Part II of the Turok interview

Josh Holmes, vice president of
Propaganda Games

Dino-mite! Propaganda’s Josh Holmes on Turok, Canada and more – Part I

Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Canada’s very own Josh Holmes, vice president of Propaganda Games in Vancouver. Josh is a fascinating guy to talk with ... whether the topic is the beautiful city of Vancouver (his hometown!), or bloodthirsty dinosaurs. Speaking of which, feast your eyes on five, all-new, exclusive screenshots from Turok.

Originally a 1950’s comic book, Turok is no stranger to video games – his story has been told across six games from Acclaim from 1997-2002. He’s been M.I.A. for the past six years, and he makes a grand comeback this year in an all-new, completely-reimagined Turok game from Vancouver-based Propaganda Games (published by Touchstone.)

-- On the Turok franchise --

Jade: The Turok franchise has had its ups and downs – do you think the time is right for Turok to stage a comeback?

Josh Holmes, Propaganda Games: I do. I think that it’s been a sufficient period between the last Turok game and the release of Turok on Xbox 360, and people are hungry to return to a prehistoric world and experience surviving dinosaurs and other crazy creatures.

What’s really cool about this is that next-gen consoles give us the power to do things we couldn’t do in the past, particularly around the AI systems that drive our game. And then, of course, the spectacular graphical prowess of these consoles lets us bring creatures and environments to life in a way that’s never been seen before. So, I think it’s absolutely time for another Turok and I think people have been looking forward to a good Turok game for a long time now.

Jade: Is this a spiritual sequel to past Turok games?

Josh: We look at it as a spiritual sequel to the first game, certainly. And we also took a lot of inspiration from the second game.

When we looked at the series and the kind of path that it took over the course of the franchise, from our perspective, it kind of lost its way with the last couple of games. It got to be a little too much “me too” and pushing things too far, in terms of how crazy and wild they took the sci-fi elements. Pushing the fantasy or more fantastical elements to a point where it just became a little bit ridiculous.

So what we wanted to do was strip away a lot of the baggage that came with a continuation of the storyline that existed in the last game, and really develop what we have termed as a “spiritual successor” to the original games. And get back to the things that people loved about those games and the experience that they offered – of surviving in an outdoor, prehistoric environment and engaging dinosaurs in close, intimate combat, and all the terrifying experiences.

-- On Turok for Xbox 360 --

Jade: What’s your Turok game all about?

Josh: The game is set a couple hundred years in the future. It centres around a military mission gone wrong, when Joseph Turok is brought in to track down and capture his former mentor, who is this bad guy named Roland Kane.

When they track Kane down to this planet, their ship is shot down, and they find themselves stranded on this prehistoric planet filled with creatures and dinosaurs and all kinds of other things. Basically, the mission becomes – survive and escape at all costs.

When you look at the game in comparison with any other shooter that’s out on the market, the thing that really sets it apart is the dinosaurs. What we’ve tried to do with the game, through use of a completely dynamic AI systems, is to create a triangle of conflict between Turok and his human enemies, Turok and the creatures on the planet, and also a conflict between the human enemies and the dinosaurs. You can really use that to your advantage – to get your enemy in the dinosaurs to attack your other enemy in the humans, and vice versa. And, because of the dynamic AI systems, every time you play the game, it plays a little differently.

We’re really trying to give players the freedom of choice. When someone comes into a given scenario, it’s not a completely scripted, linear, one-way approach. We’ve given people the power of stealth, with quiet kill weapons like the knife and the bow, so you can choose when you go into a situation to approach it in a more stealthy and quiet fashion, if that’s the type of player that you are, or you can just go guns-ablazing and start shooting everything that moves.  It’s really up to you. And I think the addition of the dinosaurs becomes a wild card in any fight. It always adds that element of the unexpected. Because you could be in a shootout with a group of human opponents, but when a pack of raptors comes in hunting for food, it completely changes the dynamic in the entire fight. Everyone’s now in a mad scramble to avoid being eaten, and you can use dino-luring to get the dinos to attack your enemies. It becomes this really rich experience ... on the single player side that’s phenomenal, but then when you translate that over into multiplayer, and now in every engagement you have this third neutral party in the dinosaurs, that kind of mixes it up with everybody. It’s just a completely different experience.

Jade: I love that the dinos actually have their own AI. How much of the dinosaur interaction is actually scripted?

Josh: When we first bring a particular type of dinosaur into an area, we’ll do a dramatic introduction of that dinosaur. But beyond that, we just have the dinos in the environment. They’re alive, so to speak, and they’re making their own decisions.

It’s really cool because it plays differently every time, but it’s also kind of amusing because we’ve seen behaviours emerge as a result of the dynamic AI interaction that we never planned for. We’ve seen stuff like where you’ve got a raptor that’s defending its nest, and you have another dino that comes too close into its territory and the two just randomly start fighting. They get into a territorial struggle over protection of that nest and that’s something that the level designers never planned for, it just emerged from the AI behaviours that have been coded into all of the creatures.

Jade: As with any AI, you can have some weird stuff turn up that you didn’t expect. Do you imagine that there are going to be interesting AI stories down the line after gamers have put in 1000s of hours of gameplay?

Josh: Totally, and I think there’re a lot of strategies in the game that have emerged naturally. Here’s one that just came out through play: We have a gun in the game called the Sticky Bomb Gun, and it basically allows you to affix an explosive onto whatever you shoot with it. Then by pressing the trigger a second time you can detonate that. Well, some of the guys that were play testing the game realized that you could stick a Sticky Bomb onto one of the raptors, and then lure the raptors to attack your enemies. And they used this in both single-player and multiplayer to create a sort of suicide bomber in the form of a raptor and send that into blow up groups of enemies. It was a really, really cool strategy that kind of emerged out of using the different tools we give the player, and the dynamic AI systems.

Jade: Those dinosaurs look awesome in the game – did you aim for them to be as “realistic” as possible?

Josh: We went through a long process on the dinos. We did a lot of research. We started off doing traditional, academic research on what we know of the behaviours and history of dinos on the planet. From there, we went and did pop-culture reference gathering, where we looked at movies like “Jurassic Park.” But we really wanted to make our dinos feel different.

I think people have been dulled to the impact of what a dinosaur would be if you actually came face-to-face with one. I mean, coming face-to-face with a raptor would have to be one of the most terrifying encounters you can imagine. But because people have seen so much of dinosaurs, either in the museum or on TV, we knew we had to create something that felt really new, so that it would have that initial impact and that people would have the reaction that we wanted – of fear. So the art team started to infuse the dino designs with inspiration from horror films like “28 Days Later” or the remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” and really tried to get that kind of bloodthirsty look and feel to the dinos. So every dino that you run into kind of looks like it has a history; its skin’s been scratched and scraped in different encounters, it’s diseased and bleeding from trying to survive in this hazardous world. So each dino tells a story.

One of the most amazing triumphs for the team is how they brought the dinos to life in a really believable way. Again, trying to capture that intensity in the way that they move, that once they see blood they never stop. When you’re fighting a group of dinos, it escalates the intensity of the encounter; it just makes the whole thing that much scarier.

Jade: The Turok games have always been known for wacky weapons. What kinds of fun, funky weapons can we look forward to seeing?

Josh: One of the places that we decided to go with the game that’s a little bit different from the previous Turok games is that we decided to dial back a bit on the crazy weapon designs. We really wanted to ground the game in a sense of gritty realism. Which isn’t to say that it’s realistic, because, clearly, a game that takes place on a foreign planet full of dinosaurs is not going to be considered a realistic game, but we wanted to have a sort of believability to it. So, our weapon designs are not as crazy, over-the-top as some of the previous Turok games, but what we tried to do was make our weapon designs as inventive as possible and give players kind of new techniques and strategies that they can use to overcome their enemies by using them.

We’ve got stuff like a mini-gun that turns into an automatic turret that you can set up anywhere. So that allows you to kind of set up strategic cross-fires and things when you’re dealing with large groups of enemies. In addition to the Sticky Bomb Gun, you’ve got some more standard stuff like shotguns and sub-machine guns and sniper rifles.

What we’ve done is that every weapon in the game has both a primary and secondary fire. So in the case of the shotgun, your secondary is a flare launcher. Which can not only be used to light up an area, but can be used to distract dinos and get them to attack another enemy. For the RPG, we’ve got a secondary mode that switches to a fire-and-forget lock-on mode, which is really cool. The two signature weapons for the game are the knife and the bow.

Those are really things that defined Turok, and we knew from the get-go that we wanted those to be really, really special and different from anything anyone’s ever seen in a shooter before. For the bow, you can use it as a quiet kill weapon to silently take out enemies at a distance, and you can use it to pin guys to trees and to walls and stuff, which is always cool. But you can also switch it to secondary fire mode where you’re using tech arrows, which are explosive tip arrows. And you can use those to blow dinos into bloody pieces, which is really cool. And with the knife, what we wanted to do was take a weapon which has always been kind of the weakest part of a first-person shooter experience.

Jade: The “Oh no, I’m only left with the knife” panic moment...

Josh: Yeah, the oh-god-I’ve-just-got-a-knife-what-am-I-going-to-do. And it’s got that elite feel to it, like in a game like Counter-Strike. If you can take a guy out with the knife, you’re super elite. But at the same time, when you actually manage to do it, you’re just kind of seeing your guy swipe at air and then some dude crumples in front of you.

We wanted to take the power of the knife, and kind of amp it up, and then also pay it off in a gruesome way. The knife allows you to move really quickly and swiftly and silently through the world. When you get close to an enemy, the knife will rise into position. And then you can take out the enemy with a one-shot kill that pays off in this spectacular, cinematic way. Of course, getting close enough to someone that you can actually take them out with the knife is pretty difficult. So the balance is there in that you have to be very, very close, and it takes a second for the knife to come up. But if you can actually pull that off in the game, either in multiplayer or single-player, you get rewarded with this incredible kill. And that holds true for the dinos, too. If you’re attacking a dino that’s small enough – a mid-sized to small dinosaur – you can use the knife when you’re close quarters. For the larger dinos you actually have to stun them and get them on the ground first, and then jump on top of them and finish them off with your knife. 

Stay tuned for Part II, where Josh dishes on Turok’s Xbox LIVE Gameplay, his studio, Propaganda Games, and some of inspiration behind their new Turok game.