Forging Honor: Providing a Coherent Vision for a New IP

[Music] so my name is Jason Vandenberg creative director for Honor before I get started just to get an idea of who I'm dealing with here how many of y'all have played for Honor holy wow okay great that's about half uh that's cool so I um that's good um I do have information for the rest of you so you won't be lost um but I just wanted to sync up there all right so this talk is forging honor providing a coherent vision for a new IP and the more I read that sentence as I Was preparing this the more I read that subtitle the the harder it was for me to look in the mirror and maintaining of my my self-respect uh because that is horrible corporate speak and not at all what happened um so I'm going to rename this this uh this talk here because while we did end up providing a coherent vision for a new IP what we it grew out of one

very important emotion and that is this um we we had a a big Challenge and a lot of work to do to make it happen now when I showed my producer this slide Stefan cardan he was like I don't think that it was desperation he gave me this other I think it was more determination that we were doing this and that right there tells you a lot about me and my producer we're a good pair we he more about that so this talk is not um providing a coherent vision vision for the new IP no no no let's rename it to what I actually want you to remember and that is that if you want to provide a coherent vision for your new IP what you need to do is never stop pitching never okay now that will make more sense as we get deeper into the talk but that's the title never stop pitching never stop okay so the pitch why is if I'm if I'm here to talk about Vision why am I here to talk to you about a pitch I mean this isn't a sales presentation right this isn't

about getting the deal I'm a designer and I'm a creative director what am I doing the thing is that hundreds of people simply can't agree it's not doable right you can coers a lot of people to agree right but that's hard to do in in a team project you need people to all be aligned and moving in the same direction right so the pitch the art of the pitch is how you get people to see the same goal and how you get people aligned the first part of this talk is going to be an examining of how to do that then the second part will be how what that looks like different tools that you can turn that you can use during your production uh to keep people in line but it's all pitching okay keeping people in line is all pitching so let's start by defining what a pitch is so never stop pitching let's define what a pitch is uh this is one way we think that a lot of people this is think this is how pitching works right you get an elevator get in the elevator you say hey I have a 30 seconds later 30 million

dollar it's amazing it's just can't we just got to refine that pitch so you have exactly the thing doesn't happen that's not how it works um this is another idea of how we think where we have this we get up in front of this room and this very important people and we make this very reasoned impassioned maybe very clever emotional appeal and then they think very cautiously and and they nod seriously and then we walk away with $30 million right now that does actually happen once and that is not enough to keep your team on track across an IP right this is what pitching actually looks like okay this is a this is a an open house with a politician in the middle talking to their constituents okay because pitching is actually a process of interaction between you the vision holder and the people who actually need to understand and comprehend and buy in

and then feed back to you about where you're wrong and then that dialogue needs to occur right so this is actually what pitching means and you do it all the time now to be clear this story I'm going to tell you about how this went un for Honor I kind of sucked at this at the beginning so I'm going to give you some tell you some stories about what happened in the beginning the early stories are not going to be examples of good pitches but we'll get there eventually um so to clarify what do we think pitching is for we believe a lot of people that pitching is for convincing to get cash that is not at all what it's for pitching is a way for you to Signal your values to the people you are going to collaborate with in order to earn their confidence in whatever that means confidence that their jobs are meaningful confidence that the Project's going to be a success confidence that they're going to get money back from their investment whatever confidence means to them

and whatever confidence means to you this is what pitching is actually trying to do which is why it is at the heart of creative leadership and why it is at the heart of keeping people aligned over time keeping people aligned over time is not telling them what to do it is signaling that you are on the same team you want the same things and then you show them where you want to go and then they see that they want to go there too okay that's what pitching actually is not that one it's that one okay so a pitch is anything that connects people to the reasons why their efforts matter which is why we do it in the beginning to get the money now let's pitch what is for Honor before we go any further what is for Honor uh I can it's a it's a video game where Knights Vikings and Samurai crashed together on an epic medieval Battlefield um it was my um my 15-year um dream pitch game uh it was my personal sort of quest that has now came out um February 14th a couple weeks ago um but it's easier to

just show you what the game is like so this is a quick video that we'll introduce you to if you haven't seen it um this is what it's about warning there's some violence there we have swords so it's not terrible but there is some if you're sensitive to that here we go oops sorry [Music] [Applause] this is a 4v4 multiplayer Battlefield we also have a solo campaign the guys with shields over their heads are other players [Applause]

oh coward we have a system called The Art of battle it's a whole new way to do melee combat involves stances on the right stick locks and attacks and some rather spectacular executions because yes plays on Epic medieval Battlefield and we can go on but that's the basic gist of the game um uh if you haven't seen for Honor that gives you a large part of what what you need to know for the rest of the talk okay so where did it start how did this how did this game get started I'm going to give you a little bit of the background I've told the story um to the press a lot um so I'll do a fast version of this but the idea for Honor actually began about 15

years ago um when my wife bought uh the two of us a Year's uh uh uh subscription I guess uh to a dojo to a dojo in uh San Francisco that was teaching Western martial arts long sword German long sword um and I studied this art of sword fighting it's just really rediscovered form and I was walking home one day and I was all impressed with the the how simple the system was and I thought what if we took these stances and we put them on the right stick and I had this new controller idea like oh this is going to be great got really excited about it because I thought this would feel like real fighting and it would move the fighting genre forward yay cool so I pitched it and I pitched it to everyone who would listen for 10 years I pitched it the answer was no uh uh again no no no no we don't make that kind of game no that'll never work no I don't get it why would you want them this no no no no no no

no so um I want to be clear I'm going to tell you why I think I'm going to spoil the ending a little bit I'm going to tell you why I think I failed um but I wasn't I didn't it took me longer than this to figure this out this is the core principle I want you to understand about pitching don't pitch your idea pitch your purpose I was pitching an idea that I had about melee combat I was not pitching a reason to make a video game okay to demonstrate what I mean quickly I'll give you the pitch here was the cool pitch this is my original pitch I have an idea for a better way to do melee combat with a standard controller okay we're going to put the guards of martial arts on the right stick and if we do that in third person we end up with a whole new experience where the fighting feels more like real Combat but in an intuitive way

that is a terrible pitch it's horrible it's awful um it works if you're able to like squint and visualize the whole system and kind of reach towards a thing but of course I was pitching to executive producers and business people and you know even designers would be like I don't think I don't really think that would work right it's a bad pitch um because I wasn't pitching the reason why it mattered so what happened what happened is I met this guy um yanis mot managing director at Ubisoft Montreal I was working at Ubisoft Montreal at the time and um after years of trying to pitch he he had he took me to lunch one day he took me to lunch one day as he does he likes to you know let's go talk let's have our annual talk like once a year he likes to go and talk he looks at me and he's like so Jason what do you really want to do what do you really want to

do and that's his eyes are like that they're creepy he's really like he's this really like intensely compassionate but very dangerous man right um and I was pissed off I had had a bad day okay I was really I was flaming I was RA I was raging that day and I was like you know what you what would I do I'll tell you what I would do and I said to him you know what I'm going to tell you but you're going to say no you know why you're going to say no because you can't see it I want to change the way melee combat works I want to feel the way that I feel when I pick up a weapon and I go out with my nerd friends and we fight because yeah man I do that I want to I want to feel those emotions of Battlefield and I have this idea about how to make that work but you guys can't see it so you're going to tell me no the middle of this restaurant it was a nice restaurant too he's he's like whoa um and so I told him the thing and

at the end he smiles at me and he says no and I'm like I knew you were going to and he says but I have someone I want you to meet and he says I want you to meet stepan cardan Stephan cardan was the producer of a team at the time called the fox team they had done Naruto and Prince of Persia and a bunch of fighting stuff um inside Ubisoft and they were looking for a creative director and he had been going around asking an interviewing people talking about you know he would ask them this question he had this question that he wanted to ask me so we went to the bar across the street and Steph looked at me and he said what would be the game of your life what's the game that you would make what's the one thing you want to do what's the game that would make your life have meaning and I was pissed still

but I told him I'm like ra right um and at the end of that he uh I I explained it all to him and he said I think you should talk to my team so I put a deck together and I gave this pitch right I gave this pitch now it was a terrible pitch I want to be clear about that it was better than the pitch that I just gave you but I'm going to show you the key slide from the pitch that I made um so you understand what not to do I want to make fight club with a claymore fight club with swords that's what I want to do I just I just want to fight with weapons um because I was so desperate I was like I just want to fight I just want to do this system right like um so it's terrible it's a terrible pitch um but they said yes they said yes they said let's do this um and there were a lot of reasons I'm going to go through why that happened um but the key thing

again I had accidentally pitched my purpose because I was Pitch pissed right I had forgotten to talk about the controller part and I got so hung up on the God damn it I just want to fight I want to feel the way I feel when I do this for real it's so cool and I don't feel that way when I play other games and I want to and I had accidentally put some passion and some thought into the into the some emotion into the context and I connected with them accidentally um so later so we got a yes and we started and that's where it started that's where the that's where the the game began um uh so we kept we kept going um and but at this point and this is the thing I want you to there's a key thing I want you to understand remember the the elevator pitch idea right you get in the elevator ding $3 million right or the you know you stand up and they ask for the $30 million so I had gotten the team I got the team and I got the Greenlight with a terrible pitch right I had not yet learned how to do it well the way I'm I hope you will feel I did right so it it it still

didn't work but the pitch turned into a really really strong vehicle for the project because the pitch is only the beginning right so what happened next I'm going to take a quick moment and I'm going to do this is going to be a straight up plug all right so brace yourself because somewhere in the first four months of the project this group called The think 8 came to our project and they did a workshop on their process and I they haven't finished their freaking book and you guys finish your book these guys I want to read the book um when their book comes out read it um and if you can hire them great they did this process for thinking about what you're trying to accomplish I highly recommend it we came out of that process with a pitch that actually was the one that carried us through the first 18 months I'm going to do the pitch for you now I'm going to do the pitch that I did at the the first like you know I don't know I gave the pitch like a 100 times the course of the first two years so I'm going to do the the

opening bit so this is the pitch that I think actually carried for Honor through its opening bits here it goes so I have a I have a belief why am I making this game I have a belief I have a profound belief I believe this I believe that combat is an art capital a art I believe that combat is an art form where the artist sometimes gives their lives in defense of what they believe in I have a military family my father was a marine my dad was an infantryman in World War II and I have all my brother was a ranger and my son was joined in the Navy early on in his life um I was the black sheep okay I deeply respect Warriors right even if I understand that the Army can be used for horrible purposes right um I have I I believe that combat is is an art form deadly terrible necessary we don't want it yet it is there and I have a

favorite style it is this one this is a screenshot from Total War Medieval too okay um which at the time it's the actual screenshot I used for the pitch at the time was the only reference I could find to make my point I this is my favorite style of combat it is close it is intense you see you're right in there you're next to them but I don't want to play this game I mean I do play this game but this is not the game I want to make right I want to make this game I want to be that guy right I want to be or you know the guy that lives right um I want to be surrounded on the battlefield I want to know that my skill is what matters and I right I can't do this I can't play that game at the time this game didn't exist now it does five years later but this that's the game I want to make that's a better pitch right it's better it even if you don't agree or you don't want to work with me on the project at least now you understand why I want to make it what's its value

what's the problem that it's trying to solve it's better to try and demonstrate to you how better it is I'm going to try and do a little experiment here where I do that same pitch without the Y part without the combat as an art bit so let's just erase our brains I know you can't do that but this just a mental exercise it'll be good for you guys try it out we're going to try this so here's a better pitch here's the here's the pitch without this I love this kind of combat personal it's brutal difficult exhausting and I want to make a game about this kind of combat but I don't want to play this game I want to play this game and I have an idea about how to connect the player through the controller to this character in a way that will change the way these kinds of melee games are made it's okay combat's a [ __ ] art right and I believe it um so

never stop pitching but pitch your purpose how did I learn this I showed you the think eight that was absolutely part of this but I'm going to show you a slide and if you're if you're on the Internet is anyone on the internet do you guys use the internet yeah good um you may be familiar with this guy so I learned this um this technique from a guy named Simon synic if you've seen this guy on your internets in the last 6 months it's because he went viral with a video where he was saying terrible things about Millennials um please do not let that video prevent you from extracting the awesome that is this talk how great leaders Inspire action it's a thing about the Golden Circle when people ask me how can I do what you do how can I learn to pitch I say go watch this video 20 times and when you've digested the lessons of this video go in there the quick version of this goes like this he has the story he tells about Apple and Dell people don't buy buy what you make

they buy why you made it Dell Dell's pitch for a computer we have great computers great Hardware great service delivered to your door affordable we can you know great warranties would you like to buy a computer it's great Apple's pitch we believe that technology can be used to improve The Human Condition and it should be we happen to make a computer it's not bad watch this video I learned all this from him so so that was the first part of the pitch now so pitch the Y those are two tools so far first you never stop pitching you're always pitching two pitch your purpose not your idea but you do have to do this the dreaded business case do you need to make the dreaded business case absolutely it is super easy to come up with a great pitch for game that's already been

made right I want to make a game that immerses you in the adventure of being a soldier captures the fantasy of being in the middle of a modern Battlefield right yes we've made those before right we know it's not okay good but what's something special about that right so I'm going to give you the example of the dreaded business case this is tool number three I've been sneaking my tools in on you under my under all my stories tool number three the dreaded business case this is how I pitched the business case and it's an example of trying to point to the problem that this game is trying to solve here we go so I'm going to do two charts for you first one was going to be gun games second will be melee games do the same thing here's an axis on this side we have PVP combat skill so the further out we go here the the more skill is required to play this game the more skill the game asks of you right or potential for skill expression there is and up here is immersion the higher up here we go the more the world is there I

believe in the characters in the space and I'm really in there I'm really I feel like I've been transported okay so with gun games in the beginning there were always this balance between and we can argue about exactly where the dots go but there was always this balance between skill and immersion we quickly discovered this Zone here where it was all about skill right at the same time we discovered this other Zone up here where it was all about immersion right generally but all along there were these games these slides are a little bit outdated cuz remember this project was 5 years long so excuse me for for that um but there was these games that were the balance of both had the best of both the highest potential for skill and the highest potential for immersion all right so let's do that for melee games same thing so in the beginning again trying to balance the both there were some interesting experiments Bido blade um right off the bat we found a Zone here where we can it's all about skill right and who cares about emersion right it's all about just player skill player versus player and then we always had these games that are

about imersion getting into the world right A lot of these games you don't even play on hard right there's no hard difficulty in a in a Zelda or Assassin's Creed right so not about skill but when it comes to games that did both there's some interesting experiments name one name one game that has melee combat as its primary topic that has the immersion of a Call of Duty a Halo Battlefield and has a skill level of skill expression of a the Halo Call of Duty Battlefield one game I've given this part of the presentation to probably over 3,000 people now and I just gave it to the entire internet so I'm sure I'll hear about it but no one ever said one game right okay well my point is what the [ __ ] man I want to play this game like I really want to play it and I think that I'm not alone so that's the business case that was my entire business case but do you see what

I'm doing here I am pointing to a problem that I thought a lot of people might have which is the lack of a Knights versus Vikings versus Samurai sword fighting game in their life and I am setting out to fill that void because damn it the world deserves that kind of video game so make sure that you're solving a problem that a lot of people have now this doesn't just apply to your audience of course because remember that pitch when I talked to jannis and then I talked to Steph well I was also solving a problem that yanis and Steph had jannis had a problem he needed a new IP he was looking for something new to do out of Ubisoft Montreal and he had a team that was looking for something to do and didn't have a creative leader that's a problem for him he's burning money and he's like he wants something cool Steph my producer had a problem he had a he was running a team with no creative leader so I my pitch also solved their

problems so never stop pitching pitch your purpose and solve someone's problem I want to underscore this for Honor didn't just happen because I had a good idea I think I had a good idea but it wasn't very it wasn't good enough I needed an entire design team to help fix it and they really did got one of my designers here in the front she was like yes yes we fixed your game I'm not that great of a designer um um but the reason for Honor happened was because a whole bunch of people had a problem and they were all different problems and the pitch was a solution to a majority of those problems so find someone who's got a problem that your idea solves and go talk to them and remember I pitched to the team and it was the team that said yes okay oh yeah so we

had to so now we have a pitch that's a pretty good pitch and it carried us through so that was great my part was good but we also had to build um uh the what's it called um the video game all right um so we started doing that now this idea had there wasn't such a thing at the time and so we started doing um if you guys have attended um Mark leblancs uh quick if I say fail faster and follow the fun who has does that familiar to you great all the rest of you if you are a designer or a producer or really want to make video games attend Mark leblanc's lectures and learn about fail faster follow the fun because that's what we did we did a series of prototypes um this is the first prototype that was that was done this was done in the first week of for Honor um this is our two-player uh experience here uh uh was two controllers and we had uh the guards in the middle there and you could attack little little block windows and health bars and stamas and that was where foner started the very first video game week one on the project

it was fantastic fail faster follow the fun means build as many prototypes as you can over the course of the first 18 months of the project we made like 400 prototypes um we just we would play every day um we' rock and roll and as we played as we as we built the game we evolved this was we played with stick figures for the first year um and it was great uh it was a lot of fun you can see us we're experimenting with feedback systems and stuff one of the things that we learned is what you play with stick figures you can see the entire Battlefield really clearly because nobody has any flesh to block the field so when we put real um skin on the characters suddenly the game changed we had to change all our maps and you know everything was but we played with stick figures for a while this is a screenshot from an early game super brand in the middle there that's my producer that's Steph and uh the Dark Lord that's me and unfortunately it was kin who got the kill I was so pissed but it was a great so we what we were

doing is we were iterating and iterating and iterating but we were playing like this for a long time how do you know what the game looks like so remember this talk is about keeping a team aligned how do you keep a team aligned right we had a good pitch but what's the game going to look like now everyone's bought in what do we do what are we really building so while we were doing this while we were iterating the iterating and iterating and iterating and playing every day we had another thing we were building was a thing called Target gameplay footage you may have heard of this this concept um uh other talks I'm not sure um but what is a target gameplay footage it is an attempt to create you create a video a cinematic that shows you way in advance what the game will look like or what it could look like anyway right um it's an attempt to sort of explore the future through a video and it this idea sometimes gets a bad rep because of course the question is why are we wasting all this time on assets that we don't ship right it's a huge amount of

effort it's expensive to make right what's it for and it seems like a gig often feels like to developers like it's waste it's a waste of time but in certain cases and if you do it well I'm going to give you a list of how you do it well in a second uh it can really help you I'm going to show you a little clip from uh the middle of the TGF that we built for for Honor this was done um the second year and between the second and the third year of the project um and you're going to hear in this clip you're going to hear an announcer come in and start talking about points and you know oh he's got to take the thing doing sort of commentary stuff that was our way of injecting the game design rules into this video so that is if people wanted to watch it and kind of understand how the mode was going to work that there would be a way for them to do that but um it's not really a video so this is the the the opening uh seconds or open minute and a half or so of the uh of the TGF we built key thing to know all of this was

rendered inside the actual game engine with actual assets 3 years in advance of shipping the game [Applause] Blaze is really starting to overextend into that minion group if he's not careful he's going to get surrounded Astros Serpent and blades are going to tag team this captain and that's going to give their guys the push they need to really get this match started now blades is keeping it a little bit defensive right now he's waiting for his minions to join him so he can start this push against the

Vikings oh those catapults are really going to screw with blades's plan he's got to take that flag it's also going to give his team 200 points which is a solid step towards the 1,000 they need to put the Vikings into sudden death now blade should have an easy time taking care of this point nothing but minions here so his FL is exactly what he needs to take him out all right the knights Take the Lead yes [Music] oh [ __ ] ah crap Here Comes Eric larouge he wants to take back the Catapult and if blades wants to hold against that axe with his flail he's going to need to keep The High Ground let's see if he can pull it off a there it

is okay oh dude that guy needs to practice so um so that gives you a feel for that all that was MOA it was just we just got actors in the mo motion capture stage and had them go through that but when we did the map we were sitting there with our game director and our game designer and they were we were designing all the moves to be like how we thought it would work and you know try to fake it right um so that it would all come together um but if you think about that what I showed you in the opening right the first charge through that was 3 years before that right pretty proud of that um so how did that work how how did we get this asset to be useful to the team there's a couple of key things if you're going to do this a couple of key things that you really you must do or or it will be a waste of time use real assets you have to be using the actual stuff that you think you will be using in the game it has to be stuff that has the has the poly count has the right level of textures right something like the right process your best guess as to how you're going to build those real Assets in the game if you possibly can you need to use your real engine

they're going to you're going to make a bunch of mistakes and there's going to be a bunch of conflicts between your departments while you're making this TGF right those need to be real they shouldn't be fake right they shouldn't be having discussions about how to make the movie they should be talking about well in the real game we wouldn't do it this way and so we shouldn't do this now right should be have the have your arguments be real use the real team so that when the arguments you have what the so that the arguments that you have are remembered by your team that knowledge is embedded inside your group right and it's it it It's Tricky cuz it's your team is not 400 animators in another country right it's it's a it it can constrain you but there's nothing more valuable for the team than the lessons that they learned making this stuff so use the real Team stick to the core player experience okay follow the player around force yourself to not cut don't take shortcuts it's not a trailer you're not trying to

sell this game with this TGF you're trying to inform the team the whole team and the company about what you're building and if you do those things then this is not a waste of time especially if you have nothing else to compare it to if you have a game that is a lot like your game then you can often just point at that and be like well like this but different right that can you that can get you through a lot but if you're doing something new if you're working on a new IP and if you got ideas that you don't have good examples of this is an incredibly useful tool for keeping people on track and align on the same idea now that's really expensive right you're like great thanks a lot for rubbing it in our faces how big the budgets are at Ubisoft thanks a lot man right like must be nice right um well we did that because we we can right but I'm going to show you another clip that was actually the first TGF we made and this clip there's not

going to be any sound on this video because we used a soundtrack from uh Two Steps From Hell which is a soundtrack you know group and it's not our like we didn't license it right it's all internal stuff so there's not going to be any sound here but this was made by one person my animation director um and I'll talk you through what we got here oops hey give me the thing give me my video there it is Battle imagine epic music um what we did is he went into I think it was Maya might have been in Max um and he stole a bunch of characters from Assassin's Creed and posed them in a series of vignettes and then he just cut between them and moved the camera around behind the round to try to try and get a feel for what this game might feel like and we chose seatone why because it's artistic and cool no because we didn't have to texture anything was no work to be done it was complete cuz we didn't care about the

texture at that point right we just wanted to get it done now that's not that's there was more it went on it had you know sort of a sense of loop but I just want to use this as an example you can if you think creatively you can do something that gives you 80% of the value that I just showed you of the of the previous thing with one 1% of the work right the point is go through the thinking through it process so never stop pitching you're always pitching hopefully by now I've convinced you of that pitch your purpose solve someone else's problem and describe the target describe the target as accurately as you can you've got a large team of people who need to be able to make decisions when you're not in the room so last one this the last one and there's two quick ones at the end um we're getting we're all right we're doing good um so last this one is a culture of play so now where are we in the production we got the green light yay we did a bunch of prototypes yay we made our TGF we know where going right cool this is good stuff now we're making

the game and while it's useful to see the TGF and know kind of what it's going to look like and we get a feel for how we're going to play it or and we're making all these prototypes there's an essential need that game developers have which is to understand why their game is cool and to validate to prove to themselves as often as they can that what they're doing is working that they're succeeding today not just in six months so the way we did this is instead of having Milestones on for Honor we had tournaments every 3 months we would all get together we would have the build and we would close the build we would lock stabilize like the whole thing right um and I can tell you the programmers were very serious about being sure that the build was stable because they knew that on Friday the entire team was going to be playing this game in a tournament and they didn't want to be the one who was responsible for the game crashing mid match and then their friend coming over and being like why did they game right

there was they put a lot of pressure on themselves to make it work but then we would sit and we would play and it was awesome it was really fun um I'll show you a quick video we made just to prove that we actually did it uh this is the actual team uh so it's a quick video the end of the video that we made that shows a tournament two teams f for the championship or crash and the pixel this was the second tournament you can see our prototype rning in the background there yay the champion of the dev team would self organize in the teams and we would have just a you know normal tournament we'd have little trophies and they would pass from Team to team the trophies were great one of our one of our devs took some clay one night and made a series of clay stick figures they were fantastic um so we played every week um if you weren't playing every day everyone would play on

Friday and then every 3 months we would have a tournament um and we were always playing the game because that for us we're a multiplayer game it was really important for a single player game you need to do it differently but same idea applies quick thing I mentioned Giannis mot the very beginning the guy who with the beady eyes or the blue eyes or he's so intense ferocious this guy I wanted to just give you a quick taste of what I was dealing with every day of my life so this is Giannis here in the middle in the tournament we were playing against my team I'm on the left there and they had and they just won and I want to show you the grace and and the modesty and the the pure just every day so never stop pitching describe the target culture of play the culture of

play is one of the best ways during the production to maintain it of course you you need to be you need to have all the other pillars in place but once you it's a great way of maintaining and reinforcing it all right we're getting near the end here which is great um there are two more tools that I want to U mention quickly but there one of them is obvious and you already know about them and the other one was you see you'll see is a talk that I gave already um so the first one is key art this is amazing right you have to do this right but duh right like um so this was the very first image that my art director um put together that we all when he put he came home one day from the weekend and had done this and we all went whoa that's that's our game that's that's what we're doing it's really cool right um and it I mean if you've seen the collector's edition that we released it's literally that right it's three helmets um together it was an amazing way to communicate what we were trying to do this is the first image that we did um this was uh an attempt to capture what made our fighting different um

because that style that stance that that character is in comes from German longsword and is something that you don't see usually and there's a kind of an intensity and a ferocity that's there the reason that that stance is so tense is because I'm he dragged me into a corner and took pictures of me and forced me to stand like that for several hours and the day after we took that picture and he did a paint over my back went out and I was on my back for three days so I paid for that picture um but it really captured the essence of our fighting in some ways our world we did amazing stuff we this natural world with all this beauty this was the first picture the first time I saw a detailed render with all of our lighting stuff when I came over to my um art director's computer I said why do you have a photograph of a sword and a shield on your screen and then he turned the camera and I was like well that's in the engine oh my God uh and I had this experience several times um so it really we we had been working on um the look of the metal the look of the leather this feel of aged

material that we really wanted to capture and it really guided us through so that's not my department it's not my expertise we had an amazing art team but of course key art is is a crucial way for keeping people on track key art get some the last one I give you is this one which is to know your audience um I gave a talk last year uh called the engines of play where I talked about if if you probably probably haven't seen it but um I talked about these things called taste maps and player motivation we did this process right um on the team I'm not going to go through how we used it here because that's what the talk was last year um but it absolutely helps in defining who you're making this game for and what they're going to get out of it and that helps their design team Your Design Team enormously and it also helps your marketing team and your business team understand how the design is going to work and function but there's a whole other talk on the G VA about that so

here we go never stop pitching I hope by now I've convinced you everything I was doing here was some form of a pitch the why is here in every one of these tools right why are we doing tournaments combat is an art form I want you to understand combat I want you to be in there and experiencing that art form every day as much as you can right describe the target TGF so never stop pitching pitch your purpose watch Simon to next talk I know you probably think he's a dick he's not or maybe he is I don't care he's smart Okay um I've never met him I don't know solve someone's problem for Honor happened because it solved like a lot of people's problem not just because people believed in me it's a great story and my ego would love you to believe that I stood up in front of you know Ubisoft and that the Brilliance of my genius is that that's not what [ __ ] happened that doesn't happen right and

if they did do that it would be a mistake right it should be more complex than that describe the target clearly show your team where you're going generate a culture of play play your own game make your key art so you know exactly what emotions you want to evoke visually how you're going to do that and get to know your audience the last one I'm going to do is this was was I gave this um gave this presentation to Clint Hawking who was my adviser and he pointed out at the end something that there's one more reason there's one more place where all these pillars and all this pitch and all this work comes incredibly useful and that is when you are talking to your players okay I showed you the TGF and I showed you the the the the start that video is the way that the game starts that's how we did the the the the same video the same setup was on the the stage at E3 and all of my stuff about combat is an art form and all that stuff about why I want to make this game it's

all in my interviews right and not just my interviews it's in bad's interviews right when she goes on there and does her videos she sometimes she does it better than me right these ideas spread right and if they're true they're true they're going to be as true to your business people as they are to the players they should translate and so if you've gotten really honest about why you're making this game and as a creative leader you need to be honest about why you're making this game cuz cynicism spreads right you need to be honest if you've done that then your players will hear the same vision that your team has heard and with any luck it'll solve their problem too that's my talk uh I think we have time for a few questions but thank you very much yay uh I think we' got 15 minutes am I right no we got time for questions yo questions hi first of all congratulations on the

release W game kicks ass and it's just super stable and on all four wheels and running I have a question about key art um what happens when you have keyart that kicks ass and is awesome and is something very close to what you think that you want but you're not sure or you're maybe sure that it's not but it you're it's really good keyart but it doesn't get it doesn't show the destination that you want the team to be be going towards well two answers to that question um and it entirely depends on whether you're right or wrong yeah so which is it if okay let's say are you right you're right you're right the game doesn't want to go in that direction but the key art is saying that then you need to have a clear conversation with your art team or your art director or whoever it is that is doing the art right um about these values start at the values and say this is why I need to find where you think it's gone wrong you you need to be able to as a creative leader you need to be

able to illustrate to those people why why you think it's off right um You need to be able to do better than well I don't really get it or this is I just don't think this is right and these tools if you take the time to digest and really think about your own personal why what this game is about for you emotionally and then you look at what you're at what they've done you should be able to identify why the emotions are different which is the different emotion and then talk about that talk about what I feel like this this art makes me feel this way but what I would like to feel is like this right the mistake that many people make is I think is to ask for is to give your team Solutions instead of problems um everyone in the games industry not everyone but almost everyone in the games industry came in here because we're interested in solving difficult problems so if you have a team of people who are interested in solving difficult problems and then you walk up to them and you give them a solution what are they going to do do you're going to go

okay but if you walk up to them and you say I have this problem your art makes me feel like this and I need to feel like this they're going to be like if they're interested and if you've got good rapport with them they're going to go huh I think I can do that I'll show you right they'll give you something cool thanks thanks hey hi yeah uh thank you for the amazing session amazing talk uh I want to ask how ear in the development came this idea of mashing these different cultures together and how yeah how uh this crazy idea that well everybody went along with it and it came yeah and it came to the release so you mean it's the night's spiking Samurai thing yeah so Knights Vikings and Samurai what um so what happened there um was I came into the project with the desire to make the sword fighting part from the beginning we were um we were talking about what characters we could use right who do we want to be who

do we want to be and after you know a week or two of discussion along that rack the the conversation was really like we should do Samurai and oh I want to do this Viking over here and I want to do these kns and we should do these things and VI nights Viking Samurai nights Viking and I turned to my my producer one day and I said hey Steph what if what if we did nights Vikings and Samurai and he looks at me and he's like I kind of love that and he tried it out on people he would he went around in the hall and he would try it out on people because he's like that he would go around and be like night Vikings and Samurai and we just it was so much fun people just knew it they just loved it right and the amazing thing about nights Viking Samurai let's do a quick test I'll show I'll actually tell you why we're doing this it'll show you why show of hands Knights Viking Samurai pick one show of hands Knights my people

Vikings Samurai always the most popular who did not raise their hand who did not raise your hand that's why we're doing Knights versus Samurai versus Vikings everybody knows you picked when you were eight years [Laughter] old thank you how did you keep like a coherent vision for the game rather than just letting it become sort of an interesting feature you came up with like where did the and when did The Game come through rather than just the combat system you thought we because we spent we did it by spending the first 18 months of development almost exclusively on the combat system we knew that this was going to be the Breakthrough at Ubisoft um uh this this moment is called a breakthrough that which something that we look for um so there's a culture around Ubisoft for look looking for things game gameplay breakthroughs that are like this um and we knew that if we

could crack this that we would end up building the whole game around it because it would change melee combat in some ways for us right so from the beginning it was clear that that's how that's what we were going to do um and we knew that we were we were going to be a uh a new IP from the beginning so it was easy for us to Define that from the from the start right we weren't we weren't having to push other stuff out of the way that's the nice thing about doing a new IP is that you have this blank slate and so we were able to go it's right there in in the middle and then when other stuff would come in we would be like well this needs to stay here in the center and then we were able to prevent that from happening it was nice um there's other problems with having a new IP though the most important one is what's the genre of foner does anyone know because I would like to know it would be really useful for me to be able to tell people what that is um that's you have other problems when you're doing a new IP but that's one of the great things about starting fresh okay thanks cool excellent talk thank you very much for that uh I have a question about more details you talked about your weekly

play test that you done on Friday yeah uh about how long did you spend on that uh would it be the whole team at once would it be individuals and um how did you balance that against deadline pressure I guess you know other Studios with shorter turn around times it's so the answer is pretty simple um we start at 4:00 and everybody plays um actually we used to enforce that everyone plays it used to be required but when the team got really big we started to go well okay maybe we don't have to have everyone play but you need to play every so often and special cases were made so um we and we would the whole team would play from four to whenever the day was over and often times people would stay and play until you know seven or whatever but they're just playing the game um the way we enforced it was because the producer uh was his idea like like the producer was like we're going to do this because he was he was he was he had been on teams in the past where the where where the team hadn't

played their own game and he didn't like the like the results and so he was like we're going to do this and so it was just enforced he just paid the cost Steph just said we're just going to pay that cost because it's part of my Dev budget is having my team know what game they're making um and so when you've got the producer and the creative director and the technical director and the art director all going this is what we're going to do everybody it's 4:00 put your pencils down and start playing it's a lot easier right it's harder if you got people who disagree but in our case that wasn't the case thank you was lucky we were really lucky yeah uh thank you for the great talk um my question is kind of more related to the pitching part of it yeah um it's a two-part question did you when you thought your idea was a brilliant idea I never thought that oh well were you ever I was terrified I would die and never having get never never have it out of my body that was the only thing that I was worried about oh well the question was kind of were you ever afraid that somebody who heard your idea was going to just take it and run with it and and also um you know what's the reality of

that when you're you know actually pitching and then you're like they're going to steal my idea but instead they're like no great question yeah okay well okay so I don't think you're going to like the answer um so here we go uh I was I afraid that people would steal my ideas I spent 10 years attending E3 going please not this year please I'm almost there please please don't do this is not the year please no the year before we announced I was at the Xbox um uh the Microsoft uh show right you know what the first game was of the Xbox show that year Rise Son Of Rome I oh my God that was about a dark five minutes right there right like oh no um no it was terrifying I was absolutely terrified that someone we get there but the thing is you don't own your designs design is not copyrightable

it's just an idea it's a form right you don't own it um and I what I wanted to do was I had this idea about how to get melee combat into video games and I actually didn't care how it got there if somebody else had the opportunity to build it great cuz I wanted to play the game right that's that was my goal um so I told everyone and of course I was afraid I wouldn't have a chance to to make it of course I was but I had to just trust that if I was the right guy to do it if I was the best choice to lead that project that it would happen right for 10 10 years um uh and so I took a Gamble and I told everyone I could I told everyone who would listen right I think all my friends got sick of it they're like yeah we know you want to make a melee game we know like we get it um right there my friends here um uh so the answer is you can't own you can't protect yourself not with design Art Is copyrightable Right um and you know uh

you know the the implementation the engines I mean the code you own the code that you write right but design is is Emeral it's ideas right um uh and that you know you can disagree whether or not like you can agree or disagree if that's a good thing it is the state of the world right now so yeah it can happen it sucks when Stu when it gets stolen it's a horrible thing right in this case I would happily have played someone else's melee game that used this system would have been great all right thank you yeah hey um so first off when I'm not working I'm main lawbringer so hey lawbringer um I play warden so okay so long as you're not a warlord I'm okay with that um no so uh you touched on this earlier with how uh for Honor being a relative I mean it's it's a unique gameplay style so from when you're trying to pitch that externally to potential players I mean do you try to make the

sale entirely based off of the the feeling of the game since you can't articulate it through oh it's like you know Dark Souls plus XYZ um so the way that we did that actually the the the we knew from the beginning that you had to play this game to understand it right to to to really get what the appeal was you needed to play it but again you pick up the you know you look at the poster or you pick up the box in the store or you're doing to download download leave you're not playing it right so it's a problem how do we overcome that that's what the knights and the Vikings and the samurai are for right those three factions are the portal into the game that's the blue door right of magic that we were like hey night Viking Samurai come on in you can be a warrior it's a pretty good pitch right so that was The Lure right we're like come on in like that's the that's the that's the thing that we're playing and then when they step to the door the very first thing we do is we hand them a controller right like now play it and they oh hey this is cool and it's a surprise um but normally people like it right and so it works out um that was why we announced uh two and a half years

before we started we had two e3s the first one was our multiplayer one and we had we were had a 4v4 demo on the floor running on PS4 we had a thousand people come to the booth and then we did the same thing at Gamescom and we did the same thing on the that next year and a whole PR and marketing push has been about play the game so that when the game came out if you picked up the if you if you picked up the Box in theore store and went nice versus Viking versus Samurai that's weird is this cool hardcore friend hardcore friend would go yeah or you know not stupid what I mean me no who knows but they would have an opinion right because we knew that's how it would that's how it we the word would get out at first and then once you tried it it would be okay that's why we had a big open Beta we had 5 and a half million players in our open Beta amazing or like six anyway lots many so like that's how we did it yeah so so basically in that case rather than try and get bogged down in dets nitty-gritty

it's just like no no no just bypass the portal build a portal build a build a build a portal of invitation right what's the fantasy Warrior fantasy hey so you were talking about these uh business cases and you were showing all these different games you also mentioned that it took about 5 years of to develop this game so as you guys were developing this game you know many other games come out so do looking at all these other games do they encourage or discourage any of the uh creative decisions that you take while in development you know you know it what we were doing was so new we learned early on with Fon I think we have time for just two more questions um what we learned was that um we stuff that worked really well in other games if we tried to reproduce it in our game there was a 50/50 chance it would fall on its face um because the the the base assumptions of the gameplay was so different in what we were doing we had to kind of throw

out a lot of our expectations about what would work and what wouldn't so we learned to get really careful about where we were drawing our Inspirations from because it was it led to like wasting a bunch of time um and we didn't have much time to waste uh so um uh we of course were playing everything all along the way but what we were doing was so different that it was it was hard for us to draw direct inspiration from other people um going two more hello oh are we done oh we're done okay so we're done thank you very much for the time Yay good one