Interview with Frank Rooke of Condemned

Transcripted by: Chris Playo

The 360 launch is right around the corner, and the developers are just as excited as we are. We caught up with Frank Rooke of Monolith Studios, one of the lead designers of the game Condemned: Criminal Origins. He spoke to us about moody atmospheres, forensics, and beating the crap out of people with locker doors.

Exclusive: Listen to Frank Rooke speak about Condemned while checking out footage of the game!
Frank Rooke Interview (WMV, 480×360, 108.2MB, 11-17-05)Frank Rooke Interview (WMV, 320×240, 63.2MB, 11-17-05)

The following is a transcript of the phone conversation between Shawn Sinclaire of Advanced Media and Frank Rooke of Monolith.

AMN: Hi, this is Shawn Sinclaire with Advanced Media, I’m here talking to Frank Rooke, he’s a lead designer on the game Condemned: Criminal Origins set to release with the Xbox 360 launch. For those of you unfamiliar with Condemned, the gameplay is a brutal mix of first person shooting and combat elements as well as forensic investigation. You play as Thomas, an FBI agent tracking down some of the most ruthless serial killers out there. But enough from me, let’s hear about Condemned from one of the men behind the game. So, Frank, what exactly did you do working on Condemned?

Frank Rooke: I essentially wrote the Game Doc and the story behind the game Condemned: Criminal Origins.

AMN: Okay cool, so what was the inspiration behind Condemned?

Rooke: We decided to not just make it a first person game or a survivor horror game, but to make it something new. At the beginning we wanted to make a 360 launch title, not just make a game with enhanced graphics for the new platform, we wanted to mess around, find game mechanics that could be considered new, or at least tweaked a little bit to be fresh. Putting that together laid the groundwork for Condemned.

AMN: Has it always been an Xbox 360 launch title?

Rooke: When it got rolling it was a launch title for the 360. The game was designed specifically, not just for tech, but also for gameplay… the environment, and the level of maturity, [they were designed] specifically for the 360.

AMN: Would you consider Criminal Origins more of an action game or survival horror?

Rooke: It is, I would say, an action game, mainly because what you’re left with when you play the game is the amount of input you put into it which is a lot of in your face type combat. It has turned out to be quite a brutal and raw feeling that makes it feel like an action game, but the pace is slowed down so there were a lot of opportunities to get the player all worked up.

AMN: Right.

Rooke: There is a lot of tension, a lot of anticipation, the creep factor is pretty high, so that introduces some survivor horror elements. But in the end I feel that it’s a stronger action title with a nice, maybe different kind of feel to it compared to other first person shooters.

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AMN: Yeah, the demo we played at E3 was definitely really moody with all the lighting and effects. Will that hold true throughout the game? Will players feel that kind of tension?

Rooke: Absolutely. There is a dynamic flow to the game to make it interesting from start to finish, but overall there is a high degree of tension. In fact, our battles are more powerful since we set them up with such a level of tension.

AMN: How many gameplay hours do you expect players to get out of it?

Rooke: Well we’ve done a lot of play testing to fine tune to the game, so we have a pretty good idea of how long it will take the user to finish the game. I think clocking in, easily over ten, so I would say between ten or fourteen hours.

AMN: That’s cool. One of the major elements of this game are the forensic puzzles, right?

Rooke: Right.

AMN: In a lot of cases, in games featuring these puzzles end up being too easy. They’re kind of cookie cutter. So what are you doing in Criminal Origins to ensure that players are not only collecting evidence but also analyzing it on their own?

Rooke: Well, we really, one thing I really didn’t want to have happen is that I think is a problem with a lot of games. We have this terrific element but it could be turned into a pixel hunt or a trial and error and keep going at it until something comes up. I wanted to make sure that when the player is doing some sort of forensic element in the game to have it feel like it is part of the action or some objective that your being asked to do.

AMN: Right.

Rooke: The forensic tools themselves are relatively intelligent on their own. So what the player is left to do is do the fun part, which is finding the evidence, collecting the evidence, and then receiving the reward. They’re never asked to take a room and be like “I know there is something in this room but I have no idea what it is or how to get it, I’m just going to have to use trial and error to get there,” or we’re not going to ask them to take these three pieces of evidence and figure out what it means. That’s just all over the floor for any person; it’s hard to nail it down and have a person understand what it means.

AMN: Yeah.

Rooke: So we tried to take away all the frustrating elements which leaves with the fun stuff which is finding stuff, getting stuff, and getting the reward for finding that stuff.

AMN: Yeah, what about the combat. We saw a lot of that in the E3 demo, but how is it different in the final version? How much of it can players expect?

Rooke: In the E3 demo, we were really at that point just putting together what was mainly a melee combat oriented game, which is the core of our combat, but a lot of games have melee components to their combat, and I don’t know if they are overly satisfying. We wanted to make sure that the focus on melee combat was absolutely satisfying. In the same way that dueling somebody with a huge machinegun or shotgun is.

AMN: Right.

Rooke: So we took a lot of time making sure that the melee was visceral kind of raw feel to it. We want you to feel the impact on your enemy, and you can feel their hit on you. You could see the feedback on hitting them, as they recoil and spit blood. It’s very in your face, and all the elements you would expect to be there are there. We didn’t mess it up with a bunch of combos where you have to press all these buttons; it’s just a basic raw, primal kind of fight that you would expect in this setting. One guy has a pipe and another has a two by four with bolts in it, you don’t expect them to be performing all these fancy moves, it gets really primal at this point. We tried to capture this and implement it into our game.

AMN: Yeah, nothing gets more raw than beating somebody with a locker door.

Raw.

Rooke: (laughs) Yeah, the sound is just perfect.

AMN: Being one of the launch titles of the Xbox 360, you’ve been one of the first groups to work with the hardware. What have you found the 360 to be good with, and how are you optimizing the hardware for your game?

Rooke: Well, this would be a great question for our engineers. But from my point of view, the Xbox 360 offers all the things we wanted to do simultaneously. For example in PC or other consoles, they are starting to introduce some of these effects such as per pixel lighting, and light volumes, shadow volumes, normal mapping, and shaders. All that kind of stuff. But we are usually confined to doing one or two at the most. What we found with the 360 is that we can do all of these things simultaneously. So yeah, somebody says we have per pixel lighting, and so does somebody else, but do they have this, this and this. The additional thing is its high definition. All 360 games are going to be in 720. So if you have the TV, no matter what type of game it is, it’s going to be visually superior over other older, console games.

The negative is, for us…is not a specific thing about the kit, but being a launch title having to run parallel with the development of the console. So it’s hard to look past that challenge to find a negative for the 360, since that for us was a huge hurdle.

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AMN: Right, so the visuals sound like they are going to be awesome, and you’re going to be trying to present mood, and obviously sound is going to be a huge part of that. So what kinds of sound effects are present, and is there going to be voice acting? What kind of musical scores do you guys have playing?

Rooke: We have an in-house sound design team, as well as a composer, but being part of Warner Brothers we also have access to their facilities. Previously games by Monolith have been acclaimed for their sound. When working on the prototype for this game in pre-production, sound was right there. We were using sound to drive atmosphere, mood, and the overall texture of the game. So it wasn’t something that we had a sound designer come in and add later, he was always there at the very beginning. A lot in many situations, sound was one of the very first components of an event or area, or some sort of situation. In that respect I always say sound is fifty percent of our game. You can swing a locker door, you can see it hit the guy’s head, but without the sound it is only fifty percent as effective. It just makes the whole effect.

AMN: Yeah especially if you have the whole surround sound.

Rooke: Yeah, we treat sound very seriously here. And music is a part of the whole composition of the audio. The script, and the story are very important to this game. We didn’t want to lessen this effect by not having good voice actors so we hired top professional people to do the voice acting, and I think all of that turned out really well.

AMN: So what about Xbox Live? This is predominately a single player game so are you going to be doing any recording of game experiences on Live.

Rooke: Yes, there is actually a requirement to do that.

AMN: Oh really?

Rooke: Our game uses all the things that will let players brag about all their accomplishments within the game. Other people can see where they are at currently in the game. We give out plenty of awards for all the various things they accomplish within the game. So there is all that there, there is no death match or multiplayer components. We left it with rewards for players to share back and forth.

AMN: Assuming it does well, are you planning on any sequels?

Rooke: I think that every developer believes that his or her game is going to be good. They can’t help but think about what to do with the next game. There are plenty of thoughts and desires to work on a sequel, but there has been no announcement regarding that yet.

AMN: What do you think of the consumer reaction from the game? Have you gotten any input from that yet?

Rooke: Well input so far has mainly been from the selected press people and those within Microsoft, but everything has been extremely positive. We have high hopes for this game, and expect the public to respond in the same way.

Check out Condemned, or you’ll end up like this.

AMN: Excellent, that’s all I have. Thanks for your time. Have any final comments for our readers?

Rooke: Buy the game, and make sure you buy an HD TV too!