The Conduit 2 Interview
with High Voltage's Eric Nofsinger
Last summer’s The Conduit proved a serious shooter could be done on the party game-loving Wii. Supporting solid FPS mechanics and an expansive suite of customization options, it gave shooter fans something besides Metroid Prime to play on the casual gamer-aimed console. But despite delivering innovation to the Wii’s arguably most under-supported genre, it received mixed reviews, mostly for its uninspired conspiracy theory narrative and gimmicky “All Seeing Eye” powers. We recently sat with Eric Nofsinger, High Voltage Software’s Chief Creative Officer, to see how the Conduit 2 plans on retaining what worked for its predecessor, while addressing the issues that kept it in the dreaded “below 70%” Metacritic dead zone.
AtomicGamer: The original Conduit got a lot of credit for evolving FPS gameplay on the Wii, but critics still had issue with other aspects, most notably the story. Are you addressing this in the sequel?
Eric Nofsinger: Yeah, it’s something we definitely wanted to beef up. There’s a lot more presentation this time around. Most of the missions and things throughout the first game were delivered through a mission briefing screen, which gives you the info that you need, but isn’t very interesting. It’s wasn’t, for want of a better word, epic, and we wanted it to be a lot more epic science fiction. There are more cut-scene cinema and more “wow” moments throughout the game. Also, what we’ve done this time is pulled in some really great external science fiction authors to help us out. We brought in Jason Blair who worked on Prey, and did some work on Borderlands. We also brought in Matt Forbeck who is a science fiction novelist; he’s written a lot of different books, and he’s helped us sort of flesh out the world as well. We also wanted the game to have more branching and pathing, so that it felt a little bit more open. It’s definitely not an open world game, but we wanted to have more variety. You get to go to a lot of interesting locales--The Forbidden City in China, The Lost City of Atlantis, Siberia--and you find out that a lot of these areas have been controlled by aliens as well.
AG: Are you building on the gameplay as well, or sticking to what worked the first time around?
EN: Definitely building on it and adding lots of new weapons. There’s an invisibility gun which allows the player to temporarily cloak; this one offers some give and take, too--while you’re cloaked you can’t fire, but other enemies can’t see you, so it gives you sort of a stealthy advantage. There’s also a shield gun which collects the enemies bullets in front of you and then allows you to fire that back at them. It also works for grenades, rocket launchers, anything that the enemies fire at you, you can collect and fire back at them. It’s pretty neat, it’s a powerful weapon. We’ve also got a weapon that allows you to fire through walls, and one that allows you to tag other enemies and then shoot around; so you can literally tag them and then run away and just hit fire, and it will find the path to shoot them.
AG: The first game also received some criticism for not implementing the All Seeing Eye effectively. Will that power be returning in the sequel?
EN: Yeah it’s back, but we’ve made it less annoying (laughs). In all seriousness, we’ve made it more of an integral part of exploration; it’s less about possible solving as a device and more about finding things and unlocking things, and how that becomes important for gameplay. It can unlock one-off maps of the game that you couldn’t get to otherwise, blueprints, which allow you to unlock a weapon that wouldn’t normally be available on that level. So there are definitely gameplay advantages through using the ASE. In the first game it was an interesting but under-utilized device, and I think a lot of fair criticism came because of that. This time, we’re picking off the bits that were kind of annoying and we’re making an actual useful device that would be something players will actually want to use.
AG: Cool! And I’ve heard you’re also adding boss battles to Conduit 2?
EN: Yes, these are absolutely something new for the sequel. We have several major boss battles in the game and they are multi-stage bosses. In the first game, we had some larger enemies, but they were just big enemies, just big guys that you had to defeat. So we really wanted to incorporate true bosses that you had to figure out how you were going to defeat them, and have a strategy for it. They have weaknesses, and they have patterns that they go through. That is something that we think is a big addition to the game.
AG: How many of these encounters can players expect in the game?
EN: There’s three major bosses that you fight throughout the game, and there’s several sort of sub-bosses – enemies that are tougher that require some strategy to beat, but they aren’t necessarily full bosses.
AG: The Conduit offered a ton of customization options for the HUD elements and controller mapping. Did you find players took advantage of these features and, if so, are they returning?
EN: That’s still a huge, huge thing for us. We listened to what players and media had to say, and it’s something that they liked with the first game, so we continued with that. It’s even more customizable; we also support additional controller inputs, so we support Wii motion plus, we support classic controller, classic controller pro; we’re supporting the new headset peripheral for multiplayer; we’ve continued with the HUD customization. The HUD is actually is on a three dimensional arc, and when you move its elements around they actually stay in perspective for the visor...it’s really mapped on to the 3D arc of the visor. It’s a little thing, but there’s a lot of those little things that give the sequel a lot of polish and character.
AG: How’s the Wii Motion Plus specifically implemented? Does it just add more aiming accuracy?
EN: Mainly more accuracy, but also off-screen tracking. If you do a melee attack, for example, it reorients a little better; If you aim offscreen, it’ll retrack it much better. It’s not necessary, you don’t have to have it to play the game, but if you have it, why not support it.
AG: Can you talk about the multiplayer?
EN: Yes, we support twelve-player online multiplayer. Same as last game, but we’ve got a lot of really great new maps. There are also many improvements to the multiplayer, including allowing you to do full weapon loadouts; you can completely customize your online experience to load in what weapon-set you want. Additionally, we have a full perk system with over thirty perks; you can go in and modify the character, modify the gameplay experience, and change the look of your character. We also support split screen, so you can play with up to four players on the same box. We also have Invasion mode, which is where...it’s a coop mode where up to you and four of your friends can sit on the same box and wave after wave of enemies come at you. We have over fourteen different gameplay modes confirmed at this point, so it’s a lot of bang for your dollar. We really wanted to make this a deep single player experience and a really wonderful online experience, and deliver on a truly great first person shooter for the Wii.
Thanks to Eric Nofsinger for taking the time to discuss Conduit 2 with us. We’re already locking and loading our Wii-Motes in anticipation of its early 2011 arrival.
