Triumph Studio’s Creative Director Lennart Sas speaks to Xboxer360.com!

Triumph Studios are the devs behind Codemasters cult underground hit of 2007 Overlord, and the forthcoming Overlord II, due 26th June 2009. During a recent Press Event, I managed to catch up with Lennart and ask him a few Overlordy questions and his thoughts on Project Natal and Sony’s alleged move into the Motion Controller market.

Q: What new Features are there to entice owners of the original Overlord to this title?

Lennart: I think for Overlord 2, we just took a look at what made Overlord 1 cool and what people appreciated and worked with that, rather than attempt to please any naysayers. The core of the game is the Minions, so we looked at what we could make the Minions do and expanded that. We tried to make the core control of those Minions more fluid, so they can now ride mounts, use siege machines, and they’re smarter. Their core abilities have improved as well – so you can use the brown minions to stop an enemy in its tracks then use the other minions, or the Overlord himself, to take them out. If you play it, especially in the later levels, you can see that there are more tactics. We also made the game bigger and more epic, because many people felt with the first game, although you played the evil Overlord, many of the skirmishes were quite small – fighting a couple of hobbits or killing a few dwarves. This time we’ve made larger confrontations with big formations of enemies, a longer view distance and sweeping battles. That has been our goal.

Q: Was the inclusion of the map based on the criticism of the previous game?

Lennart: Absolutely. That was our fault that we didn’t include it, because we know the game so well and also it didn’t pop up during the bug testing – maybe they were just trying to be nice or something [laughs]. What really happens with games nowadays is that the tolerance level for frustration or failure has diminished a lot. You can see that with Nintendo now in the new Wii version of Mario Bros, which adds demo play so you can see “oh I need to play it like that”. So the trend in the industry, which we underestimated, is that people just want to have a great experience and any little thing that sets them back or makes them backtrack, or if they die and get placed back ten minutes – a growing number of people don’t have a tolerance for that. For example in shooters, now when you get shot you only get placed ten seconds back. Some of the more hardcore people don’t have a problem with how it was. Like I used to play a lot of RTS games and there came a point where you thought “I’m going to lose” but you still kept playing for two hours. But now I’m also more into the action games, because you have so little time, you want the best experience from the time you invest in it.

Q: Why do you think humour in video games is still not that used compared to film?

Lennart: I think that you have to approach humour in a different way. Some of the games that tried to do humour before, it felt forced. Because they’d try and perform a joke on screen and it would be like “Stop playing, you’re supposed to laugh now”. I think Overlord’s humour is more integrated into the entire experience; it’s in the entire tone of the game, and its look, and the voice acting. It’s more about the situations we create that the humour comes from rather than pausing the game and saying “oh, now there is a joke.” Sometimes we do that, but it’s consistent. So a character acts a certain way constantly rather than in American style comedy. The Lucas Arts games were very funny, but other than those there haven’t been many good humorous games I think.

Q: What would you say your reference points for the game are aesthetically? Is there anything coming in from outside games – like visual arts and film?

Lennart: Yeah we’ve been influenced by things like Pixar movies, but also more obscure artists, when it comes to things like exploring the grotesque. We have a rule that whenever we introduce a new character we want the player to say: “what the fuck is that!” So we have these ‘what the fuck’ moments. Like rather than doing a cute fairy, we have a big thing flying around like a bumblebee with big breasts squidging around like that. We want people to say now that’s something different.

Q: Do you have any plans for further franchise expansion?

Lennart: I can’t really say anything about that. It depends on what the game does. I think creatively there’s still a lot of room there, because although we could use a combination of existing factors, we could still very much come up with a new game, because it’s not locked into one genre. With many other games they find one issue – like I can shoot lightning from my arm – and that’s the key thing, but if you go left or right you’re stuck already. But with Overlord the entire concept can be spun in different directions both thematically and in terms of gameplay. All we have to do is destroy the Overlord’s empire at the end of every game, so it starts a new cycle of destruction!

Q: Is there anything you’re particularly proud of in this game?

Lennart: I think one of the key aspects of the game is the experience of the dark humour. We’ve found our own kind of narrative style and atmosphere in the game, that’s a lot sharper than in Overlord 1. That’s the thing I’m most proud of.

Q: How important is it for you to release a demo of the game before hand?

Lennart: I think it’s very important, especially when you are a smaller publisher or development team, because you need to come clean with the people and say this is the game – try before you buy, and if it whets your appetite then great. So for us demos are a very important marketing instrument.

Q: Who’s idea was it to make 3 games over the platforms and how difficult was it to pitch?

Lennart: When we started to make Overlord 2 the question came up, especially two years ago when the Wii sales went sky high at least in installer base. Of course immediately people said “ok the Wii remote is a bit like sceptre”. It’s not precise enough for a shooter, but for sending Minions around it seemed like a very logical match. So that’s what we started investigating, but it was clear that we wouldn’t be able to make all of these games, and a direct port wouldn’t work. So we said ok its cool that Codemasters want to do that, but we wont be able to that internally, because they need to be unique games specifically designed for those platforms. So that’s when Climax came in and they’ve done a great job with both these games.

Q: So it was Codemasters idea?

Lennart: No actually, we pitched it. Back then the IP was owned by Triumph, so we wanted to talk about a sequel but they wanted to acquire the IP, because the game was expensive and if they needed to invest more they had to own it. But we approached them and showed them you can do this with it or that with it, which was good for us because it got more use out of the IP. I think it’s a logical match for those platforms, but we will have to see how they do, because we all know how poorly third party games are doing on them, which is a real shame. For the DS its piracy and for the Wii it seems to be the target audience; there is an attach rate of like 1.5 for the console I think. Hopefully the Mario and Zelda fans will say: “hey, this is the game that I want to play” – there are too few of them now. I think the Wii could be such a good platform for gamer’s games so I hope that people embrace Dark Legend.

Q: What are your thoughts on Project Natal for the 360 – are you looking to use that in the future?

Lennart: Yeah it looks great. But the way Microsoft is pitching it right now is to non-core gamers, but I think it can definitely be an extra layer to games that are built around a regular controller. I like games where I can walk around in a virtual environment, but the core interface for that is that you need something to navigate with.  I hope that this is not the only future for games – I hope that the games we love can exist next to this new thing and hopefully be stronger, as it adds a new level of immersion with it.

Q: What about Sony’s new device, which they say will be pitched at hardcore gamers?

Lennart: Yeah, I think with the Sony controller the advantage of that is accuracy. It’s impressive what I saw in those demos. I don’t have a dev kit for it so I know as much as you, but it looks really powerful in terms of sensing the depth and the rotation – basically all of the stuff we thought that the Wii would do, it appears, for its presentation, to be doing. But of course we need to have it in hand to see how to use it. As a core gamer myself I don’t I will be using a lot of these motion devices. When I’m tired I just want to flop out in front of the TV and when I’m a little bit tired I want to be sitting in front of my video games like this [mimes holding joypad] and only in very specific moments I want to go jumping in front of my TV. But it’s a great addition, and hopefully it will draw in a lot of new gamers as well as providing an extra level of immersion for core gamers as well.

Q: I guess the problem is that the Wii controller was intrinsic to the console from the start, whereas these are going to be released as Peripherals?

Lennart: What they might do is rebrand the consoles with this in mind. So instead of releasing a 360 Peripheral, they might package it up with an Xbox and perhaps give it a redesign and a new name. But it doesn’t need to have new architecture or a chip set. It could even be their new system. Microsoft wants to dominate the living room – it doesn’t mean just games but TV, streaming video – everything. I think that little box could be the core of that move.

Q: Co-op and multiplayer – is that going to play a bigger part of the game?

Lennart: Well we still have the party type multi-player games for people to have a laugh with, either on the couch or the internet. But you know the theme of Overlord doesn’t really work well with co-op – because the idea of two overlords working together just doesn’t work.