Eariler in the month we had a chance to sit down with Patrick Fortier, Creative Director for WET.
Who give us just a little insight into what it takes to make a game unique as WET, espeically in this climate, and so here is our Interview with Patrick Fortier.

PS3 Center: The current market seems to favour established IPs, and publishers seem increasingly less likely to green light different or unique concepts. What are some of the challenges that go into developing a new IP, especially one as unique as WET, with such a close minded market?

This must have been even more difficult for the studio, considering that this is your first new IP since the years of the PS1, where the license belongs to you rather than another party.

Patrick Fortier: It’s definitely a challenge. I think ultimately the key is to stick to your vision and not compromise it to fit different people’s opinions. We received a lot of feedback questioning whether people would enjoy playing a female heroine, whether the grindhouse look was too different from other games but each time we decided to stay true to ourselves because we knew those things were core to the experience we were building.  In the end, it boiled down to conviction within the company to stick with the project and carry it through to the end.

PCN: Many games nowadays are designed with a franchise in mind; can the same be said of WET? Is there room within WET's lore to make a sequel or trilogy?

PF: I think it’s fair to say that we definitely built a very iconic universe whose span is bigger than this first installment.

PCN: WET has had a pretty rough development cycle, especially when changing publishers from Sierra to Bethesda, whom are now owned my ZeniMax. Has the protracted development cycle affected the game at all, either positively or negatively?

PF: Both I guess.  Negatively in the sense that it creates stress for the production team (although we never had to scale back which was a testament to how much the company believed in the project), but positively because it gave us a bit more time to tweak certain elements of the game such as ‘Rage Mode’.

PCN: A demo was just released on the European PSN - how recent is the demo build? Will the actual retail game be any different? And for American members, when would a demo for the US PSN arrive?

PF: The demo has been available for a while now and the game is actually on store shelves! The demo is pretty representative of the game experience although the final build is a bit fresher.

PCN: What was the reasoning behind having a female character in a game like WET? It’s an interesting concept but were there any influences to that decision?

PF: The idea was to have a character that would promote the fast moving, athletic, acrobatic nature of the game.  When you see her, you FEEL like taking to the air and staying there.

PCN: Can you relate to any films done in a similar fashion? Will it be a new wave of games to be funny along with being your classic shooter?

PF: I think right from the start you can tell that the game doesn’t take itself seriously.  We didn’t want a whole “save the world” sort of mood and we don’t shy away from including some humorous moments in the game.

PCN: Will we see anymore content for WET? Maybe more along the lines of a Download Content?

PF: Our focus has been getting the game done and on retail shelves.

PCN: Now abit more of the development side, how many triangles/polys are used to create Rubi, and how many are there in the enemies?

PF: Rubi is about 20,000 polys and the enemies are between 5000 and 10,000.

PCN: And were you held back at all by the hardware? You constantly mention you wanted the game, and mostly the arena fights, to closely follow the Crazy88’s fight from Kill Bill but from the Demo most of the arena stuff seemed empty when compared to that scene.

PF: The intro scene is set-up in a way that allows players to get familiar with the controls. You do get to fight larger groups of enemies later in the game!

User Questions

Lloyd: What replay value does the game have? Any multiplayer modes or collectables within the game.

PF: Obviously the different difficulty levels do change the game experience a lot and have achievement/trophies related to them, but beyond that we do unlock some new game modes once you finish the story.  There are also monkey toys to be collected in all the levels and scorpions to kill in the boneyard.  No multiplayer though, we did not want to divide our development team into to and never felt multiplayer was really right for the mechanics of the game.

Lloyd: How long will I spend playing WET in one play through?

PF: Around 8 hours maybe - a bit more or a bit less depending on your skill level.

Lloyd: Also I would like to know a few other small things such as how many frames per second you are aiming for in the final version of the game, and is the game going to be presented in both 720p and 1080p on the PS3 or just 720p?

PF: We aimed for 30fps in 720p for both Xbox360 and PS3.

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Special Thanks:

We like to give a specially thanks to Patrick Fortier for having the interview with us, as well as Tracey Thompson at Bethesda & Sylvain Awad at Artifical Mind + Movement for helping organise the interview.