E3 2009 Media: Red Steel 2 Video, Images, Fact Sheet, and Q&A

Hey, that guy’s Wii Remote isn’t in its jacket!

I swear, Red Steel 2 looks like it’s going to be awesome, and I hope it lives up to its potential. Perhaps we’ll hear more about it in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, we have some nice new images in our gallery, as well as a Q&A and fact sheet below.

Product Description

Red Steel® 2 is the highly anticipated Nintendo WiiTM exclusive title that will bring players the best sword & gun fighting experience ever on console.

Designed for the Wii MotionPlusTM, Red Steel 2 features unparalleled control. Players will pick up the Wii Remoteâ„¢ and swing it freely as the sword
on-screen follows their precise movement – and even measures the strength of their swing.

Red Steel 2 is a first-person-action-game where players become a lone swordsman who finds himself in an edgy city in the middle of a desert armed with only a sword and gun.

Key Features

BE THE SWORDSMAN
You are a lonesome fighter, a man of few words with a shaded past full of mystery. One day, you come back to town, to find the members of your clan murdered.

Your only duty now is to discover the truth about this slaughter and take revenge. You’ll have to defeat the wicked plans of the Warlord who has slaughtered your friends and taken control of the city.

Face various, and increasingly stronger, enemies and defeat challenging bosses in epic and intense fights.

IMMERSIVE EDGY WESTERN SETTING
Caldera, is a remote mixed metropolis in the middle of the American desert, where Eastern culture and Western culture has been smashed together into a hodge-podge jumble; rice bowl restaurants, gas stations, Japanese shops, and American steakhouses all compete on the same block.

Visit various locations through the city, each with a distinctive style. You will discover the game’s immersive background and environment as you make your way through the adventure.

EXCLUSIVELY DESIGNED FOR THE WII MOTION PLUSTM
The Wii MotionPlus provides 1:1 recognition where the sword movements are precisely replicated within the game. Slashing the villains the way you want!

The Wii MotionPlus measures the power of your swing. The harder you swing the Wii Remote, the harder the sword swings in the game!

In addition, the Wii MotionPlus provides a more precise input, which results in increased aiming accuracy with the Wii Remote.

Finally, the combined features via the Wii MotionPlus make the game accessible. However, a wide range of difficulty levels gives players the opportunity to take on a more challenging experience – making Red Steel 2 the core title featuring the Wii Motion Plus.

CLOSE COMBAT SYSTEM
The first-person-view puts you in the middle of the action and immediately making you feel like a powerful swords-master and gunslinger.

Fight up to six enemies simultaneously and feel the power and freedom to use your sword or your gun at any time.

The dynamic controls also allow you to master numerous combos with your sword and your gun ranging from triggering several finishing kills on your enemies, parrying your enemies attacks as well as deflecting bullets with your sword!

Product Specifications
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Paris
Ship Date: Holliday 2009
Category: First person action game
Rating: Teen (US) / PEGI 16+ / USK (TBC)

© 2009 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Red Steel, Ubisoft, Ubi.com, and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries. Wii, the Wii logo and Wii MotionPlus  are trademarks of Nintendo. © 2006 Nintendo.

RED STEEL 2 Q&A

What can you tell us about the hero and the story in Red Steel 2?

Our hero’s a bit of a mystery, actually.

You can tell by looking at him that he’s been around. He’s young, but he’s weather-beaten and worn, like he’s been left in the sun too long. He’s also got this badass look that never leaves him. Folks around these parts have heard of him, or seem to recognize him, but no one seems to know his name. “He’s that swordsman.”

Perhaps he’s a drifter. Maybe he’s a bounty hunter. Either way, he has found himself in a bad situation… but maybe that was what he was looking for?

He arrives in a town under the rule of packs of thugs, mercenaries, and villains… and he manages to make enemies of all of them. But he comes prepared, with a gun and a sword. (Who brings their own sword, anyway?)

He doesn’t say much, but when he does say something, it’s usually not very nice. It’s like he’s looking for a fight.

A hard man in a hard situation… but he stays, and, more, he tries to save the people from the villains running their town…

Can you tell us more about the setting?

It’s a city in a mythical Nevada desert, in a version of ‘now’ that’s recognizable as modern, but with the volume turned way up. It’s a city where eastern and western culture has been smashed together into a hodge-podge jumble – ricebowl restaurants, gas stations, Japanese shops, and American steakhouses all compete on the same block. Dojos, saloons, tea houses, and gun shops…
The desert is the hot, dry, sun-cracked desert of the imagination. Vultures, tumbleweeds, and roving packs of biker samurais are the main inhabitants.

It’s a modern Wild Wild East.
Everything about the setting reflects this jumble: the world, the characters, the music, the gameplay, the story – it’s never one or the other, always both.

How did you get this idea for the setting?

We started with our gameplay: the sword and the gun. Everything comes from that, really. We asked ourselves, with these weapons, where do we want to be?

The katana itself made the first part of our answer simple: Asia will always be one pillar of any Red Steel experience.

So, we asked ourselves: if the “natural home” of our sword is the Far East, what is the “natural home” of our gun?

We could have gotten into a chicken-and-egg problem here – because, of course, we can choose what gun the player uses. But, for us, the classic .45 caliber revolver is such a great weapon that this part was easy, too. What’s the “natural home” of the revolver? The Far West – specifically places like what you find in the films of Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, etc…).

So, our setting: Far East meets Far West, in a modern time. The more we worked with these ideas, the cooler we felt it was… and here we are.

Why did you go with this very specific Artistic Direction?

It’s more fun this way.

Our look is what we think of as a “game look” – it looks like a game. We’re not trying to make a movie game, or a simulation, or anything like that. We want every piece of what we give the player to be focused on having fun fighting with a sword and a gun. Of course, the limited resources on the Wii were a factor for us, but our main focus was finding a look that fit our game feel and setting, that really excites us (and then, hopefully, our players).

Additionally, we wanted our look to give our designers the best tools to make the game really fun – and for melee combat that means strong feedback, big effects… we didn’t want the look and the gameplay to fight with each other. We wanted a look that made the game design better, and a design that made the look better.

We think we’ve found what we were looking for with what we’re currently calling a “graphic novel” approach. Our references are very diverse (Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz for Elektra Assassin, Akira, Gunm…). We’ve pulled out some of the details from the world, but left it a grungy, dirty place: a look with strong contrasts but with a good dose of reality underneath. We don’t want to over-spend on details that don’t make the game better, but we still want the world to seem real.

It’s a difficult balance to strike, and we will no doubt be working on it until the day we ship, but we’re pretty excited about it.

How is the Wii Motion Plus implemented within the game? What does it brings to the gameplay?

When we received advance prototype versions of the WiiMotion Plus, and took some time to see what it could do, we realized that it was the solution we had needed to make the new style of gameplay, we had been experimenting with, work. It’s an integral part of the game, and therefore Red Steel 2 is Wiimotion Plus exclusive.

First: the WMP gives us 1:1 recognition of your movements. This means that all your motions with the Wiimote are precisely reproduced within the game. The angle and direction of your slash is directly reflected in-game. That’s pretty cool.

Second: the WMP measures the power of your swing. The harder you swing the Wiimote, the harder you swing your sword in the game, which has become one of our basic building blocks – against most enemies and challenges, the strength of your swing is crucial to gameplay.

Third: The WMP allows us to measure your movements even when you’re not pointing at the screen. What does this mean for us? As an example, we are experimenting with a feature that allows the player to point off-screen as a way of turning more quickly, so that advanced players can have more fine-tune control of their motions.

We think it’s cool that Red Steel was released alongside the original Wii, which changed so many things about gaming; and now Red Steel 2 will be released alongside the WMP, which we believe again opens up a new world of gameplay.

What are the key points of the gameplay?

Red Steel is a first-person action game where, for the first time, you can fight with both sword and gun, at any time.

The possibilities of this kind of combat are very broad – you will fight enemies who are attacking you with ranged weapons, with melee weapons, and plenty with both. You’ll fight groups of similar enemies, and then mixed packs of different types. Sometimes you’ll fight one enemy at a time, and sometimes up to six at once (which can get pretty hectic), all in a wide variety of different interactive fighting environments.
You will need to learn which kinds of attacks work best against which enemies, what kinds of defensive moves you can use, and who to attack first!

Our combat works with an intuitive enemy-locking mechanism. Players can customize this to give them the level of control they are most comfortable with (from full auto-lock to full manual).

You will unlock more powerful combos and finish kills as you progress. Your character earns rewards for combat, and knowing which moves to use against which enemies can earn you a higher reward, as an example. Your defenses will also increase as you play, increasing your kit of options (including deflecting bullets with your sword…).

What kind of players did you have in mind when you started designing the game?

Anyone who wants to hit things with a sword.

Our goal, first and foremost, was to make a game for gamers: people who love gaming, people who love action, combat, and people who love to have a great time.

At the same time, we wanted to make sure that every level of skill could play. Different gamers have different levels of physical coordination and strength, and so we want to make sure that anyone who is interested in the experience we’re offering has a chance to play. This means having a wide variety of difficulty settings, and the ability to calibrate the physical experience to your level of comfort.
We’re excited about the higher difficulty levels that will certainly require developing a new set of skills! But, at the same time, in keeping with our “anyone who wants to hit things” credo, we wanted to make sure that gamers who are just looking for a chance to blow off some steam vanquishing badguys could get in the game easily. So, we’re trying to strike a balance: we start with a “pick up and play” experience that’s very accessible, and then add layers of complexity at the higher difficulty settings that make for a very rich experience.

Everyone can play this game. But only a few will beat it on Ninja.

What happened since the release of Red Steel? How come we haven’t heard of you in three years?

It wasn’t the right time. The original Red Steel was a great proving ground for the team and for a lot of the ideas we had around sword-and-gun fighting; but we couldn’t explore all the ideas we had at that time and we wanted to be sure that the next time we came to the table, we had something definitely great for players, something really new and fun, enriched by the experience we had on the first opus.

Much of our time since the release of Red Steel has been spent prototyping, developing, and experimenting, looking for that special something. When we received the WiiMotion Plus, and discovered what we could do with it, we decided now was the time.

Today, we’re a team of about 100 people. Roughly 50% of the current team are vets from RS1, and the other half are fresh blood, from inside Ubisoft and from elsewhere. It’s been a great mix so far.