User blog:Manic The Hedgehog/South Park: The Game - Game Informer Coverage

Game Informer, a gaming magazine by Game Stop, has excusive coverage of the new South Park game simply entitled "South Park: The Game". The article is 12 pages and answers a lot of questions about the game, answers the fans want to hear. Below is a quick summary of what the article included.

Overview

 * The first game Trey and Matt have directly participated in, writing the script and the dialogue.
 * Trey has always preferred silent protagonists in RPGs, so the player’s character will be silent.
 * The player’s character will be fully customizable more so than any avatar creator on the internet.
 * Your character has a smartphone that acts as the primary game menu and has a Facebook-like app showing the number of friends you have and your current standing with the various kid factions.
 * There are five classes—wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and a fifth unannounced class. The unannounced class is said to be "one of Cartman's creations."
 * Obsidian is using the Dungeon Siege III engine.
 * Obsidian developed a dynamic lip-syncing tool to accommodate changes to the script.
 * Trey and Matt gave Obsidian 15 years of South Park assets used during the show and a detailed list of approved textures and colors.
 * Critical hits, cash rewards, experience, and consumables are in the game.
 * Trey hates unskippable cutscenes, so there likely won’t be cutscenes at all or they’ll be interactive.
 * The humor and plot will focus on the games they have played in the past, but Trey mentions that games have lampooned other games before so they don’t want to do exactly that. Instead, they are focusing more on RPGs and how big and bombastic they can get sometimes.
 * The game will look exactly like an episode of South Park.
 * You can explore the town in between quests, as “exploration takes the characters from the left to the the right (and vice versa), but branching paths occasionally take them in the background or foreground to prevent the game from becoming overly linear”.

Story

 * The player will play as the new kid in town, with the main themes of the game being about fitting in and acceptance.
 * The story begins with your character participating in a live action role-playing game that the neighborhood kids started, which eventually evolves into a real adventure.
 * Eric Cartman will greet your character and help you decide your class, which are wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and a fifth unconventional class made up by Cartman. (I’m thinking “Jew”!)

Combat

 * Combat system is like Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi games.
 * If the player initiates combat they will attack first and vice versa.
 * X button is for melee attacks, pressing it in well-timed succession will result in multiple hits.
 * Timed inputs occur for defense as well for reduced damage.
 * Obsidian doesn’t want the player to have to sit and watch animations play out; they’re incorporating dynamic camera angles at certain times, such as the Rochambeau attack that stuns an enemy.
 * Screenshot of combat shows that encounters are like classic Final Fantasy (presented from a side view). Combat screenshots show only the player and one other party member (Cartman, Kyle, or Butters), fighting 2-5 enemies (Girls, Gingers, Hippies, Fantasy style, and Goth) at a time.

RPG

 * Enemy encounters are visible on the map.
 * Sodas are health potions and Tweek’s coffee is a Haste-inducing item.
 * There are melee and ranged weapons, and a lightning-powered Okama Gamesphere makes an appearance as a magic item.
 * There is a Final Fantasy VII Materia-like system in the game to augment weapons with various abilities like fire, poison, and electricity.
 * There is a Summon System, but they are not able to talk about it.

Collectibles

 * There are collectibles to look for in the environments, some appear throughout the game while other are in specific areas.
 * An example of a collectible is a Chinpokomon doll and a magazine, though Chinpokomon dolls are not all the same model. Obsidian is using various models that appeared in the episode, probably “Pengy” and “Shoe” to name a couple. They are also using some models that were cut from the episode.

Other

 * When Obsidian was first coming up with ideas, they showed Trey and Matt a quest where you go into a cave and fight a giant bat boss that Ike is riding on. Trey and Matt said that the quest “wasn’t South Park.” Trey and Matt then suggested a quest to “get Kung Pao Chicken from City Wok” to readjust Obsidian’s focus.
 * When they started making the town hub, Trey and Matt realized that they didn’t have a true layout for the town, so they had fun figuring out where everything went.
 * There will not be any platforming—jumping was tested early on, but it didn’t seem right.
 * They talk about how they have had to scrap a level, because the perspective wasn’t right with everything being hand-illustrated and hand-animated.
 * They talk about the challenges of making a comedy-driven game. Portal 2 is mentioned by name, and they said that if Portal 2 had had “shitty dialogue on top of being a shitty game,” it wouldn’t have succeeded. Trey and Matt want to make a game that’s as funny as it is playable.
 * Trey and Matt really enjoy RPGs and they do think that RPGs are the best fit for South Park.
 * They were asked how making an RPG story differs for an episode, they say that the learning curve was bigger than anything they have done, except for The Book of Mormon.
 * Visual styles seen in episodes like Good Times With Weapons, or the live action hamsters in Pandemic, will not be in the game. They wanted to keep a simple 2D style.
 * Lastly, they joke how this South Park game will be a cross between Obilivion and FIFA where “you gotta go kill a bunch of monsters and shit, but you can only use your feet.”