Insomniac Games verklaart bijzondere nieuwe cover van Fuse

Ontwikkelaar Insomniac Games werkt momenteel hard aan Fuse, de game die tijdens de E3 in 2011 nog werd aangekondigd als Overstrike. Sinds die aankondiging heeft de game nogal wat veranderingen ondergaan. Niet alleen werd de naam veranderd in Fuse, maar ook de volledige uitstraling en cover van de game werden vorig jaar aangepast.

Ted Price, algemeen directeur van Insomniac Games, vertelde in een recent interview waarom men die aanpassingen heeft doorgevoerd. Daarbij gaat hij er vooral op in waarom de hoofden van de personages op de cover maar deels zichtbaar zijn:

Covers are tough. They’re always difficult and we’ve been through the wringer over covers for years and years trying to figure out what best represents the game. It’s rare that everybody’s truly satisfied with the cover either internally and externally, so we make the best decisions we can.

For us on Fuse it was about showing that Fuse, this alien substance, is a central part of the game which we hadn’t shown before. And we were also prepared for a lot of feedback on the cover. It has drawn attention and people asked a lot of questions about it: Why’d you cut of their heads? What’s the reasoning behind that? Well, part of the reasoning is when you have four characters and you want to present them on the front of a cover, we found the default positions for them were Charlie’s Angles-type poses, where it looks contrived and almost silly. And we were trying to avoid that.

It’s really difficult to get it right because you don’t know. You’re putting yourself out there, putting our creations out and asking people to comment on it. And if the comments come back negative then we need to act on it, and if they come back positive then we need to figure out whether or not those comments were based purely on aesthetics or on something else. But the most important aspect is to make sure that at the core of the game is fun. And that isn’t about putting out trailers. That isn’t about putting box covers about, but actually taking the game and getting it in people’s hands, watching them play and asking them questions about what they liked and what they didn’t like.

Het is dus een hele klus om een passende cover te maken, al draait het volgens Price vooral om de daadwerkelijke game. Laat de game voor zichzelf spreken, of vind je een cover wel degelijk van belang?