Escape from Butcher Bay was single player only and while The Darkness had multiplayer, the general criticism was that it felt tacked on. Can you talk about your approach to multiplayer for Assault on Dark Athena?

The Darkness was an experience that we learned quite a bit from, so people should be excited about what we do with the multiplayer in Assault on Dark Athena. And what’s immediately apparent about our approach for this game is that we’re very interested in (maybe even nostalgic about) classic multiplayer gaming. Run-and-gun, quick and easy, pick up and play for 15-minutes type of engagement, which is different from some of the other multiplayer games out there right now – games that have gone the way of persistence and RPG type character building, etc. We enjoy the more brisk type of multiplayer gaming, and we hope other people will enjoy how we’ve applied that to Assault on Dark Athena.

Sticking with the multiplayer, Pete Wanat, a producer on the upcoming Wanted: Weapons of Fate game recently made comments about the effort of adding multiplayer to games that don't need it at the expense of the single player experience. To be honest, when I first read this comment, I thought of Escape from Butcher Bay, which was criticized by some as not having any multiplayer components, but at the same time, provided a tremendously solid single player experience. Do you have any thoughts on balancing the inclusion of multiplayer with providing a solid single player experience?

Pete and I worked together for many years. He was the Producer on Escape from Butcher Bay and I was the Designer, and that project – more than most – shaped our thinking about Multiplayer and Single Player gaming and how they mix. People that criticized EfBB for not having multiplayer seemed to be painting by numbers, i.e. most other FPS games have multiplayer, I expect multiplayer in an FPS, so because this game does not have multiplayer, I’m literally bound not to like it as much.

To do that, you have to slightly ignore what we achieved, which is just silly. There are other examples as well. It would be just as awkward to complain about a game like Metroid Prime not having multiplayer. To do that you have to largely ignore what they created. I think where people get tripped up is in their assessment of value. They seem to do it by the numbers. Games with more hours of gameplay are automatically better. Games with multiplayer are automatically better. If he’s got 10 vehicles in his game and you have 20, yours is probably better than his, etc. That kind of thinking ignores one critical thing about games and game development which is how we take everything we put into a game and bring it all together – the execution and the sum total of the experience.

The GTA games (while they were on the PS2) were certainly not the best looking games out there – but how could you ignore the experience? And does anyone rightly complain about Ico or Shadow of the Colossus because they’re “short”? Who cares if they were “short” – they were profound! So… long rant short… if multiplayer is important for your game and it completes that experience, great. If not, why bother? At that point you’re really only doing it to answer those critics, and I don’t believe that’s healthy.

If someone has already played Escape from Butcher Bay, what is their biggest incentive to go back and play it again in Assault on Dark Athena?

Well it’s certainly good for achievements! But beyond that, it really is amazing to look at everything that we’ve done to remake and rebuild that game and just how gorgeous it is now. For fans or even people that never got to play it at its original release (and there’s a huge audience out there that’s not yet played EfBB), it’s going to be a real joy to go back and experience that based on the remake. It’s a bit of history too – a licensed game that didn’t suck. Arguably the best licensed game ever! (Mad love and respect to GoldenEye btw) How could you not want to play it?

Having your game dropped by Activision must have been a very stressful event, yet Starbreeze kept on working. Was this a case of having enough faith in your work to know that you'd be picked up by a publisher eventually, or a "what do we have to lose" situation or a little of both?

In this case we had a game that we believe in very strongly. The business of game development is always stressful and we’re always losing sleep, but given how confident we are in Assault on Dark Athena, we believed we would find an equally enthusiastic publisher to partner with, and Atari has been fantastic!

When working in the Riddick universe, how much of the mythology is coming from Starbreeze and how much from Vin Diesel and Tigon Studios?

It’s a bit of a back and forth. Starbreeze has all the freedom in the world to go and envision a setting they want to put the Riddick character in, and since we’re not re-treading a story we’ve already told, there’s all the room in the world to play with. What we’re mostly focused on in working together as producing partners (Vin and Tigon along with Universal), is how we connect all of these threads and build the Riddick universe as we’re telling these stories.

Finally, Escape from Butcher Bay had a little bit of everything: gunplay, hand to hand combat, stealth, quests and even some hot mech rampaging action. Is there anything that you weren't able to put in that you really wish you had and if so, is it in either the remade version of Butcher Bay or in Assault on Dark Athena?

Apart from the work we’ve done to make EfBB look even better, we did tweak a few areas of that game where we felt we’d frustrated people originally. So for example, it’ll be a bit easier to make your way out of the mines this time around! But we also included all of the additional content that we created for the PC version (our Developer’s Cut). And then of course there’s multiplayer, which we did consider and even spent a small amount of time working on during the original production, but were now able to more fully and properly realize. So there’s a lot there – this is a huge game when you put all of the different pieces together and we really hope you enjoy it!

Thanks again to Ian for taking the time to answer our questions. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena releases on April 7th for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .