2 Days 2 Vegas

Monday at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007 we met up with Edwin Loo, the “head monkey” at Steel Monkey Ltd., to talk about their current project, 2 Days 2 Vegas. We came away from the meeting thoroughly impressed with the game, and looking forward to the game when it debuts in 2008.

2 Days 2 Vegas is a third person game somewhere between a movie, and an action/adventure game, rolled into a thrilling story line. Although Steel Monkey is still relatively tight lipped about specifics, they gave us in an exclusive interview with the only new information on the game since 2005. Why the lack of press on the game? He told us that they purposely had tried to stay under the radar with this game.

The company, he said, is adamant about keeping creative control. So adamant that he noted they have refused to seek out a publisher until they have a completely finished game. The philosophy, he explained, is that as soon as you create media hype for the content or story itself, you lose creative control and it becomes harder to create a good game. The focus, he maintained, is on the gamer first.

The game takes place in America where the main character, Vinny, must travel from New York to Las Vegas in two days. The game takes you across America, through cities and country to complete your as-of-yet unnamed objective. The goal, Loo said, was to create a completely immersive experience – one that he said was far more immersive than GTA.

The game is inspired by the emotional and psychological impact movies have on people he said, noting that although the game was going to be much stronger on story and character than GTA, gamers would inevitably compare the two due to the open ended sets which 2 Days utilizes.

He wasn’t able to give us specifics on the places we would be able to visit, but when asked about the level of detail, he told us that the game had several cities on the route in the game fully scaled and modeled so that the entire experience would be true to driving the city. He went on to say that several of the out of city areas would hopefully carry that attention to detail, from fields in the plains to mountains in the Rockies. They wouldn’t know how much detail they would be able to have in the natural settings until the polish stage.

The studio, Steel Monkey Limited, is based in Canada, and employs a team of 58. They have been working on the game for almost two and a half years now Loo said, and they have already started the initial stages of the sequel.

The company decided early on to do the entire game in an in-house engine – an engine which Loo says will enjoy many of the technologies we see in big development engines, such as global lighting and HDR lighting.

The in-house nature, he explained, allowed them to do some original and amazing things that they felt helped the immersive feel of the game. One of the things they are working on right now is a “garbage generator”, a program that is supposed to create trash and clutter in the city streets. When you don’t wash your windows, they get dusty.

The attention to detail is absolutely remarkable. “Wait till you see Vegas,” Loo said excitedly. When we asked about the constant construction in Vegas, and how it would change the city in real life versus the city in game, Loo revealed that he had been to Vegas several times and as recently as last month to look over the new construction projects which would have to become game assets for them.

“You know the Stardust?” he asked us. “They’re taking it down, so that’s an asset we had that we won’t be able to use.”

With so much attention to detail, we asked what they thought of Blu-Ray as a distribution media. He responded, “Blu-Ray solves a lot of our problems [with fitting everything on disk].” The assets, he explained don’t come cheaply.

Be looking for this game to be a sleeper hit sometime in 2008. It looks absolutely fantastic, and if the gameplay receives the same attention that in-game detail has, it will be nothing short of a system seller.

http://www.psu.com/node/8467