Hayes interview: Bayonetta 2 and Vanquish 2 ??

[Sega Stylista]

No surprise, still...

As you said, you have to be commercially minded with these things but... hopeful of a Vanquish sequel in the future?

Absolutely, yeah, yeah, definitely. I think with Vanquish - because it's coming from a Platinum Games stable - we're pretty optimistic. Bayonetta set a fantastic benchmark in terms of quality.(hint??? duh?)

Obviously there's failure underneath, too - so the good news is whilst Vanquish isn't shown at a Sony or Microsoft E3 show, if we can get enough interest with it, get it to a certain level of sales, then we sequelise it.

Then we start having the confidence to put more money in it and be a bit more experimental and sort of be a bigger production. I think where we're positioned right now with Vanquish is correct, and if we're getting some underground praise for it, that will position us quite nicely.

more. . .
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar ... ?id=255367
very interesting interview; talks about sales strategy against the mega sellers (Halo, Gears) while dealing with budget limitations. 3DS, Kinect, Move, etc.

[Deefy]

Yes very interesting interview, but i expect by SEGA "BIG TITLES" primarily developed in-house in japan and possibly with some classics sequels(actually dream not reality)

[Sharky]

I suspect one of the big titles will be Creative Assemblys new console game in the works.

[Alex Supersonic]

I suspect one of the big titles will be Creative Assemblys new console game in the works.

Same for me, maybe a sequel to Viking.

[Sharky]

Probably something along the lines of Viking I assume.

But I would kill for more Bayonetta that game is just all kinds of fun.

[Deefy]

I suspect one of the big titles will be Creative Assemblys new console game in the works.

Yes I also agree ...

maybe a sequel to Viking.

...but in a recent interview at gamesindustry.biz , Tim Heaton, the studio director, stated that the console team has a big project in the works but that is not a Total War spin-off like Spartan and (to a lesser extent) Viking.

[Sharky]

...but in a recent interview at gamesindustry.biz , Tim Heaton, the studio director, stated that the console team has a big project in the works but that is not a Total War spin-off like Spartan and (to a lesser extent) Viking.

That would be a shame; Viking had a lot of potential to be really awesome... I was hoping they would take all the criticism of Viking and us it to make a really fantastic game in the same style.

I really like the whole take back your land from the enemy arm set up, I love the big battles I liked most things about the game but it lacked variation... in almost every aspect. Enemies, movies, weapons, landscapes... Scope needed to be far bigger.

Do you have a link to this interview?

[Deefy]

Yes a really shame, I love Viking  :cry:

the link:http://http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/creative-lead-interview


To read the interview(3 pages) a registration is required.

[Sharky]

There isnt anybody around that alrready a member and could do a sneaky copy paste job is there? Been trying to sign up but their log in is weird and confusing.

[Happy Cat]

here you go =P lazy bastards

Creative Assembly's last game, Napoleon: Total War, concerned itself with the military adventures of a man who, despite his small stature, towered over Europe like a colossus. Ironic, then, that the studio should find itself faced with precisely the opposite problem.

Despite selling around 10 million games in the past decade, amounting to a healthy quarter-billion dollars of revenue, the company has an oddly low profile - so much so that when studio boss Tim Heaton moved there from Electronic Arts, "even though it was only twenty miles up the road, some of my peers didn't even know where Creative Assembly was based."

Where it's based, as it happens, is the sleepy town of Horsham - inside what Heaton describes as the industry's "Golden Triangle" of London, Guildford and Brighton, and rated, I'm proudly informed, as the second best place to live in the entire United Kingdom. Yet even here, the residents don't know what's on their doorstep - when Creative Assembly won a BAFTA for its work on Total War, the local newspaper was astonished by the firm's very existence.

The firm's low profile, Heaton says, "comes from the nature of making big strategy games - the culture is to put your head down and work until it's done." Moreover, if the firm's name isn't well known, the brand it has created, Total War, has immense recognition - both among consumers and among publishers. Following months of rumours about possible bids for the firm, Sega acquired the studio in early 2005, and now publishes both the Total War franchise and Creative Assembly's other titles.

Heaton's newfound concern for building the studio's profile is strongly linked to those "other titles". Since the Sega acquisition, Creative Assembly has widened its focus, establishing a console team which has operated alongside the Total War team to create titles such as Spartan: Total Warrior and Viking: Total Warrior. Although moderately well-received, these titles never reached the heights of the Total War franchise - meaning, in Heaton's own words, that one of his first tasks was to "figure out what we wanted to do with the console team".

What they wanted to do, it transpires, was to invest. Over the past year the company has worked on its console technology and explored game ideas which would move the team away from the Total War spinoffs on which it had cut its teeth. Finally, the studio brought a demo to Sega - "probably the best early demo I've seen in 15 years," Heaton claims, a statement given some weight by his background at EA Partners - and had their project green-lit, signalling that it was time to ramp up the firm's console team.

"The next phase, for us, is to have two teams that are totally separate," says Heaton. "That's pretty exciting - it's also nice to be the only internally-owned Sega studio in the West that's doing a console game. Sega have had good and bad experiences with their external developers, and I think they're at a time when they want to double down on their key franchises - Sonic, Total War, and so on. So it's great to see them investing in console work here."

"I know for a fact that they want to invest in a team and tech that they can take to the next generation as well," he continues. "Our aim is certainly to spend time getting the right team together and then, while this game will be for this generation - almost certainly 360 and PS3, unless we have some surprises along the way - to move them on to the next generation."

What exactly the game will be remains a major secret at this stage, with Heaton refusing to be drawn even on whether it's existing or original IP. He's clearly excited, however, by the scale of the project, describing Sega's investment as being substantial, both in terms of time and money.

"They've looked at this studio and decided that it's where they need to invest," he says. "They want quality, and they've been working with some external parties who couldn't deliver that - whereas Total War is a fantastic example of that kind of quality."

"You know, quality is talked about as if it's either a sheen that you put on at some point, or some kind of magic dust that just happens because you say it enough... Actually, it's just bloody hard work, and it's about looking at every new job application you get and asking whether this person can add quality to the team - not if he's fast, or if he's just competent, but if he does quality work. Because of that, Sega are happy to put huge amounts of investment into us - because at the end of the day, a 90 per cent Metacritic rating is what's going to make the difference to Sega's bottom line."

With the new console project presently at the prototyping stage - which will last through until early next year - the company is now busy recruiting to bring the team up to size. "We're at 137 people at the moment," Heaton says, "and still growing. We've moved premises pretty recently, and we've got space in this building to grow - we could reach 200. We're doing a few bits of recruitment for Total War, as needs must, but it's mostly for the console team - that's across the board, in art, programming, design, the whole lot."

Recruitment, however, is proving a challenge - a challenge which Heaton believes is faced by all game developers in the UK, to some degree. "It's tough," he acknowledges. "It's always tough to get the best people. We're recruiting worldwide - we're spending huge amounts of time on visas and whatever, to get people over here. Out of the last ten candidates that we've either brought in or made offers to, half of them are from outside the UK."

Like many major employers in the sector, Creative Assembly seems frustrated by the rise of specialist game development degrees which fail to meet its requirements. "We definitely feel that the gaming degrees are just too broad," Heaton says. "We're just not seeing strong applicants from the specialist degrees - instead, we tend to go after engineering degrees, or whatever is more appropriate, more direct."

In order to counteract that problem - and perhaps, in part, to try to get to quality candidates before they can be lured abroad to Canada or elsewhere - the company has established relationships with universities across London and the South East. Staff members, often graduates of the universities involved, are sent out to give talks, and an internship program has been established which the company may expand if it proves to be successful.

"We have a coterie of universities that we talk to on a regular basis, and we send people out to them," confirms Heaton. "It's a transition, I think - in the past, talking to the public was seen as giving away secrets, but nowadays we know that we need to share much more than we used to, through talks at universities and so on."

There are bright spots on the recruitment front, too. Heaton says that they've seen a number of applications from experienced British staff presently working abroad who want to return to the UK, suggesting that a reversal of the "brain drain" of previous years is possible. Moreover, there's no doubt that the sector is now capable of attracting a far higher class of graduate.

"Employers like Google and so on are absolutely the people that we're competing with for staff," Heaton says, going on to argue that the industry as a whole needs to raise its profile as an employer. "Sometimes it's good, away from the specialist degrees, to just turn up and let people know that there are careers out here in games. Huge numbers of these people are interested in games - they just need to be reminded that there's an industry here."

That, Heaton says, is a challenge for the wider industry - one that leads into a much broader debate around the extent of the work being done by publishers, developers, trade bodies and the media alike to champion games as a British success story. For Creative Assembly, the immediate challenges are more down to earth. "We're just the factory here," Heaton says with a grin. "We're creating games." With the Total War team hard at work on the eagerly anticipated Shogun 2, and the firm's console team continuing to take shape, Creative Assembly's factory looks set to be a lynchpin of Sega's Western strategy for years to come.

Tim Heaton is head of the Creative Assembly studio. Interview by Rob Fahey.

[Sharky]

That was hot and steamy... I liked every second of it.