Neil Young 'Very Impressed' by Sony at GDC, Talks Spielberg Projects

March 13, 2007 | By: James Brightman

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GameDaily broke the news during GDC that EA is working with Steven Spielberg on a special Wii project. Today we bring you the full interview with EALA's Neil Young featuring more talk on the Spielberg projects, and Neil also discusses Sony, Nintendo, AI in games and much more.

GameDaily BIZ: So first of all, since we literally just came from Phil Harrison's keynote, what did you think of what Sony presented?

Neil Young: I was very, very impressed with the whole sort of Game 3.0 initiative. There are a lot of Sony haters out there right now and you just should never underestimate what that company is capable of doing. They've got a great platform and they showed some pretty cool and compelling software today. I think Home can change the way you feel about the platform and the way you feel about interface as the sort of default interface for the platform, so that's interesting. I've personally been a huge fan of SingStar, predominantly because I'm British and all British people strangely love karaoke. ... And LittleBigPlanet is amazing. I mean, amazing. That might be the first application that you could only do on the PS3. It's very physics intensive... it's just wonderful. And it makes me happy about the business; it makes me happy for Sony and Phil.

BIZ: I think there's huge marketing potential within Home because you can have these dedicated spaces. I mean, you could have your own EALA space dedicated to all your upcoming titles, constantly streaming trailers like a virtual E3 booth, or whatever...

NY: Oh yeah, definitely. Having a space that is sort of advertiser/partner/developer/customer- friendly is a brilliant creative move. At the end of the day Sony is going to do very well with the PS3 platform and that will probably be one of the largest economies in the world, outside of the web.

BIZ: So what are your objectives for EALA this year?

NY: Well, we have two titles shipping in March. Command & Conquer 3, which is a very important game for us; it's the first Command & Conquer since five years ago. That was C&C Generals, which you could argue was not really a true Command & Conquer. C&C 3: Tiberium Wars sort of hearkens back to the original fiction of the world, GDI vs. NOD. And the focus for the team has been around trying to deliver that flavor that you fell in love with when you fell in love with C&C. So it's very fast and fluid gameplay, it sort of has a sense of fun about it, but at the same time it's really a very serious RTS. It has 38 missions and if you compare and contrast that with Battle for Middle-earth II, which was the last RTS game we released, that had 18 missions, so it's double the size in terms of the single-player campaign.

The multiplayer game, like all of our RTS games, is very robust, but we've also introduced a new feature called BattleCast, which inside our studio we call "RTS as a sport." We're strong believers that there are the same sort of dynamics that drive people to compete on the sports field as there are that drive people to compete in an RTS game. So this "RTS as a sport initiative" starts with the BattleCast feature � basically every online multiplayer game you play is streamed to the network (you can turn it off if you want), so people can tune into your games and watch them. People can commentate, telestrate, and an archive of all the games is stored on the network. You can rate and rank games, and schedule games against others, as sort of a program guide type scenario. It's a very rich online feature set that is going to shift things in the RTS space.

We have Medal of Honor Vanguard, which is shipping on PS2 and Wii. That's really a throwback to kind of classic Medal of Honor. You can think of it sort of as Frontline 2.0. It's very focused on that and of course the Wii implementation. ... Later this year, we'll also have C&C 3 on the 360. We brought RTS to the console with Battle for Middle-earth II, and that really surprised us in terms of how well it did both commercially and it was sort of experimental so we were delighted in how it was reviewed. C&C refines that [console RTS gameplay] and takes it to the next level. ... Medal of Honor: Airborne is sort of the rebirth of that franchise. You can think of 2007 as sort of the year of rebirth for the [EALA] studio; we took it over about 2+ years ago and we've reset the studio, we've been rebuilding its creative capability, and now this year we're refreshing the franchises that made it great with a set of new innovations like "RTS as a sport," or in MoH: Airborne, the fact that you sort of jump into every level and it's an open and highly procedural space.

And next year, we've got Steven Spielberg projects we've been working on and we've got two of those underway right now, and some new things that we haven't really talked about but are broad appeal in nature.

BIZ: When we spoke with you at E3 last year, you didn't have much new to share regarding EA's collaboration with Steven Spielberg. What's the latest on how that's progressing and what kinds of experiences should we be expecting to come out of this partnership?

NY: I can't really share game details, but if you recall the original announcement we agreed to build three things with Steven, three original projects. We have two of those underway at the studio right now. I can tell you one of them is what you might expect, in that Steven's stories are often intimate stories set against an Earth or world changing event. And if you think about Steven Spielberg's movies, those big stories are sort of shown through the eyes of a small number of people that are intimately connected. The first product that Doug Church is producing is very much in that vein. The second product is really not in that vein, and Lou Castle is producing that game. Lou's one of the great game makers in our business, just like Doug, and that's a product that we're building for the Wii. So it's very different and very interesting and we're excited about that.

Steven's in the studio about once a week, anywhere from 1 to 4 hours; he swings by and he's in the office by about 8:30 and usually leaves like 11:00 or midday. And it's a very close collaborative relationship. It's everything you'd hoped the relationship would be but were nervous to ask upfront. It's really wonderful spending time with him... he's incredibly creative and just has such a great sense of what entertains people. It's a learning experience I think for us, and I hope it is for him too. He seems very excited.