Dark Sector Interview

One of my favorite examples of this is a church that contains a huge boss which you can see in the far distance in a level. And as you work your way through that level you end up inside the church.

Talking about structure, though, Zelda has one open, free-roaming world with dungeons and smaller areas within that. Despite your described influences from Zelda games, we get the impression this game is structured with more separate levels that lead you through what is essentially a linear path. Is that the way it's working out?

Josh Austin: That is the way we're taking it. Zelda's great - it's a full world. But I remember, when Activision was focus-testing Call of Duty 2 in one particular level they had to put a wire down for players to follow because everyone kept getting lost - I saw that in a 'making of' feature.

So that's one of the things that we've learned - typically in these type of games you'll want more of an action-orientated setting. You're not going to have your hand held through it - there will be lots of multiplayer paths and things like that - but we want players to just get into it without having to worry about where they have to go next.

You've been working on this game for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 - how do the two consoles compare?

Josh Austin: To start with, it's very nice just being able to put code onto the 360's hard drive. The difference with PS3 is that we have to burn the build (as in the game code) to disc to play it. You can't boot the game off the PS3 hard drive. It's a small note but a significant point for us.

But we've actually been focusing more on the PS3. We did our initial press tours with the PS3 but it's just hard to get the PS3s right now (hence the demo was done on 360 hardware).

Thank you for you time.