GameDaily BIZ: I realize you can't talk about the ongoing litigation [with Epic Games] too much, but in general, how has that affected the morale of your team? It's looking like you guys had to redo your entire engine for Too Human, so it must have been a drain on the team.

Denis Dyack: Well, I think we've said this publicly in the complaint, but essentially we've had to have a lot of hard work to overcome problems and we ended up having to rewrite the engine, so it was a huge burdensome task and it causes all kinds of problems stemming from E3 2006 as we talked about. But, we are where we are today through perseverance and I think, in the end, Too Human's going to speak for itself with the new technology.

BIZ: Do you anticipate when this legal battle is actually going to get resolved, any idea?

DD: I can't comment on it, sorry.

BIZ: Alright. So let's talk about the presentation; you showed off Too Human to the press. From the reactions you saw from the media in attendance, how did you gauge it?

DD: It's really hard for me to answer that question because I didn't get a lot of chances to interact with the media except for really quick 10 minute interviews with everyone; however my gauge was, after we finished, everyone was talking and playing the game and no one seemed to want to leave, so I see that as extremely positive. I guess, when it all comes out, we'll find out. I've seen some positive stuff this morning, so I'm really happy with that. In the end, we believe that Too Human is one of the strongest games we've made to date, and it's really going to be up to the consumer and you guys to tell us if you think that's true as well.

BIZ: I spoke to a few of my colleagues and some of them were like "Yeah, it's pretty good" and another person was actually kind of negative about it, saying there was a little bit too much of an eclectic mix of the Norse mythology and sci-fi and it's like all the stuff that's been in your head over the years was jumbled together. Those were some of the impressions I got from my colleagues, so I've been seeing a sort of mixed reaction... Obviously you'll find out once the game's actually released.

DD: Well sure, I don't know if everyone's going to like it, and I think the thing that's really interesting about the games we make is that we actually try to do something that's original, and when you do something original and you do something that's never been seen before, people have a very difficult time describing it and it ends up often being described like you just said – an "eclectic mix up." ... I will say this: it's definitely not eclectic and I think from a perspective of what we're trying to do, we've got a game that has a ton of enemies on screen that plays really quickly, seamlessly integrates story in ways that we've never seen before and really combines action with RPG, and from that perspective it's something new. When Eternal Darkness came out, early critics and people who reviewed the game gave us 4 out of 10, 3 out of 10, saying how crappy it was, how it was a Resident Evil clone, whatever. People are always going to say that; we don't try to please everyone but what we try to do is create a good game. As far as people's opinions, everyone is going to have them. ... In the end, we think it's a solid game. Time will tell, it's a work in progress, but we're getting close to the end, and we're happy with where we are.

BIZ: Roughly what percentage is done – how far along would you say it is?

DD: The game is entirely complete, really, and because of the type of game that it is you have to balance all the different character classes to level 50, make sure the co-op is balanced properly, make sure everything plays well as you level up. There's so many things you have to do to make sure it's right, so we're in those final balancing and tweaking stages now making sure we don't ever dip below 30 frames per second... there's a few places where the game gets incredibly insane where it may dip and we're fixing those now but the game's going to get a lot faster. The interesting thing – I know I said this and no one seems to care and it's kind of ironic – technology has these funny effects on people, but people were going around with, I think it was Halo saying it's not really running in 720p and Call of Duty 4 not really running in 720p, and we are in 720p with 4x anti-aliasing and we have not seen a game do that in a long, long time and people were like "eh."

BIZ: Since the game is an RPG and a trilogy, will the level and stats carry over with your character throughout the trilogy?

DD: Absolutely.

BIZ: One of my first thoughts upon seeing the presentation was that it reminded me a lot of Devil May Cry in terms of the sword and gunplay. Were you at all inspired by Devil May Cry?

DD: Well, certainly we like games like Devil May Cry, God of War, Ninja Gaiden; I think they're really cool games, and if you would say what is the peak of the action genre, I generally tend to lean towards those. However, because we've fused it into an RPG, it's really hard to say that it was a huge influence. Also, games like Street Fighter [influenced us] ... and combos, and I'm a big Samurai Shodown fan as well – Samurai Shodown 2, the only real Samurai Shodown! ...actually number one was really good too. But, the essence of a lot of the things that we're doing hearkens back to a lot of the classic games and I think in some ways, Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden and those type of games do the same thing, but we all stand on the shoulders of giants; trying to say you're creating something completely original is very, very difficult and what our approach is to a lot of things is merging these different genres together to create an experience that's original, and that's what our goals are.

BIZ: There was a release that came out recently about Ontario funding and it made mention of a new third-person action psychological thriller from Silicon Knights. I'm just wondering in terms of your team being involved in the Too Human trilogy right now and the resources devoted there, where is the time and the resources coming from to actually make this other game for 2010?

DD: Just so you know, Silicon Knights is about a 170 people right now, and we're probably going to be hiring another 80 or so. So the team is growing and it's going to be a third team. We've got this other project that's unannounced with Sega and that's underway as well. So that's where the bandwidth comes from. We're growing and we've got a lot of aspirations for where we want to take Silicon Knights and hopefully take the video game industry in a good direction as well.

BIZ: And you're overseeing those projects in the same way you're overseeing Too Human?

DD: No, actually. This is kind of a funny thing; as the company grows, these are the kind of things you think about. I've been involved in a lot of IP creation within Silicon Knights and as the company grows, I have to look at whether I want to continue to be president and director, and I'm leaning towards staying creative. And on the other project that's unannounced I'm not the director on that project. I'll certainly lend a hand wherever I can but there's a different director and we're going to have a director for every project. So, in the end as the company grows, for my role I'll probably hire someone to be my boss and help run the company, which is kind of a weird thing, and I actually won't run the company while I continue to work at what is the company's bread and butter, which is original IPs with great stories and game concepts that are provocative to gamers.

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