GameSpot: The first thing I noticed during the demo was the art direction. What kind of research went into putting all those environments together and adapting those cultures?
VandenBerghe: I did vast, extensive research. It's essentially: each culture offers a very different problem, right? With the samurai culture, we have all this wonderful reference material, and we're also trying really hard to be sure that we have Japanese people on the team and we're collaborating with Ubisoft Japan to make sure that we don't make any of the obvious mistakes. It's really easy to screw that up. But we've got a lot of great guidance on it. What's weird is that with all of our cultures, we're not trying to be true to history exactly. We're trying to evoke your fantasy of history, right? We're trying to go, "See, this is what you wished it had been like." That's how we're trying to do it. It's wonderland. It's warrior wonderland.
It's not a historical game. It's not our world and it's not alt-history. It's like you've gone through the looking glass, and now we're on the other side, and now everything is rearranged. It's also just rearranged for warriors. We did the same thing for each of our cultures. We look at all the source stuff and we ask ourselves what makes those cultures iconic. What are the iconic shapes and the iconic stuff that makes us go, "Yeah, that's the thing!" And then we just work it, we just work it in the art, and we start to think about it in the context of our world story, which is this story about coming out of the darkness.
But it's very different for each culture, because of course the Vikings never made castles. That didn't happen, and so we were like, "Well, f*ck it, yes they did, here they go, this is what a Viking castle looks like." We have lots more examples to follow.
How about the armor and the classes you've chosen? Obviously, all of the gear is very intrinsic to that culture as we think of them. So when you were researching armor, when you were trying to decide on these are the armor archetypes that you want hooked up to this particular factions...
It's tough. The short answer is that we spent a lot of time thinking about what is it in the mind of our populace. Like, in our minds, what are the keys that trigger those associations? What are those things you see? We did a bunch of experimentation and analysis, and we found that each culture had aesthetic codes that, if you see those codes, only means knights, or a Viking, or a samurai. And we focused down, and we ended up having to come up with this bible about the things only Vikings do, and then we held ourselves to it--these things need to be here on this character to see them as a Viking. It's funny, you can take that character and you remove the fur, you're like, well, that could be a European. Put the fur on, you're like, that's a Viking! The same with the [Viking] horns. Even though the horns are made-up culture, still we expect to see them, so we see them.
We did a bunch of thinking and work around that, around what are those codes, and then being sure they didn't overlap. Because we really want the experience that you're seeing, where you go "Oh my gosh, that's the Viking in my mind."
When did you decide that you wanted to vary up the lineup?
Twenty-five years ago. [Laughs] And that's where we start, because this game isn't about us creating characters and imposing them on you. This game is about you. And so what kind of warrior are you, right? You can change the skin color of your Vikings, too. You want to have a black Viking? Knock yourself out. It's who are you. I want you to be able to be in that game. I play the female warden. That's my favorite character, because she's great. And it's always been, from day one, it's been the core value of the team, and we've been doing this for a while.
We have all our heroes now. We have 12 now. Each faction has four heroes each. In each faction there are two heroes that are dual gender, male or female, and then there's one hero that is male only and one hero that is female only, for all 12, so it's 50/50 all the way across.
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