No this thread isn't going to be me stating so and so about so and so. Instead I've got an interview excerpt to share. Read the whole thing at the link if you wan't to know anything else about the game. I've bolded SSB direct references for those that can't read.
AusGamers: Hi Omar, thanks for your time with us today. Let’s start by you telling us what your role at SuperBot is about, and what brought you to Australia?
Omar Kendall: Sure, I’ll start at the beginning. My name is Omar Kendal, and I’m the Game Director on PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. A Game Director -- or at least, what I do -- is sort of... when I close my eyes, I have to have an idea of what the game is like, for the end-user experience; what it looks like, what are the sort of tactile feedbacks like; the compulsion lock (what keeps you playing?), and the things that compel you to know more about the game.
I sort of have to have all of that in my head, and I work with all the individual departments --both creative and production-- and steer the team in that direction. It’s working with designers, and artists, and programmers, to make sure that they’re all on the same page, moving toward the same plan.
And that plan currently, is PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. You’ve got these two halves of it: it’s a celebration of all of these PlayStation characters, and these Universes, over all of the console iterations, and all of the great games that have contributed to that legacy, and it’s also a fun fighting game brawler, that you can get together with three buddies and play together on your couch.
I think there’s a great tradition of that sort of sitting together, and playing a game together, that sort of comes and goes, but it’s a game type that we really enjoy. Even before PlayStation All-Stars was a fighting game, that idea of four people getting together in the same room, and playing the game together was one of the foundational pillars of what the game would eventually be.
AusGamers: That was going to be my next question, which is ultimately, you mentioned the words celebration, and obviously you landed on a Battle Royale brawler type of game. What other iterations had it gone through before you reached that point?
Omar: When I came on to the company, it was right as they had decided they were going to make something with combat, with head-to-head as the central focus. I was definitely brought on for my expertise in that area. But before --and even the day I had set foot in the SuperBot (at that time Broodworks) office-- it was like this team-based, four vs four, capture the flag style game, where each of the characters was an archetype.
It was almost like you were making a new sport, where you had: if you imagine a football team, you have strikers, and you’ve got defenders. They had a similar approach to the character design, where there were certain characters that were really well suited to going after the flag, and there were certain characters that were well-suited toward defending the flag, and in between. It was actually a really interesting concept, and I would love to explore it again, and develop something like that. Because i think they were really onto something interesting.
There were all sorts of different gameplay styles. There was one sidescrolling adventure, where you were kind of stringing along narrative together, where different enemies would --and this is sort of where the foundation of the mash-up element of the game came from-- where you could take individual enemies from different PlayStation games, and combine them with different levels from different PlayStation games to create these all-new experience as a hero who goes through a mashed up level with mashed up characters in it, and based on who you’d chose to bring along on your adventure, it would play out in different ways in real time.
There were all sorts of different game ideas that were floated around, because really again, the foundation ideas were: let’s take all these cool PlayStation characters, and bring them together in one experience that you can play together.
AusGamers: Now you guys obviously aren’t the first to do a Battle Royale mash-up, and it’s not strictly a Nintendo concept persay, but they kind of did do it best. Are you allowed to mention that as inspiration?
Omar: Yeah. I think when we first knew we were going to start talking about the game, I think there was maybe some “oh, well find a way to act like, while that game exists --Smash Bros.-- never mention it by name”, and that just proved impractical, because it’s an unavoidable thing that we’re always going to want to talk about, and people are always going to want to draw comparisons.
From the SuperBot perspective, we’re just fans of these kinds of games. I think the reason why a four-player, 2D-style brawler sounded like a good idea to us, was because we’ve had such great experiences in games like Smash Bros. Even the idea to make a fighting game is because we like fighting games.
AusGamers: So “Newsflash: Sony plays Nintendo videogames” [laughs].
Omar: Exclusive: Confirmed! [laughs]
AusGamers: I guess a really good jumping off point for that is what did you guys learn from the experience that Nintendo had with that game? And what have you guys expanded upon, or left alone? What’s the differentiator?
Omar: Well, I think what we learned from Smash... and what I’ll say is what we really learned from fighting and brawling as a genre --it is something that I know, because this is my core genre; I love fighting games-- is that this head-to-head, mind-games, battling it out against your friends and enemies, is really fun. There’s something inherently fun --and this is something that existed long before videogames-- with testing your wits against other people, like chess, or any sort of head-to-head game where “I’m going to use my strategies, and techniques, and things that feel right to me, to employ my tools to victory”, and matching that against a rival, and seeing how that shakes out, is just inherently really fun.
And the more people you add, I think the more fun it gets. I think that’s the one thing that Smash got really right, is that: in a traditional one-on-one fighting game, it’s like a zero sum game; there’s always one winner, and there’s always one loser, and if you’re the guy losing all the time, maybe you’re not having so much fun.
But with more players, it’s not always just coming in first, sometimes it’s just not coming in last, sometimes it’s just getting that one really cool moment, where you got the upper-hand on your opponent, and I think that, for us, that’s what we tried to introduce with the Super system, and that’s really a big differentiating mechanic. Instead of the traditional health-bars --when you think about the Smash percentages, it is essentially a health-bar. We do away with health-bars, and instead, you’re fighting to accumulate this energy, this AP All-Star power, and this energy fuels your super attacks.
So it’s kind of like... again, you can see our sort of sports roots in it. You fight to get into a scoring opportunity. You fight to accumulate this energy to get to your supers, and then what once you have a super, you have to figure out a way to land it, in a way that’s successfully going to kill opponents and score points.
So there’s these rising and falling actions, based on which character is getting energy, or getting close to a super, and where he is on the screen, and whether he’s about to perform his super, and where I need to be mindful of my opponent in that situation so that I don’t get killed, and I can finish the match with the most points, or most kills.
It’s kind of what PlayStation All-Stars is really all about. And that central gameplay loop of getting the energy and performing the supers is really different. I think it’s not something that I think fighting games have... while I think supers, and meter management, and all that stuff has existed in fighting games, it hasn’t quite been packaged this way before.
http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3249354
