Jose Perez III: There is that old question, would you rather be invisible or would you rather fly? I think we’re answering with flight in this game.
The Dark Void was something that kind of organically fell into place. In the beginning when we were initially talking with Capcom, we had a guy with the grappling hook, he would get in planes, he would fly around and he jumped out in a parachute and he’d fight big robots.
Matt Brunner: I started out with a really solid foundation but we found ourselves at one point going, you know what, this just isn't cool enough.
Jim Deal: There’s something missing, you know something really big. We all went off, we thought about it and about a week later, Jose came back. He hadn’t slept, you know, he’s scribbled it on the white board showing me stuff and he goes, here it is, it’s vertical combat.
Jose Perez III: You know, on a horizontal surface I'm in cover and if I stand up and get off that cover I'm standing up and I can run around it. On a vertical surface, when you're moving up and you're fighting, you can't stand up and in fact if you try to, you're going to fall until your death.
Morgan Gray: So no longer you able just to hunker down completely safe while you reload and the enemy is waiting for you to come to them. Now you're holding on with one hand and you're scaling up vertical surfaces and you scaling down. You feel like there's a 360-degree combat sphere because we’re looking up, down, to the side, behind you, over your shoulders, get aim for targets so suddenly you feel like you're in the center of this chaotic mess.
Matt Brunner: Vertical combat started to stretch the whole project in the ways that we never anticipated. The rocket pack followed afterwards. We did redesigns in the environment from scratch to support it all. It all fell into place when we got those new ideas.
The jetpack is not perfect and that’s one reason why it’s awesome. There's almost a sense of being and just barely in control with this jetpack, in other words it feels like you’ve just strapped a 30-pound rocket to your back and when you hit the Go button, there is that moment of chaos where your arms and legs are flailing and you—you take off.
Jose Perez III: When I was a kid I used be on rope swings a lot and that was kind of fun. There's always that moment where right up until you get off the rope swings is that—you know you have that moment where your stomach kind of drops out. I think that’s a fun feeling and hopefully we can capture some of that in here.
Keiji Inafune: It’s a very exciting game. It’s a world of adventure. People can't actually fly. But Dark Void conveys the sensation of actually flying, chasing, and dogfighting.
Jose Perez III: If you played some of the previous games that a lot of people at Air Tight have worked on like Crimson Skies, you have a really good idea for what our flight mechanics are going to be like and that’s accessible, a little arcadey. When you hit that button you take off, we want it to feel like, okay cool I get it I know how to fly this thing.
Matt Brunner: This is the game where we want you to just have a blast either on foot or flying.
Keiji Inafune: The exciting part of Dark Void is that you are able to steal items from your enemies, steal technology. And fly using the tools and equipment you pick up. Your abilities develop as you go through the game as well.
Matt Brunner: The jetpack, when you first get it, it starts off sort of diminutive, it’s a hover pack, which in of itself is pretty awesome because that leads into the ability to do a lot of jumps around the battlefield, get in the air and do simple flanking.
Jose Perez III: And then through the upgrades you actually get to even add more onto—your rocket pack becomes a little more durable, you get a little more boost and eventually you get guns on it.
Jim Deal: And so what we’re trying to do is give the player a number of different experiences instead of just one over and over.
Jose Perez III: You’ve got you guns, you're heading cover, you're blind firing.
Matt Brunner: And just start hang and taking him out, so you could be on foot on sometimes, you can be doing vertical.
Jose Perez III: You're zipping around through all these different canyon areas, eventually you’re jumping on the UFOs, running around the outside of it.
Morgan Gray: You're sort of ducking and weaving from the pilot.
Jose Perez III: Trying to piss off the robotic guy inside so he opens up his hatch, jumping in there.
Morgan Gray: Expose the pilot, bust him in the head.
Jose Perez III: And then you're taking over that UFO in a very kind of Crimson Skies way, using that UFO to blow up all these other vehicles.
Matt Brunner: And suddenly I'm going, holy crap!
Morgan Gray: Its definitely visual and any way you look at it, it’s way more fun to shoot someone on the head at pointblank than it is to sort of twiddle away from long range so it’s nice to bring ground combat into the air in that way.
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