Article by: Justin Amirkhani

The Resistance series has somewhat reinvented itself with its third and most recent version. As things turn from bad to worse with the Chimera taking over Earth, it’s do-or-die time for humanity. Marcus Smith, Creative Director on the game, tells us about the series’ evolution and how the game has evolved given its shift in philosophy.

Resistance 3 has evolved most from its predecessors in the depth we went to create a sense of place. From the opening area of Haven, where we see how people are living by hiding underground, to feeling the wind rip through town when a Terraformer is approaching, we spent lot more time, effort and resources on building a believable world. We wanted to create a place that players feel existed before they got there.

For Resistance: Fall of Man we were focusing on the military power of humans as they fought to defend England against the Chimeran invasion. For Resistance 2, it was about the plight of a select military branch and its members as they also fought against an invasion. For Resistance 3, however, we are focusing on the human element, less military might and more strength of the individual. In Resistance 3, the Chimera is no longer invading. They’ve won. Now we see how people react to living in an alien-occupied Earth, where THEY are the hunted.

I wouldn’t say it LACKS the high-tech elements; it just focuses less on the infrastructure that created them (namely, SRPA, the military group responsible for building many of our more ‘exotic’ weapons from the previous games). But we do still have Chimeran technology, where our sci-fi based weapons originate. And where humans are concerned, their weapons are more improvised. There’s plenty of shotguns out there and other leftover military weapons, but there are also weapons crafted by humans from Chimeran technology with a nice touch of ‘homemade-ness.

We wanted to focus on how humanity was surviving, how different survivor groups used different tactics. So it made sense to revert to a more ‘primitive’ way of life. With 90% of humanity dead or converted, there are just not enough resources to support larger groups. Not to mention what a detriment it would be if survivors started powering up sections of cities- drawing too much Chimeran attention is a very bad thing.

Resistance 3 multiplayer allows people to craft weapon and ability load-outs to support the way *they* like to play the game. Once people start unlocking abilities, trying them out, seeing how each can help different parts of their game, I think people will really enjoy what we’re doing. I get really excited when I’m playing the game and I get killed by someone a few times; I become obsessed with getting my revenge. And since every ability has counters (and we show you what load-out each person has when they kill you), it’s very gratifying to switch load-outs mid-game to take them out. There’s a very satisfying strategic element to it. It makes you feel smart and lethal. Additionally, we’ve got some cool DLC coming that we don’t want people to miss out on.

As with most new peripherals, we definitely looked at what other games did when they implemented support. You basically look at what worked, what didn’t and how you can change it to better suit your game. For us, it was figuring out how to give the player the most control to play with as much speed as you can with the dual shock. There’s finer control in cursor movement with the Move, so we also had to adjust things like the amount of aim assist, which is crucial to using sticks, but becomes a hindrance when using the Move. Again, the biggest issue was making sure players could adjust the Move to make it feel right to them.