Villordsutch talks with James Valls, Senior Producer of Rebellion’s Battlezone…
On Saturday October 8th I attended PLAY Expo’s 5th Anniversary at EventCity, Manchester. My first port of call was to the Battlezone stand which was also showing off the PSVR, both of which I’ve been watching for a while. Mainly for two reasons – the first it is that looks truly beautiful and the second, being of a certain age I can remember the original arcade release back from 1980. After two rather impressive goes on both the device and game, I was kicking myself for not pre-ordering the PSVR (along with Battlezone), and I took five minutes out of James Valls’ – Senior Producer for Battlezone – day to talk to him about this rather splendid game.
Villordsutch: Why did you go back to that game [1980’s Battlezone] and bring it into the 21st Century?
James Valls: Easy answer. The owners of my company – Chris & Jason – they are massive fans of the original Battlezone and they are kind of my age so we remember going to the arcades and playing that game, and we had the opportunity to buy the IP from Atari, literally a couple of years ago. So they bought it and the brought it to the company and they said to me, “What can you do with this? What can work?” and at the same time we’re getting PlayStation VR and VR headsets for different platforms and yeah, it’s kind of a happy coincidence that we’re working on prototypes and we have the Battlezone IP and it kind of made perfect sense that we made something like this.
V: A happy coincidence.
JV: Yeah massively, but I mean I don’t like to say it’s a coincidence because we made it, but yeah definitely it just made perfect sense.
V: A lot of people say, “When using VR they get motion sickness”. When you were making the game did any of the developers suffer with motion sickness or…
JV: Yes, of course. Particularly when you are developing the game, you are mostly working with a broken game. So most of the time the framerate will be low because you’re still working on it, but I have to say once we’ve got our first stable set up we didn’t really have any motion sickness. But motion sickness is really something you cannot help, it is what it is, simulation sickness.
V: We both (photographer and I) went on early today for the 4-5 minute demo and didn’t suffer at all.
JV: That’s good to know.
V: Battlezone looks fantastic, a very Tron based landscape.
JV: It’s like what your brain feels the old days version of the future should look like. That was intentional; it was doing a homage to the old Battlezone but taking it to the next level.
V: We noticed some of the later zones, the industrial etc. as we got a sneak peek at the end of the demo. Will they be carrying over the tone we saw in the first level or will they be different?
JV: At the end of the demo you saw different themes or styles for the game.
V: Will they be similar to the first level in appearance?
JV: They will look different as you progress through the campaign. So you yeah, they will have a different layout and visual style and they all have different themes as you progress through the campaign.
V: As for the future of Battlezone, when the DLC’s come out will we see anything airborne or below water or will it all be on land?
JV: (Smiling) You know we haven’t even released it yet, it’s coming out next week, so we’ve been focusing on getting the game out. The DLC plans we haven’t really thought about it much, we’re happy playing with ideas like we always do, though we haven’t really announced anything neither do we know for a fact what we want to do. We’re going to see how the game does, we’re going to see how the players react to the game, and we’ll see where it takes us. We’ll be seeing what people like about the game, do more of that; what they don’t like so much, do less of that. Shape the game according to what they like.
V: Listening to the Community?
JV: Absolutely! Absolutely! Yeah that’s what we normally do anyway. We always make the games for the people to enjoy them, most of the guys here [gestures to the Battlezone booth] are from community support. That’s why we are here.
SEE ALSO: You can watch the full interview here starting at 1 minute 26 seconds
Villordsutch and Flickering Myth would like to thank James Valls for taking the time out for the interview and the Battlezone crew for giving us an extra go… for research purposes.
Battlezone is released on October 13th and for more information visit the website here.
Originally published October 12, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
