For the most part, fans of the SOCOM franchise are pretty vocal about their preference for SOCOM II. What do you think it is about that game specifically that they love so much?
Well, SOCOM II had these really nice, intimate experiences where there's a little more density in the environment, a little more interaction, more strategies you can use and a more closed or confined environment. SOCOM 3, in adding vehicles, the environments obviously had to grow, so we lost a little of that. We tried to come back to that a little bit with SOCOM: Combined Assault but we had a tight development schedule on that one; we could only take it so far. So in many ways with the new title we're trying to go back to that, and actually going above and beyond that and really focusing on the environments to make sure that they're even more dense and intricate than previously.
That's one of the things we really want to play up--we want you to always be careful when you're going around a corner, because you may run into five guys coming at you the other way. We want you to really look at the environment and have to learn it to know all the different paths and different intricate ways that you can navigate the environment, so that you can find your own special routes and routes at different ways through it; so that you can really use the environment a lot more than we had in previously games. Because we kind of want the environment to be more of a part of the game in this one.
So no vehicles then in SOCOM: Confrontation?
Not initially, yeah.
Not initially?
Not initially. We're going to focus on really getting that on-foot game play to where we want it to be.
If SOCOM II is sort of the spiritual inspiration for Confrontation, is it fair to say that this is fanservice, that you've been listening to the fans and you're finally giving them the SOCOM that they've been wanting?
In some ways, but we're obviously going to create an experience that's appealing to everyone. It's not going to be something that is going to be appreciated only by the fans. This is going to be a next generation online title. We're focusing a lot on making it a very visceral, very fun game to pick up and play. As far as the direction, I think there is a lot of truth in saying that there were things that were better in SOCOM II than they were in SOCOM III and Combined Assault, and mainly it's that intimate experience with the environment, that sort of connection, where you knew the environment like the back of your hand--which is harder to do with a much larger environment. And that's what we're trying to get back to. We want to have these very detailed, dense environments that you're really going to get to know. When you're going through it, you're going to know where each object is and be able to highly utilize the environment.
Are there going to be any bots in the game for any sort of offline experience and if not, is that something you would consider sort of post launch?
It's something we're already considering. I can't--we're evaluating it and seeing, it's one of those things that we can do a lot with it on Playstation 3. I think most people think of bots and they think of the experience of a lot of the different PC games that have them. And we want to do something that's much different from that actually. We've been talking about it and we definitely want to do it, but it's not going to be a small addition because we want, we really want the bots to--SOCOM's a team based game. It's not like free-for-all mode where you just run around and shoot. It's not a frag-fest. So if we add bots, we need them to act like a team because that's really going to provide the best experience. So it's a much bigger challenge but it's definitely something that we want to take on.
