end, I fear you can't please everybody.