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B]August 31, 2006[/B] - With all the industry coverage of Insomniac's Resistance: Fall of Man in the past several weeks (especially via the extensive billion-page preview from the last issue of PSM), it appears that more questions arise every time another one gets answered. For a little clarification, we asked the guys at Insomniac about a number of different topics that have been circling around the Internet. And while we certainly can't claim that all the loose ends left by previous articles will suddenly be tied up, at least we learned some new info -- and had fun while we did it. Here's what the guys had to say:
IGN: 40-player online is pretty ambitious for a game that has this much data being tossed about at once. What convinced you that you could upgrade from 32 to 40 without any problems and how will the game deal with a few poor connections amongst the solid ones?
Eric C. Ellis, Lead Online Gameplay Programmer: We set a target to run with 32 players at 60 frames per second and we hit that goal solidly for our E3 demo. After hitting that target, (which we were pretty proud of), and getting a lukewarm reaction to those numbers, we went back and decided that what would show off next-gen power better was a game with more stuff blowing up and more players.
So, we made the decision to run at 30 frames per second and add more players and a greater level of things that explode along with more environmental effects. To make sure we run well over the internet with that many players, we have all spent a lot of time running with artificially high latency and packet loss so that we make sure our systems are designed to handle them without looking bad.
IGN: Multiplayer allows you to play as both Chimera and human warriors. Are these differences simply skin swaps or will there be distinct advantages or disadvantages to choosing one side over another?
Mike J. Stout, Online Lead Designer: Both the hybrids and the humans will have distinct advantages and disadvantages. They require a different play style -- humans are more team-oriented and hybrids are more about going it alone. The humans have a speed advantage, as well as more advanced detection abilities. The hybrids have an ability called "Rage Mode" -- which they can use to do more damage (and gain a few other neat abilities) but doing so puts them at risk of taking extra damage.
IGN: The inclusion of the tilt feature is definitely one of the most intriguing new goodies. It has been mentioned that shaking the controller will free you of an enemy's grasp, but is this something that can be toggled? Will there be instances in the game where you HAVE to use the 6-axis tilt for specific reasons?
Peter Hastings, Gameplay Programmer: We have several more tricks up our sleeve where we intend on using the tilt-sensor to increase immersion and improve control (nothing we want to give away just yet, though!) We're also aware that some players are a lot more animated than others, and if it's someone's style to shake the controller around while they play, we don't want them accidentally triggering unwanted actions all the time. So, players will have the option to disable all tilt-sensing if they want.
IGN: How much impact does a successful or unsuccessful hero moment have in the overall story or level progression? Are they purely self-contained or do they have an effect on the bigger picture?
Colin Munson, Lead Designer: When you start a large-scale battle, you might have a couple dozen allies with you, so if one of them falls to a Hero Moment it won't be that big of a deal. But, by the time you get close to the end of the battlefield, your forces will have diminished and you'll be glad to have as many allies as possible to help you in the final stages. But the British forces are fighting the Chimera on multiple fronts, so Hale will likely not see soldiers that he has saved in previous battles. However, that doesn't mean they don't owe him their lives.
IGN: The game's tech specs have been a frequent topic of discussion. So that said, what level of HD will it run in (720p, 1080i, 1080p), what's the final framerate, and what sort of audio codec have you decided to support?
Al Hastings, Chief Technology Officer: Our intention is to support all HD modes including 1080p. The framerate will be locked at 30 frames per second in both single-player and multiplayer. We use a number of different codecs internally including AC3 and ATRAC3 depending on what's best suited to each particular case. The highest quality output format our game supports is 7.1 uncompressed over HDMI.
IGN: You've previously mentioned that bodies will be persistent, so if you come back to an area later they'll still be there. Does this imply that the game is somewhat "open" in a way, where you can choose to wander back to previous areas at any time to find new secrets, or will areas be revisited throughout the game's storyline?
Drew Murray, Designer: Each level will be a totally unique environment and experience. While some of the levels in Resistance: Fall of Man, such as the battlefields and vehicle levels, will be more open and less linear, we have to have a certain amount of control over where the player is at certain times in order to build the horror and suspense that's part of our core experience.
The player will have opportunities to choose multiple tactics and paths in order to overcome certain challenges, such as our massive battlefields, and there will also be more restricted environments. These allow us to control timing and suspense, and offer some fantastic one-off events, such as the Burrower that crashes through the walls at the end of our E3 trailer.
IGN: What is Nathan's role at the start of the game, and what is Rachel's part in the war?
Josh Wall, Writer: US Army Sgt. Nathan Hale begins as just one of thousands of US Army Rangers dropped into a foreign country to fight an unknown enemy. Upon engaging the horror that is the Chimeran invasion, Hale's entire unit is infected by the Chimeran virus. While everyone else falls into a coma, Hale alone somehow manages to awaken.
Hale soon meets British Army Intelligence Corps Captain Rachel Parker and joins the remains of the British Army. As the Chimeran infection continues to evolve within him, Hale gains uncanny insight into the Chimeran plot. He begins to realize that only he will be able to seek out the heart of the Chimeran operations in Britain and bring a halt to the invasion.
As for Parker's role, by the time the Chimera finally reached England, she thought she knew all there was to know about the threat. When the Chimera shattered the British Army, Parker realized it wasn't enough. She marshaled the remaining forces and led them to safety. In the months that followed, it was only Parker's ability to think one step ahead of the Chimeran invasion that kept any of them alive.
As the Chimera grew stronger and began to close in, defeat at the fangs of the Chimera seemed inevitable. It was only when Parker met the sole survivor of a failed US assault that she found a new reason to hope.
IGN: The game's AI is touted to be cognizant of its environment, making it aware of surrounding actions while unaware of things that may be hidden or disguised, like the player. Does this imply that it's possible to take a somewhat stealthy approach to the game?
Colin Munson, Lead Designer: Yes and no. The player will experience a huge variety of gameplay scenarios from massive battlefields, to dark, creepy corridors. On the battlefield, a stealthy approach is impossible. The player has to use his unique weapons, loud explosions, and some balls to break through the enemies' frontlines. In the darker corridors, when the player is alone, that's where there will be some opportunities to be sneaky.
For example, you can crack patrolling hybrids in the back of the skull with the butt of your gun, sneak up on a group and snipe two in the head before the other two even see you, or shoot the rope that holds a hanging crate so that it falls and crushes a patrolling enemy. Or, if you're the kind of player who likes more fast-paced combat, you can toss a Hedgehog grenade into the group and watch as it impales a couple of them with a few dozen three-foot-long spikes. Then, use your Auger to create an energy shield and take out the remaining enemies with a hail of firepower. The game accommodates a huge variety of play styles, and the player is encouraged to experiment.
IGN: Many of the game's alien weapons sound extremely powerful. How are you making sure to balance each of the weapons in power and function, not only for multiplayer but single-player as well? It sounds like you might be SOL if you run out of alien ammo and are stuck with human weapons at later.
Ken Strickland, Designer: Tuning a huge suite of weapons is one of those happy dilemmas; it's only difficult if there's a lot of variety. Luckily, we have a few ways of tuning our weapons relative to each other. Some are balanced with ammo counts alone, like the LAARK rocket launcher. Others have more plentiful ammo, but are limited by heat or charge bars. The most powerful balancing mechanic we have, though, is specialization. Many of our weapons are wonderfully powerful, but only if used in the correct time and context. The Sapper requires time and planning to use to form traps. The Bull's-eye can technically be used on anything, but the limited number of tags means that good players use it only against fast-moving enemies. The weapon designs are meant to encourage strategic choices between weapons from situation to situation, and the added strategy that comes from that will help players through the second and third play-through.
IGN: Speaking of weapons, with as many that the team has already created for the Ratchet series, how do you continue to come up with new ones? What is the process of developing a new and more interesting weapon for a game that takes itself a lot more seriously than the Lombax?
Ted Price, Founder & CEO: Coming up with new weapons is definitely fun, but it can also be pretty tough. Early on we decided that this game needed weapons as exotic as Ratchet's, but with a more serious flavor. We encouraged everyone at the company to come up with suggestions for weapons and as usual, we got some excellent ideas from lots of team members. But I have to give real props to Nathan Fouts and Ken Strickland who together came up with many of the designs and implemented our craziest weapons. To their credit they were always open to anyone making comments on the guns. And, during the project it was very cool to walk by and see a group of people at Nathan's desk point at the screen saying, "Hey, can you make that go faster? And what if it had more auto-targeting?"
IGN: Would it have been possible to create Resistance on anything but the PlayStation 3, like the PS2, Xbox 360 or PC, and if not, why? Have you had the idea for the game on the backburner and been saving it for capable hardware?
Ted Price, Founder & CEO: It would have been very, very difficult to create Resistance on any other platform. First, this game requires an incredible amount of processing power to support the large number of moving characters and objects in the levels. Every one of our characters has sophisticated AI and navigation routines running in the background. Plus, every object -- including characters -- has to access our physics and collision systems constantly. And, of course, I'm ignoring all the other processes that have to occur simultaneously to create immersive, believable environments. What a game like Resistance requires is parallel processing on a massive scale and fortunately the Cell's SPUs give us this. We can take complex and expensive systems and move them onto the SPUs, which are extremely good at number-crunching. When these systems run in parallel it means we can do more per frame and that means more detail in the game.
Second, the game requires more than 20 gigabytes of storage space, which means that the only viable storage medium for us is Blu-ray. We could not have fit this game on a DVD or a HD-DVD. So, yet another reason that the game could only have been created on the PlayStation 3.
IGN
Anyone has their R:FoM cover design?
I've been wondering where it's been!
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During world war 2, this is what europe was like, dark, grim, and grainy. 
