Castlevania Lords of Shadow producer: new Contra entry needs to "stand out"

Castlevania Lords of Shadow series producer Dave Cox said on a Siliconera interview that he would love to work on the Contra series, but only if he and his team were able to do something unique and intuitive that hasn't been done before.

"You can't just bring out a generic shooter. You have to have a new idea. I think if we had a new idea and we could combine [it] with the universe of Contra, that would be special. Yeah, watch this space."

Cox said that recent entries in the series like Contra 4 and Hard Corps: Uprising were not doing anything new. "You are basically remaking or doing your slant of something that has happened before. You have to have the things that made that game great, like Castlevania, you need to have that, but you have to not be afraid to do something new. The problem with Contra it hasn’t really had anything done new to it so it's become this hardcore niche game."

He suggested that one way to bring the series out of its hardcore niche shell was to treat it like releasing a new IP in many ways. "We are hardcore gamers, we played those games, but there are a lot of people that don’t know what Contra is. They have no idea. There is a massive audience out there; they play Call of Duty and love those games, but they don't know what Contra is. I think if we were going to reintroduce something to that audience, it has to be new and unique. It's got to stand out. It's got to have a new idea, something really cool about it that's never been done before."

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 will be out this November.