United Front Games gab nun bekannt, dass der neue Publisher des Spiels vom Setting und vom Open World-Genre des Spiels überzeugt war und deshalb mit UFG zusammenarbeiten wollte.
United Front Games sagte nun, dass der neue Publisher Square Enix sofort überzeugt vom Hong Kong-Setting war und mit dem Entwicklerteam, das zuvor unter Activision gearbeitet hatte, zusammenarbeiten wollte. So machte man aus dem zuvor entwickelten und geplanten True Crime: Hong Kong das Open World-Spiel Sleeping Dogs.
“For Square, that proposition was exciting for them. They said ‘First time in Hong Kong; sounds amazing,’” sagte Senior Producer Jeff O’Connell von United Front Games. “There’s not a lot of cop games, so the original in that respect sounds amazing. And the guys that came off Just Cause and Arkham and saw our mechanics, they loved that as well. So for them, there wasn’t a whole lot of need to change elements,” sagte er im Bezug auf das Entwicklerteam von Square Enix, dass sich jetzt neben UFG um Sleeping Dogs kümmert.
“We’ve worked on a lot of these games – we have very experienced staff and we knew that these games take a long time to come together in the end because they are so complex,” fügte er hinzu. “They’re system-driven and the system is essentially building a world simulator and that doesn’t really play nicely together until near the end when all the systems are in place. The thing about Square is that they kind of understood that and they understand about how these game come together.”
“A while ago and it looked like one thing; today it looked like an entirely different thing and part of that is just a maturation process of these systems as they get developed.” Square Enix hatte dies verstanden und wollte mit United Front Games zusammenarbeiten “to have the game in Hong Kong, be an undercover cop and offer people the deepest mechanics that they’ve seen in an open-world game”.
“For us, the cornerstone of the game is the fun piece. You can have a great story and you can have a great city, but unless the game is fun, it’s just not great,” so O’Connell. “You see people going back and forth between fighting, shooting, vault-shooting, getting on a bike as you saw in the demo and shooting,all of those things don’t seem modal, it seems natural – that ability to seem like a Hong Kong action hero – and have a very, very short learning curve.”
■ Jensen6
