Why You'll Love Rabbids Go Home
Two and a half years in development, a brand new engine, no mini-games and it's a full-blown comedy adventure.
First off, who's developing this project, how big is the team, and how long has it been underway?
Jacques Exertier, creative director: The Rabbids Go Home core team is made up of people who worked together in Ubisoft's Montpellier Studio on Beyond Good & Evil, King Kong, the official game of Peter Jackson's movie, as well as the first Rayman Raving Rabbids party game.
Today, over 90 people are hard at work on Rabbids Go Home as we move into our third year of development… which is pretty rare for a Wii game. We wanted to give ourselves the time and the means on par with our ambitions for a big adventure.
Explain the concept to us.
Jacques: For obscure and evidently irrational reasons, the Rabbids have chosen a ridiculous objective. Luckily, they've got an infallible plan…equally absurd, of course. Is a ridiculous plan the best way to attain a ridiculous objective? I doubt that the Rabbids doubt it or even know what doubt is!
The fact is, something has changed... After three invasions and a lot of intense partying, the Rabbids are ready to go home, and that shiny, round thingy in the night sky has captured their imagination like Moses before the Promised Land… OK, more like a kid in front of a toy store window! To the Moon or Bust!
So the Rabbids come up with the perfect plan: just build a huge pile of stuff and climb to the moon! 'See, if I jump up and down, or stand on my tiptoes I can almost touch it!' Now…where to get the stuff… Lucky for the Rabbids, the Humans have more stuff than they know what to do with! So they go grab as much stuff as they can carry in that shopping cart they found and transfer all the stuff via toilets through the sewers and back to the Pile where it keeps growing higher…and higher…
The story starts here with that simple surreal premise and evolves as the player progresses through the game. Eventually the humans revolt, sick their vicious pooches on the Rabbids and join the Verminator volunteers to exterminate the Rabbid pests. After all, that's human stuff the Rabbids are stealing! They've toiled their whole lives to amass that precious stuff!
What's worse, the Rabbids make a mess wherever they go, disrupting the normal flow of human drudgery to provoke a gag a minute, and shocking the Humans right out of their socks, literally! In fact, Rabbids live to make a mockery of our numerous human neuroses and inhibitions. And we, as players, thank them for it… with a bellyful of laughs.
This is not a mini-game compilation, right?
Jacques: No, Rabbids Go Home is absolutely not a mini-game compilation. It's an adventure game, and more precisely a comedy-adventure. After exploring new weird and wonderful Wii moves with the Rabbid party games, we now wanted to go further and give core and casual players a deeper and more varied experience, and tell a story from the Rabbids side-splitting point of view.
Besides, they just kept jumping up and down in our field of vision (sort of like Donkey in Shrek screaming, 'Pick Me!'), until we couldn't ignore them anymore! So we gave them an epic adventure, and to everyone's delight, we get to experience the world Rabbid-style.
Why did you decide to omit Rayman from the experience altogether?
Jacques: Not a day goes by without somebody asking us for a new Rayman game… He'll be back for more imaginative and fantastic adventures of his own before you know it, but not in RGH, which takes place among Humans.
In the meantime, the Rabbids really like it here in the real world and are here to stay… That is, unless they make it to the moon! But rest assured that the Rabbids and Rayman are still B.E.F. (Best Enemies Forever). They'll no doubt meet again...
Exactly who do you control in this game? It looks like multiple Rabbids around a grocery cart. Explain how that works.
Jacques: The player controls a team of two Rabbids pushing a shopping cart. The supped-up cart is a blast to drive around the open environments, skidding, accelerating, breaking and super-boosting over chasms. Players will learn to master this tuned-up caddy, which is key to the main objective: collect stuff, little and big, to grow the Pile.
How do the controls work. Please be precise. How do you use the Wii remote and nunchuk.
Jacques: Driving the shopping cart is at the heart of RGH's gameplay and players will steer it using the nunchuck and control acceleration (boost) and other driving actions with the Wii Remote. We make good use of both controls and have imagined a completely unique set of delirious activities that uses the Wii Remote in a way you've never seen before… Can't say more for now.
In some screens and footage, we've seen the Rabbids rolling their grocery cart through skyscrapers, on planes, etc. Is this an open world, or is it level-based? How does everything unfold?
Jacques: Rabbids Go Home has an open-world structure. The action in RGH takes place in a world that concentrates everything one might find in a typical US city and surroundings. Some other environments include a beach, a desert, the everglades…. The game world is organized, like a spider's web, around neighborhoods (the Hubs), each giving access to several levels. Players can move around freely and choose the level they want to play from these Hubs, but they can also collect resources, strip humans naked and even combat enemies in the Hubs. These neighborhoods evolve throughout the adventure.
There are of course plenty of obstacles along the way that will make collecting stuff a lot less easy than it sounds. Humans will start defending their freedom, siccing mean pooches on the Rabbids, designing surveillance robots and generally equipping themselves with anti-Rabbid kits and traps…until they become Verminators! Anti-Rabbid propaganda explodes and with it the Verminator craze arises. The Humans will do anything to get back to the quiet, boring and stuff-laden existence they led before those heinous Rabbids showed up!
You describe the game as a comedy adventure. Obviously, the Rabbids are hilarious. How big of a role does comedy play in the title?
Jacques: That's the exact question we asked ourselves over 2 and a half years of development. How can we keep the Rabbids fresh and conserve all that delirious variety in an adventure context? For such an ambitious game, we needed a coherent and authentic storyline.
We asked ourselves: "Who are the Rabbids? What is their archetype? What values do they represent?" The Rabbids have no memory, so they're spontaneous; they're stupid yet enthusiastic; irresponsible yet joyful, overbearing yet without taboo…. They incarnate a good number of our irrational impulses--that's the key. The Rabbids are irrational, emotional, sensual. They represent emotions pushed to the extreme. We created the Humans as their exact opposites. The humans in Rabbids Go Home mull over all their decisions, their emotions in-check. Their organs have atrophied. They have nearly forgotten that they have a body or a heart, and can barely handle those.
The meeting between these two opposing characters is an allegory of the internal debates we have with ourselves each time we make a decision.
When these two archetypes meet, sparks fly… and make for a variety of comedic situations wherein the Rabbids unleash their utter Rabbidness.
Come to think of it, I can assure you that the Rabbids couldn't care less that they are actors in an allegory. In fact, they would never have responded so rationally!
Ok, here's the deal. Now I'll give you the Rabbids' version and you choose:
« BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH !!!!!!!!!! »
(Don't take this personally, but you should really try unleashing the Rabbid in you too.)
Do you earn points for causing mayhem?
Jacques: The more mayhem the Rabbids cause, the more stuff they will get for their pile! We don't have any specific counter for the 'mayhem.'
Give us a description of what you will be doing in a typical level?
Jacques: There is no typical level, because the levels are all very different, some involve chase scenes, some are time attacks, combats, exotic gameplay, puzzles…
The objective is systematically to reach an XL (Xtra Large) item for your pile. Players can pick up XL items either in the middle or the end of a level, or they might carry it throughout. These XL items have gameplay properties. A jet engine strapped to your cart will suddenly propel you at three times your normal speed. With a big tire attached, you can bounce off surfaces and off enemies like a bumper car… Float and glide with the Bubble Bed on board, and upgrade your caddy with a jet ski to power slide through water!
These transformations radically change the sensations and driving controls, varying the pleasures and creating new challenges for the players.
Regardless, each level always ends with the transfer of all the stuff you've collected via the toilets… Gotta grow that Pile.
The game looks beautiful. Tell us about the style.
Jacques: We wanted to create a rich, dense world with tons of detail, where players would explore and discover things wherever they looked. But, the world also had to be in the image of its uptight humans with their sterile places and normalized urban planning… Visually, the world of RGH is very much inspired by what we French call the "Glorious 30," the economic boom from 1945-1975, which marks the explosion in mass consumption. Instead of photorealism, we played with simple colors and geometric shapes… Anything that helped create a caricature of modern man.
Did you build a new 3D engine for the game? What new graphic techniques are you pulling off?
Jacques: Yes, a brand new engine called LyN was created alongside Rabbids Go Home and will serve many forthcoming games. It is a revolutionary graphical engine thanks to its structure and technology that make it at once easy to use, effective and evolvable. With LyN, we can create games for any console.
For the Wii in particular, the engine maximizes the capacity of the console by managing the totality of the graphical pipeline within the engine itself. The advantage of this engine compared with earlier generations is its capacity to optimize graphical resources without limiting the imaginations of the teams of artists and designers who use it. RGH is the first game out of an Ubisoft studio to benefit from this technology.
Does the title include a multiplayer mode? Tell us about it.
Jacques: It's too soon to talk about it, but it is our firm intention that 2 players be able to experience the adventure and the comedy together.
Any online play or WiiConnect24 support?
Jacques: We are preparing several online features currently, but I can't elaborate at this time…
Are you using Wii MotionPlus for any reason?
Jacques: We don't use the Wii MotionPlus, but rest assured, the Wii remote will never be the same again… Players will discover a feature that uses the Wii Remote in a creative and technologically revolutionary way, never before seen in a game.
How is the storyline told?
Jacques: In video games, we rarely ever tell a story in the classic sense. Rather, we create a context in which the player will live out the story in their own way.
In this sense, every single game element is a vector for storytelling:
The core gameplay.
The 3C's: controls, camera and character contain information that are vital to the script. They provide precise information about the main character.. Who is he? What's he like? … Two Rabbids push a shopping cart? With just that, we have already given a maximum amount of info. Just by playing with them and their caddy, we learn that the Rabbids are hyper-motivated, hyperactive, kamikaze, impertinent fools without taboos. They have their own way of approaching life, their own way of reading Humans. And voila, a theme is born.
The NPCs: the evolution of other characters in the game is another great vector for progressing the story. We imagine the characters and ask ourselves who they are, what they think, what emotions they should express and how they will evolve throughout the story. The Humans, for instance, are completely powerless and debilitated when faced with the utter silliness of the Rabbids, who make light of all the Human's habits and neurotic guidelines. Little by little the Humans will learn to defend themselves and equip themselves as Verminators. But the Verminators are nothing like blood-thirsty warriors. They're just Mr. and Mrs. Anyone, who find themselves obliged to wear rubber suits and fight for the first time in their lives. They are spastic, ridiculous and chicken. Thus, traditional storytelling tools became the foundations for the human AI and their Verminator evolution.
The environments, the level design, sound design, music and cinematics are all essential means for conveying the story and allowing the player to experience it.
Any final comments for fans looking forward to the game?
Jacques: Rabbids Go Home is a condensed exposition of the essentials of the entire history of human creativity. The game has everything: the insanity of the greatest American cartoonists; the best of Woody Allen; the intensity of a Wagnerian opera; the creativity of Picasso; the anti-conformity of a Marcel Duchamp; the simplicity of a monochromatic Klein; the genius of a Hendrix riff; the precision of a goal marked by Zidane; the taste of a fresh vegetable soup at Bocuse; and the call to adventure of Hemingway's first period…
At least, that's what we're hoping for. Life is serious enough…go crazy! Think Rabbid, act Rabbid, be Rabbid!
Há dezenas de jogos que usam o engine de outros e não é por isso que deixam de ser bons jogos. O Beyond Good and Evil 2 é um jogo para as consolas em HD, vai ser interessante ver como é que eles optimizaram o motor de jogo de tal maneira a que consiga correr na Wii.
