May 3, 2012

The Max Payne Comics Will Explain Why Rockstar's Hard-Boiled Cop Is So Messed-Up

Max Payne

The Max Payne Comics Will Explain Why Rockstar's Hard-Boiled Cop Is So Messed-Up Max Payne doesn't wear tights. But, if insanely fast reflexes, deadly marksmanship and an ability to swill the worst whisky around count, you could argue that the gritty NYPD detective of Rockstar Games' shooters has superpowers. Powers or not, he'll be appearing in a new series from Marvel Comics which is being written by Rockstar's Dan Houser and Remedy's Sam Lake.

Both men have put Max through awful tragedies in video game form and, in the interview that follows, Houser and Lake say that the comics will show that the character's streak of misfortune runs all the way back to his childhood. Read on to find out about the comics that inspired Bully, why Viking myths showed up in the Max Payne titles and what Dan Houser thinks is a terrible thing about the internet.

Kotaku: What were the formative comic-book reading experiences for you both? Can you look back in your past and see stories or creators that made you want to become storytellers?

Sam Lake: I've been a big comic-book fan all my life. I used to drive my parents nuts by hauling a pile of Donald Duck comics to the dinner table when I was a kid. Then, I discovered superhero comics and became a big fan of X-Men and Chris Claremont. And after that it was Vertigo graphic novels, like Sandman by Neil Gaiman and many others. My love for comic books is definitely the reason why Max Payne used graphic novel panels as a storytelling method. And Gaiman's use of old mythologies is one of the reasons the Viking gods are present both in Max Payne and Alan Wake.

Dan Houser: I'm English, so I combined reading fairly obvious American superheroes—in particular early Batman and Spider-Man, both of which we had in our house in some compendium or other—classic horror comics from the ‘50s, along with various issues of The Hulk, X-Men, The Fantastic Four and very early Superman. Alongside this was an array of British and European comics that I was reading obsessively from a young age - The Beano, The Dandy, Whizzer and Chips. These were all a huge influence on our game Bully. There were more: Tintin (Hergé is an undoubted visual genius), Asterix, Lucky Luke, Roy of the Rovers, (an old British soccer comic - I know - it's not very cool - but I did love it when I was 9) Dan Dare, the Commando series, Warlord (both fantastic WWII series in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s - I think Commando is still going now), Viz when it first appeared in our house when I was about 11, and, of course, 2000AD (my favorite story was Strontium Dog).

I also loved Mad Magazine when I could get hold of it but thought American Dennis the Menace was a bit wet compared to his British namesake. I loved all of them and, as some of them were pretty much my first reading experience of any kind, they were, of course, massively influential. But it is hard to say this or that influence was more or less important. They are all so iconic, and fairly typical for a British kid. Most of the culture I experienced is a weird combination of British, European and American influences. I love everything about the comics form—the art, the combination of words and pictures, the sense of place and of character—but I cannot draw at all, and for me, the heroes of this medium are the artists.

Kotaku: Both Rockstar and Remedy seem to align with ideas that spring from outsider cultures like pulp novels, comic books, grindhouse cinema and spaghetti westerns. What is it about cult subcultures that you all find so appealing?

Dan Houser: I'm not quite sure, but I know that for a lot of us at Rockstar growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s—when our cultural references and interests were established before the Internet became widespread—there was enormous, almost pathological reverence for the obscure and the underground. Things that were mainstream felt packaged and obvious. So, while we may have loved them, we had to pretend not to. We were always seeking out stuff nobody knew about, as if that would contain some truth or honesty that other, more mainstream things lacked. I don't know if that is still the same today, and I think one of the (few) great negatives of the Internet is that it does not allow subcultures to properly gestate and evolve. Movements, subcultures, styles of music… all those things nowadays become famous before they achieve any kind of creative maturity. Maybe that or simply constantly wondering about the answer to the question - what would make someone wear that?

Sam Lake: It's the stuff that inspires us, it's the brew we have been dipped in, soaked and marinated in since we were kids. We love that stuff, and we want to pass that on.

Sam Lake: "You'll finally see how far back the tragedy in his life goes and with that a lot of things will click into place."

Kotaku: The new comics series takes place during the era of Max Payne 1 & 2, and will feature stories that predate those games. How far back will they go? Will we see Max walking a beat or romancing his wife? Will we see Mona Sax in these comics?

Sam Lake: The comics take you all the way back to Max's childhood. You'll finally see how far back the tragedy in his life goes and with that a lot of things will click into place.

Dan Houser: All the way back to his childhood, and through his career before and after Max 1 and Max 2, in a series of brief flashbacks. That was, originally, why I needed Sam's help! For the comic books to do their job, which was to glue this game to the old games, and fill in the blanks for people new to the series, we wanted to go back to the very beginnings of Max. To do that, I needed Sam's help and guidance to properly discuss the character's origins. I had some ideas, and plenty of questions. What was very gratifying was how often my ideas and Sam's ideas aligned. It gave me confidence that my understanding of the character and his were very similar.

The Max Payne Comics Will Explain Why Rockstar's Hard-Boiled Cop Is So Messed-Up Kotaku: What was the creative process when Remedy and Rockstar were making the Max Payne games together? Did the stories originate in one place and then get bounced back and forth? Or was there collective brainstorming from the very beginning?

Sam Lake: The Rockstar guys were very much involved in Max Payne 2, and while the story came from us, they gave a lot of feedback on it. It's been very exciting coming back to Max Payne after all these years and being able to play and give feedback on Max Payne 3. The Rockstar guys take the earlier games very seriously and they have a lot of respect for the heritage, they want to get all the details just right, so much so that they have noticed and included things that I'm sure I would have totally missed.

Kotaku: Max Payne has always had a strong visual connection to comics. Where did that stylistic imprint come from? Why not use some other method to advance the plot?

Sam Lake: At the time, cutscenes were still quite clumsy, the graphic novel screens felt like the perfect way to tell the story, not only could you make them look very good, but they also fit the pulp style.

Kotaku: Lots of video games spin off their universes into comics. Why hasn't Rockstar done this before?
Dan Houser: I don't know. We've thought about it, but for some reason it never seemed to quite come together. This time, it felt like it really worked creatively, as the character really fit in with Marvel's style, and more importantly, it felt like we had something to say. So, the comic would be useful and support the release, and be entertaining in and of itself. I can't say whether it's well-written or not, but I can objectively say it looks very beautiful. The artists really did an amazing job and it was an honor to work with them.

Apr 23, 2012

Max Payne 3 Multiplayer Is Good, Essential and Rockstar's Boldest Move In Years

Max Payne

There must be something about the number three that signals that Rockstar Games is done messing around and is about to get serious.

Grand Theft Auto III? That 2001 masterwork let the world know that Rockstar was ready to take over single-player video gaming.

Eleven years later comes another "three" (they don't do many of them), May's Max Payne 3. I've played it and I've seen that it carries a new message: Rockstar wants to take over multiplayer gaming.

With Max Payne 3, Rockstar's competition will soon be Call of Duty, Uncharted, Gears of War, Battlefield and any other big shooter vying for your playing time.

Rockstar's competition will also be themselves, as they strive to equal, with multiplayer, their reputation for making single-player games that are cultural milestones. In multiplayer, so far, Rockstar has only dabbled, enjoying decent success with supplementary multiplayer in Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. With Max comes the first major Rockstar game since their Midnight Club racing series in which the multiplayer has the potential to eclipse the single-player. They have the potential to make their first phenomenal Mario Kart to go with their many Super Mario Bros..

A Different Kind of Shooter

I first played Max Payne 3 multiplayer a couple of weeks ago in Rockstar's New York City headquarters, and since then I've nearly forgotten that there is a single-player adventure to go with it.

I don't expect single-player to be bad; what I've seen looks at least as enjoyably playable and visually interesting as its closest contemporary, Naughty Dog's Uncharted series. I've simply come to appreciate that Max Payne 3's multiplayer is no afterthought and may even prove to be the game's main attraction.

I began my first multiplayer visit at Rockstar with a dip into the game's solo campaign. Rockstar reps encouraged this, so that I could get a feel for controlling Max and, by extension, any of the game's multiplayer characters. Unlike most popular modern shooters-but like every major game Rockstar makes—the game is in third-person, meaning you see your character on the screen. Rockstar's pitch is that they've animated Max and the other playable characters so well—and they've given players such free movement when aiming their guns—that players can wheel around with the freedom to shoot swiftly in any direction, without any fear that they will make their character look like he's wound himself up in a pretzel.

In other words, you can stand Max still in one spot, make him shoot in front of himself, then upward, then left or even behind and he's going to fluidly and quickly move his body into proper position to make any of those shots look natural. You can dive to the ground and shoot from there without worrying that he can't shoot in a specific direction because he was facing the other way. That's first-person freedom of targeting controls merged with cool-looking third-person character animation. Rockstar reps are very proud of how good this looks, but the best byproduct of this system is how it enables a more interesting range of movement while shooting.

In an FPS, players can shoot from standing, crouching, walking, running or prone positions. In Max, you can shoot from all of those positions, plus while diving. This is the game-changer. You can be running away from an enemy, launch yourself into a slow motion dive out of a window and be firing back through the window at your pursuer…that isn't just something that looks cool, it's something that would be so confusing to pull off in an FPS that the makers of those games don't let you do it. Rockstar's game may not have the down-the-barrel intimacy of the first-person experience but the advantage in the player's options for movement and stylish action is Max Payne's.

Max Payne games didn't have multiplayer before. The announcement that the new one would invited the same skeptical squints previously aimed at the creators of the Uncharted and Assassin's Creed games. What made these games wonderful to play in their esteemed solo modes needed to transfer in some way to multiplayer. Otherwise, what's the point?

The Uncharted people tried to justify their multiplayer by making it involve shooting and climbing as well as adding some story to it, here and there. The Assassin's Creed people made their multiplayer mostly about stealthy assassinations.

The highlighted carry-over from old-school single-player Max Payne to new multiplayer Max Payne is the slow-motion shooting known as bullet time. It's in multiplayer and it works, even if it's not really the best and most Max-specific element in the competitive modes (more on what those are in a bit).

Bullet time in multiplayer slows you down, slows down anyone you can see, anyone who can see you, and anyone who those affected people can see or be seen by. Read that line again if you didn't get it. Or just think of it this way: there's no such thing as a player who is in bullet time being seen by a player who isn't in bullet time, or vice versa. If you can see someone in bullet time, you're in bullet time. Same if they can see you. You're only unaffected if you're out of sight.

If you've activated bullet time or caught in it, time slows for a few seconds. If you're an enemy of the player who activated bullet time, your screen is ringed by a red haze. Your reload speed and rate of fire is slowed. Things basically just suck a little more for you. If you're on the side of the person who activated bullet time-or if you activated it yourself-your screen is surrounded by a white haze. The world slows down for you, but your guns are still fast. You have the advantage.

You can activate bullet time in multiplayer if you have the "burst" armed on your character and activated when the burst meter has been full. You can also activate a briefer bit of bullet time if you, playing as any character in any configuration, perform what the developers call a "shoot-dodge": an acrobatic dive in any direction that is this game's prime defensive maneuver. The shoot-dodge will only trigger bullet time if you have adrenaline in your adrenaline meter, which…. Hold on. Are you getting confused?

Let's back up a bit.

Max Payne 3 multiplayer is built on a familiar modern foundation. It has headshots and its own form of perks. It lets you earn experience points for kills and assists, and it will let you level up and unlock better weapons and perks. All of that is standard and, in that combination, has been since Infinity Ward's revolutionary Call of Duty IV: Modern Warfare.

Some of Max Payne 3's core elements are simply re-named aspects of that much-imitated Modern Warfare formula. Bursts, for example, are perks, in this case upgradeable special abilities, one of which can be applied to a character as part of their weapon and gear load-out.

Other elements in Max Payne 3 are distinct, which causes this game's multiplayer to feel like a different sort of system than the Call of Duty's. The whole bullet-time system, as described above, taps into a currency called adrenaline, which is acquired as you kill enemies or loot their corpses. The player who gets no kills or raids no corpses won't be able to use their special burst moves, and their shoot-dodges won't be in slow-mo. But as they fill their adrenaline meter they'll get to use those perks and slow-mo dodges.

Player health in this game will either regenerate slowly or not at all, depending on which multiplayer playlists you choose to join. The smarter way to manage health is to use health packs called painkillers. They're acquired by looting bodies. Keeping one of them in reserve allows players who have been shot nearly dead to spring back to life if, while dying, they can counter-kill their attacker. (Think of Call of Duty's controversial Last Stand perk.)

Skilled competitive Max Payne players will be aggressive, will kill enemies, but will also loot bodies. They'll bank adrenaline, because the more adrenaline they attain, the closer they'll get to activating a second and then third level of the game's devious boost perks. That should be their main goal, because the perks are terrific.

Real gamers don't lock… at their own risk. In single-player and multiplayer, Max Payne 3 players can enable or disable aim assist. More casual players will favor a "soft-lock" configuration which snaps your gun's sights onto the enemy you're starting to aim at. More skilled players will turn that off. Without soft-lock, nailing an enemy is far more difficult and, appropriately, requires fewer shots to kill. In multiplayer, those who use soft-lock (like me!) will only be able to play against each other.

The bursts are the true stars of Max Payne 3's multiplayer and have the best chance of establishing a distinct Max Payne flavor for this game. They are, largely, advantages based on deviousness. They are, with some exceptions, wonderfully obnoxious in the best of screwing-over-the-enemy ways. Take "Paranoia." Go into a multiplayer gunfight with that and trigger it. It will cause players on the enemy team to see their allies as enemies, complete with bogus red-text player names above their actual allies. Enjoy watching them accidentally shoot each other. It gets craftier if you wait to earn enough mid-match adrenaline to activate Paranoia level 2, which not only makes the enemies see their teammates as their foes but turns on friendly fire and targets one of their allies for a bogus bounty.

The level 1 version of the burst called Weapon Double Dealer deactivates the enemy team's special weapon attachments (silencers, for example). Hold off and try to activate Weapon Double Dealer Level 3, which causes enemies who are holding grenades to drop them. The grenades they drop are primed to explode.

When I played, I activated a burst called Grounded that, at its most basic, let me disappear from the enemy team's mini-map. At Level 2, it would make my entire team disappear from their maps. At Level 3, it would put incorrect info in their maps.

Another great one: Slippery Character… Level 1, I drop a smoke grenade and briefly have unlimited stamina which lets me get the hell out of a bad situation; Level 2, same thing but with unlimited stamina until I die and also ignites a flashbang to blind enemies while I dash off; Level 3, same as Level 2 but for everyone on my team.

Some bursts are more traditional, such as Trigger Happy, which puts better guns in your hands or Big Dog, which boosts health. Players can counter some of the bursts by using in-game currency to buy items, such as an ID card, which nullifies Paranoia or goggles that block the effects of flashbangs.

The Modern Warfare influence on Max Payne 3 is most conspicuous between multiplayer matches, when players can access pages and pages of unlockable weapons, gear and burst perks. There are upgrades within upgrades, as the game's guns can be modded with a variety of scopes, silencers and other attachments. Torso and head-gear and the aforementioned burst-nullifying items fill out several more menus. There is weight to all of this stuff, which will affect your character's movement and recovery speed. All of these options ensure that players will be able to have very different loadouts from each other. They also indicate that, as with Modern Warfare, players will be drawn to keep playing to unlock new, more interesting and more potent stuff. Leveling up will unlock this stuff. Money earned in matches needs to be spent to buy the unlocked gear (just once to unlock; not each time you want to equip it).

Considering how precious XP and money is, it's nice that Rockstar gives players some extra ways to earn it, aside from basic kills, lootings and the winning of matches. During a multiplayer match, the player can activate vendettas on a player who kills him or her repeatedly. Killing the player you marked with a vendetta earns you extra experience points; but if the marked player kills you, they get the bonus XP. When a rounds of a multiplayer match is about to begin, a player can bet in-game money on which of three randomly-selected players will meet a certain goal first (for example, first player to get a kill). The amount of the bet appears to be tied to the skill level of the player you're betting on. Winning the bet gets you extra in-game cash.

My short, violent lives in a multiplayer gang

I absorbed the details about the many features of Max Payne 3's multiplayer over a pair of visits to Rockstar's offices, during which I played two distinct modes. Both were a lot of fun, even when I wasn't winning (confession: I was seldom winning).

Payne Killer pits an ever-changing combination of two players against six other players. The first player to get a kill becomes Max Payne; the first to die becomes Max's buddy Passos. They both can activate bullet time and are more powerful than the other players. When Max or Passos is killed, the player who is most responsible for their death (based on shots fired, kill-shot and still being alive) takes their place. Players earn points when they're playing as Max or Passos and killing enemies. The player with the most points at the end of the timed match wins. This mode was good, especially when I would both manage to become Max or Passos but buddy up with the person in control of the other one. Those two characters are way more powerful together than the other players. They dominate, until the pesky other six players finally flank you and get the kill-shot.

Brand Loyalty… Rockstar will let players join large clusters of like-minded gamers called Crews, loyal to a favorite city, sports team or some other affiliation. Members of Crews will be networked through Rockstar's web-based Social Club and will have an option to link up with fellow Crew members during multiplayer matching. Crews won't just be tied to Max Payne 3 but to Rockstar's upcoming Grand Theft Auto V and presumably to new games beyond that. If the system works, Rockstar will enjoy the benefits of assembling teams of fans who are loyal not to just a game series, as, say Call of Duty: Elite fans are to games across the CoD series, but to a label of games. This is the kind of cross-game brand loyalty that the likes of only a Blizzard or Nintendo can command. Baking it into multiplayer matchmaking is a crafty play by Rockstar.

I spent much more time at Rockstar playing Gang Wars, which is the mode the game's creators are pushing hardest. This 16-player mode is set within the fiction of the game's single-player game. It includes voice-over by Max Payne and other major characters explaining what is happening. These Gang Wars matches put teams of players on opposite sides of gang battles set in locations near New York or in Brazil that are part of the game's solo campaign. The story for each Gang Wars match is roughly the same: there's a turf battle between two sides. The minutiae of the stories differs thanks to a set of shifting modes and objectives that are doled out on the fly by the game as it calculates what players are doing, who has the advantage and what might be interesting to have happen next. For example, I played a match that started with a round played by Turf War rules, which involved seizing territory on the map. My side failed and was sent into a new round that required us to assassinate an opposing player (presumably the player on the other team who was most successful in the first round). We had to get five kills on the enemy team before our target's identity was revealed. We succeeded, which, for reasons explained in the voiceover led to a round during which we had to run bags of money (or was it contraband?) to drop-off locations. We succeeded there too, but failed in the next round that required us to seize three successive territory locations. That led into a final team-deathmatch round that would have had a completion objective that favored the team that had won the majority of previous rounds, but didn't that time since each team had won two rounds.

I played Gang Wars matches set in Hoboken and in a favela in Rio. I also played one set on a dock. The matches always lasted about 20 minutes and always through five rounds. The changing objectives reminded me of the little bit of the Killzone series' multiplayer, but in those games the objectives seemed to shift entirely at random. The array of objective-based rounds in Max Payne 3 was different every time, and it did seem to adjust according to some hidden statistical logic. Threading it together as a story was a good bonus. I'm not convinced that the game's logic always, say, picks the best player of one round to be an assassination target in the next, because I once was the worst person in my team in one round and then was the target in the next. But things didn't feel entirely random, either. I had the sense that our experiences were congealing into a mini-story thanks to the narration preceding each level. I liked that, as it made me feel more invested in the outcome.

The changing objectives in Gang Wars matched well with the nimbleness of Max Payne's multiplayer characters and the deviousness of its many perks. Many of the rounds were based on needing to get somewhere fast and be unhittable, whether to seize territory or move a bag. If the game merely let you run, that'd be nice, but it is letting you shoot-dodge in slow-motion out of the line of fire as you reach a goal or finish grabbing some turf. That makes brief moments of multiplayer mayhem feel like some sort of bullet-filled ballet. It feels grand and crafty, as does using the right burst at the right time.

There are lots of smart, subtle details to the design of Gang Wars. There are back-stories to all of the gangs and police forces that you can play as. Different gangs can fight on a map but you'll never play as a gang that couldn't be there based on the logic of the game's story. Maps are tweaked slightly to accommodate the goals of a round, but something that is blown up in a round played under Sabotage rules will remain destroyed in a subsequent round.

The start of something bigger

There hasn't been a new Max Payne game since the release of the very first Call of Duty. Little more needs to be said to underscore the rise of today's modern online shooters and the absence of Max Payne or Rockstar Games during that ascendance. And yet it's a little odd that a Max Payne game will now represent Rockstar's big move in multiplayer, not a GTA or its upstart Red Dead western. Maybe Max is more of a natural, since the series is more purely a shooter and because, let's face it, any modern linear shooter-as opposed to open-world epics like GTA and RDR—could use a good multiplayer mode with long-term appeal to keep players from feeling they didn't get their money's.

With GTA III Rockstar was leaping to something no one else had achieved. They were leading by being original. Max Payne 3 multiplayer does not seem as boldly alien as GTA III's single-player. It is something that makes sense as a major batch of tweaks to the formula of both its single-player Max Payne predecessors and its new rival, the Call of Duty games. That lake of GTA III-level historic freshness doesn't prevent it from having the potential to be an improvement.

This past weekend, Rockstar started airing a TV commercial for Max Payne 3. It features scenes pulled from the game's single-player mode. The commercial stunned me, to be honest, because it had reminded me that there's a single-player mode worth caring about in Max Payne 3. I'd nearly forgotten, because in my mind Max Payne 3 has morphed into a multiplayer game, a game whose solo mode will be relevant in May, but whose multiplayer has the chance to be the reason we're still talking about and playing Max Payne 3 in June, July and, surely Rockstar hopes, for many months beyond that.

If Rockstar finally has a multiplayer mega-hit coming it'll be thanks to their own Max Payne-like effort… they scoped the multiplayer scene, they took it slow, they aimed and now, with a leap, they're taking their shot.