Interview: Visceral Games on Dante's Inferno, Dead Space 2 and EA

IG: Going back to Mass Effect 2, how was the reception to those advertisements? 

NE: We've heard people liked them. Mass Effect 2 may be the highest rated game for BioWare ever. It sets a new bar for consistency of quality and concentrating on shooter action and deep role-playing. We feel it's going to be among the best titles of the year. I give a lot of credit to Frank Gibeau [the EA Games president] for letting studios take the direction they want to, and you can see it from the reactions to Mass Effect 2 and Dante's Inferno.

IG: It's been a very busy first quarter of the year and Dante's Inferno is even launching on the same day as BioShock 2. Are you very concerned about that? 

NE: In life, there's the things you can control and things you can't control. What we can control here is the business infrastructure and the quality of the stuff we create. Whether we're in a busy quarter or a busy year, we can't change that. I can't be too concerned with our competitive slate; our team has put so much time into Dante's Inferno and I have a lot of faith in it.

IG: Still, early in the year seems like a better prospect than late in the year. There's a lot of consumption, but the people aren't necessarily looking for new and original stuff. Q4 has almost become where new IPs go to die. 

NE: We thought about the right time to launch Dante's Inferno. We're in this for the long run, and we think quality will rule the day. We really think we have a winner in the game; right now we're at three million downloads of the demo.

IG: Tell me a little about your next big project in Dead Space 2.

NE: We've got two main teams; we've got some supporting content for Dante's Inferno coming out, but we'll mostly shift our attention to Dead Space 2. The first one was well received, and we want to take advantage of that start with something that has tremendously wide appeal. We're more focused on the action than the horror this time. We're more empowering to the player. We've got a lot of feature innovation and we feel comfortable because we have something with resonance and we have something that's so capable.

IG: The first Dead Space was this violent, sci-fi horror title and we think it caught a lot of people off guard with how good it was. 

NE: I've heard some people say that Dead Space was the most “un-EA game” they had seen, and they meant it as a compliment! Funny anecdote, when John in his position several years ago and was touring the studio, he said he wanted a horror game. He went away and when it came back, he helped support and finally realize that game in Dead Space. 

That's one thing we like about Visceral; we can really establish a new audience with it. I feel it's on the pathway to greatness and being widely recognized. We love the culture we've established in doing edgy properties like Dead Space and Dante's Inferno, created with the philosophy “let's build quality and let the rest follow.”

IG: Thanks for your time, Nick.