The World is Not Enough Q&A

EA's second Bond-based video game is The World Is Not Enough - a game that ditches the over-the-shoulder 3rd person perspective of the last Bond game and returns to the first-person shooter roots of the Bond series. We recently got a chance to sit down with the game's Producer, Joel Wade, to get a better picture of what to expect from the PlayStation TWINE. Here's what we asked him:

GameSpot: What do you think best differentiates the experience of the PlayStation version of the game from the other versions?

Joel Wade: Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, so we try to customize each version to push the most out of the platform it's on. One of the great PlayStation strengths is our ability to pack as many high-res textures into the game as we can fit on a CD. For example, because we don't have to worry about storing everything on a cartridge, we can use enormous textures and load more from the CD as we need to. As a result, our game characters, like Bond and Christmas Jones, and our environments are dead-on because we can afford to lavish them with huge textures.

GameSpot: The last first-person shooter for the PlayStation - Medal of Honor - had some trouble with pop-up and the sniping didn't let you see any further into the distance. How will TWINE PS be different?

Wade: Black Ops [the developer] have really outdone themselves with their new rendering engine - they've managed to achieve pretty incredible draw distances without having the frame rate suffer at all. We're definitely pushing the limits of the hardware, and it's already looking gorgeous. Pop-up, whether using the sniper mode or not, will be extremely limited.

GameSpot: What's your favorite aspect of the game so far?

Wade: That's definitely a tough question - we're at that point in development where things are really starting to gel and come together nicely, so you usually get a new cool feature every week. If I had to pick a personal favorite, it's seeing the new character animations for explosions becoming implemented. We motion captured every single animation - more than 300 - and were fortunate enough to get Keanu Reeve's stunt double from The Matrix for our session. The moves he pulled off were simply incredible, and our animation system is able to replay them very faithfully.

GameSpot: What's been the biggest hurdle in development?

Wade: Our technology is already really solid, and though I risk cursing the project by saying this, we haven't had any nightmare hurdles - yet. Our biggest challenge is going to be tuning each level perfectly. It takes an amazing amount of time and energy to balance the game play just right, but we're making great progress.