Posted by Jereme Puik

Nick Torchia, Producer for Wanted: Weapons of Fate joins Game Plasma for a chat

How big of a help is it when you sign on the actors from the film to voice over their character counter-parts in the game? 

Nick: It helps out a lot because I think when people buy a movie based title they want it to feel like its part of the movie. So, having the actors’ likeness is very important.  

From a technical standpoint, is it a challenge when you have to match the intensity of the movie? 

Nick: Yea, to a point; you always have to take in mind from a technology standpoint of what you can and can’t do. Tons of movies are so heavy with cars with this and that, so doing it for a game; it’s quite challenging to match that angle. For example, in the movie you have the car jumping through into the train, that’d be very challenging to do that in a game and take a lot of time to do. You have to worry about limitations. 

For the cover system, I noticed that it took inspiration from other games, what made Wanted’s cover system so unique? 

Nick: I think for a lot of games, for example, Gears did a fantastic job with cover, Grand Theft Auto IV had cover, Bourne had cover, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow series had cover as well. So, we looked at those games and see what they did right and see how we can kind of innovate on it. Where as Gears had bigger characters ours were like ninjas that were faster, so ours is very fast and agile moving from point to point to point, ours is very frantic, so we took cover and made it our own and made it like zip line.  

There’s a feature in the game called “Assassin Time”, can you explain that? 

Nick: Yea, Assassin Time is taken from the movie where Wesley has anxiety, so we kind of took that moment and translated it in the core mechanics. As the game progresses you gain this ability to slow down time, so if you are ever in a situation where you have tons of enemies around you, you can actually activate Assassin Time and everything slows down and allows you to take out multiple enemies. So again, taking something from the film and translating it into the core mechanics of the game.

 For curving the bullet, was that difficult at all to manage in the gameplay and make it flow with the rest of the game? 

Nick: It was challenging because it was something that hasn’t been done before so there’s no real reference material. I mean with cover we can look at a lot of cover based games and look at what they did and what we can innovate on it. For curve, we’re starting from scratch, we spent a lot of time prototyping, figuring out how to do it, do we put in on two bumpers, do we use the sticks, so we went back and forth to make it as accessible and as friendly as possible because it’s a core mechanic and if its not fun to use and people don’t get it you’re going to lose them right away. So you have to make it very accessible. 

For movie based titles, a lot people worry that most of them turn out with poor quality and rushed development, do you believe that Wanted: Weapons of Fate is above the average movie released game? 

Nick: Oh without a doubt, I mean, for example, the movie (Wanted) came out in June 2008, the game wasn’t ready and we didn’t want to release a shit title, basically. So we made a conscious decision with Universal and said “Look we’re not going to release this, let’s take the time to do this right”. The DVD was going to come out in the beginning of December; it wouldn’t make sense to release the game in the beginning of December. Because it’s going to get lost in all the other titles, you have all the Call of Duty’s, Gears of War, Left4Dead, all these titles came out in November. We’re like “eh, there’s no point; it’s just going to get washed away. So what we did was we extended the time out to put more polish into it. The developer, Grin did a fantastic job adding that extra layer of polish to the gameplay, and testing it to make sure its silky smooth.