Jaffe expects more God of War
But loves doing PS3 e-Dist.
Developer David Jaffe admits he'll probably end up working on more God of War games after the first one proved so popular, but right now he's falling in love with Sony's "e-Distribution Initiative" (EDI) - PlayStation 3's answer to Xbox Live Arcade and Nintendo's Virtual Console.
Speaking to Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, Jaffe said he'd happily do EDI games "until the cows come home", and describes his first game, Criminal Crackdown (also due out on PSP), as "cops and robbers meets basketball" or "a cross between Twisted Metal and Bomberman", where the criminals race around the environment as players take on the role of cops and bounty hunters, attempting to catch the crims and keep them long enough to transport them to jail for different points values.
It's playable "for 4 players, online, offline, 4 different maps, 10-12 different cars. It's a really good value and a lot of fun for players. If it's successful, we hope to support it with downloadable content." But that won't mean lots of microtransactions and 'consumables' by the sound of it. "I know there are a lot of guys much smarter than me that are very much into the microtransaction model - dollar signs don't really keep me awake at night," he tells Newsweek. "Concepts keep me awake at night."
It's not the only EDI game he's doing either. "This team and I are rolling onto a new one starting in about a month," he explains. "And there's another one in Santa Monica that we're about to start development on. This is really all I want to be doing now."
Because to Jaffe, EDI games are like pop songs, whereas big games like God of War are like operas. "For me, it's been a lot more fun to write pop songs than operas. And in the future, because I think these services are going to be really successful, I think it's actually going to end up being more lucrative to write pop songs, just like in the real world, than operas."
But that won't stop there being more God of War games, he adds. "I guarantee you'll get more God of War," he tells Newsweek, "'cause I don't think I have much of a choice. If it was up to me, he would have fallen off the mountain in the first game and actually died. It would have been like, 'All right, we're done. He's dead.' [Laughs.]"