With Executive Producer Hunter Smith
Written by Jeff Buckland, 2/11/2009
EA is readying the follow-up to their big-budget action game The Godfather. While the first game didn't exactly go down as a classic, it did innovate with several new ideas that have since been fleshed out in other free-roaming action games since. The sequel is almost finished and also includes some new features as well as more fleshed-out versions of the combat controls and a more strategy-oriented overview. I got the chance to ask Executive Producer on the project, Hunter Smith, some questions on what to expect with The Godfather II.
AtomicGamer: The first Godfather game had the voice work of Marlon Brando, who recorded his lines just before he passed, but not enough of the budget seemed to have gone into development. Overall, it was a solid effort, but forgettable to many gamers; do you guys see the first Godfather game as a success? Did it lay the groundwork for what you're doing in the second game?
Hunter Smith: Well it’s kinda funny – when you make the game, you spend a lot of time worrying through all the things you didn’t get to or didn’t get quite the way you wanted, but at the end of the day, it’s the gamers who buy and play the game who decide. The feedback we got from them was they did like the game; in fact, in one of our key gamer surveys Godfather 1 received one of all time highest scores from gamers when asked if they wanted to play a sequel.
Taking into account feedback from gamers, reviewers, focus groups, etc.. Godfather 1 definitely laid the groundwork for the second game. That said, we know we didn’t hit on all cylinders and really wanted to focus on some key areas as we started on the sequel. We wanted to improve and leverage the areas gamers told us they liked - Blackhand action, territory acquisition vs opposing families, your story intersecting key moments of Godfather story - as well as address areas gamers said were not done as well such as canyon worlds and long commutes, or things that felt somewhat missing, like a greater sense of being more of a decision maker as you progressed.
And we went after each of these areas, with the biggest additional focus being on tying the gameplay closer to the experience of being the Don. This led into our major new feature, the Don’s View, and the tools that enable you to pull the strings this time around.
AG: With Robert Duvall on board reprising his role as Tom Hagen and taking a major part of becoming your character's mentor, it seems he'll be a pretty big part of The Godfather II. Beyond just Duvall, who else have you tapped to add authenticity to the whole thing?
HS: Tom Hagen’s role works in both the fictional thread and the strategy game; he acts as the Consigliore, as an advisor, but you, as the Don, still need to make the decisions. In addition, we have the likeness rights for most of the key characters that we wanted to bring to life in the game: Fredo Corleone, Hyman Roth, Senator Pat Geary, Frank Pentangeli as well as some of the opposition such as Tony and Carmine Rosato.
AG: Do you feel like the cast in The Godfather II does a better job than the first game did in making players feel like they're living the movie?
HS: Whenever you’re working with a well known property there’s a world of expectations around how the player will experience ‘the story’ in a different medium. Much like when the book was “turned into a movie” and their goal was to create the best experience for the film viewer, we have been focusing on creating a role to play in a game that would match the player’s ambitions/fantasies of this Corleone’s world of organized crime. When we talked to gamers, what they were most excited about, was being in the world where they called the shots, where they could make the Don-like choices of leading their family to success, of course, without giving up all the fun of the using the Blackhand themselves... In addition, we wanted to continue to build on one of the cornerstones of the game franchise which is to put the player in charge of his success in the game and to put him in the position to develop his character and “storyline’ by the choices he makes in the game.
The film is a wonderful experience; an experience delivered in a linear, controlled, movie telling format. However, our goal was not to make you feel like you’re “living the movie”. Our focus was to build a game inspired from the world of the Godfather, with over-arching game goals, mechanics and systems that intersect with that fiction, where you could participate in key moments from the Godfather II story but from a fresh “gameplay lens”, and, in all honesty, play with and interact with characters that are relevant to the goals and obstacles you’re working through as you’re trying to “win the game.” In our game that means capturing all the Organized Crime Rings, Fronts and defeating the other families, i.e. your job is to put the Corleone’s on top of the crime world.
