hile it's clear that PAIN isn't exactly the most high-brow gaming experience out there, what might surprise nonplayers is just how deep the game actually is. For a game that centers around flinging a hapless character into an environment and watching him flop around for a few seconds, there's plenty to see and do. The downloadable PS3 game is getting a new environment soon, so what better time to chat with Senior Producer Travis Williams and learn more about the update. What can players expect to see in the Amusement Park? How about longer runs, more interactive environments and an all-new minigame, darts? Before that hits, players will get an update that includes a much-needed video editor, which will allow users to upload their greatest hits (and smashes) onto YouTube. Read on for more details!
Game Informer: The Amusement Park is coming! Finally!
Travis Williams: [Laughs] That’s kind of the inside joke here now. Every time my director sees me he’s like, “Ship it. Ship it.” So we’re getting very, very close.
GI: Do you regret teasing players about it for so long now? Was it a diabolical move on your part?
Williams: No. It’s really not a diabolical move. [laughs] I think you’re giving me far too much credit. If my evil was that premeditated, believe me, I’d be a lot better at it. Essentially what took us so long is that there were a lot of initiatives before we actually got the Amusement Park out. The first and foremost one is that we wanted to make PAIN global, so that meant we had to go to Europe to make sure that Europe got everything it needed. In addition to that, we had to go to Asia and do the same thing. We’re still not shipped in Japan yet, but that’s coming very soon. At first, it was, “OK, get everyone on the PlayStation Network PAIN-enabled,” so to speak. Then after that, we started testing out essentially our process. And that’s why you got to see Free mode, and after you got Free mode, here are some more additions to the normal things. Everything we did, those things weren’t charged at all, and really what we were trying to do was make sure that when we started rolling out things that you pay for it would be as bug and error free as possible. And, in addition to that, we paused a little bit just to give people who play PAIN enough time to give some either positive or negative feedback so we could fix certain things. So if you actually go on our Web site and look at the interaction between the developer—myself and my associate producer, Jason—on PAIN, we’re listening to what people say so that when we release this next one it’s what people wanted and not just what we wanted.
GI: Talking about the European market, Germany is pretty strict regarding rag-doll characters and what is and isn’t allowed. Did you have to make any changes to the core game to accommodate those regulations, or was it OK because nobody dies in PAIN?
Williams: No, not necessarily. One of the prime tenets in PAIN was to make sure that everything was funny. When it came to violence, we still wanted you to wince, but at the same time we wanted you to wince and it would be funny. If there’s blood or anything of that nature, it just becomes mean and unfunny. So that wasn’t really cool. If we had to pick a genre of PAIN’s bodily harm, it’s more like a Bugs Bunny or a Road Runner or a Tom and Jerry kind of pain more than the pain you would see in Mortal Kombat—because that’s graphic and it’s not funny. We really didn’t have to make any concessions there. I think if we had to reel it in any, it was just on our sophomoric humor.
GI: Any particular examples?
Williams: [Laughs] Let me tell you, I wish I could tell you some of the titles of some of the e-mails that I had to send, but I know that your magazine has millions of subscribers and there is no way I’m telling you. [laughs] There’s no way. I’d be in so much trouble. As far as the sophomoric humor is concerned, it loses something if it’s in your face, and so what we wanted to do is have the “nudge, nudge” humor, like, “Do you get it?” If you didn’t have to nudge anyone to say, “Do you get it?” or say, “That looks like…” or “That reminds me of…” then it’s not really PAIN, in our opinion.
GI: Do you think most people have figured out what PAIN is all about? It’s a dumb question, but at the same time when you talk about the game with people who write about games, there’s kind of a sense that people enjoy showing off how much they don’t like to have fun.
Williams: That’s an interesting question. What I can tell you is that sort of characterization is something that was weighing on ourselves as well. It took us a while to learn what PAIN was, and we are learning with our customers. They tell us what they like to do, we show them what we like to do, and then somewhere in the middle is where all our game modes come from. That’s especially what we’re doing with this new area that’s coming out with the Amusement Park called PAIN Labs. In the past at least, it took us too long to get an idea in front of people and say, “Do you think this is fun? I think this is fun, but do you think this is fun?” What we’re able to do with PAIN Labs is that every week we’re going to come with a new kind of construct and give it to people and see if they like it. And then if they like it, then we can apply game rules to it. We always get these requests from people—“You know what I like to do in PAIN? This, this and this.” And we go, “Huh, that’s interesting.” But we don’t want you to wait five of six months for that to happen, because everyone else might go, “That’s stupid.”
What we want to do is we want to get those requests, take it to our designers, have our designers spend a few hours making something that tests that theory, and if everyone goes, “Yo, that’s really, really cool!” Then we say, “Great, now we can make a game about that.” So, that’s really the wash, rinse, repeat that’s going on in PAIN that used to happen internally. Now that we have the PAIN Labs feature that’s rolling out with the Amusement Park, it can happen externally, too, and then all the modes that people either pay for or get for free are going to be what they suggested as things they like, and everyone’s part of that creative process.
GI: So as it stands now, will the PAIN Labs content exist out of the framework of the main game? Will players be able to earn trophies or points, or will there be leaderboards associated with that content?
Williams: What we’ll try to assess is how easy or how hard that is. The trophies we have now, we know how hard those are, but we don’t know how hard anything new is. We don’t want to attach any trophies or any awards to things that are sort of in the experimental phase, but as soon as those things become indoctrinated into PAIN, then we’ll start to incorporate those things into it.