Nioh: Talking with Samurai

[Music] good morning everyone yes good morning everyone thank you so much for coming out I know it's still pretty early considering GD week GDC week is a very long week for everyone so uh thanks so much for coming to our session my name is fumo yasa and and uh I'm from Team ninja game director for Neo so I'm really excited today to um share with you the stories about how we sort of revived um the Samurai um action RPG game which which turned out to be

RPG game but uh the samurai action genre and uh the Lessons Learned uh reintroducing uh a classic game to Modern audience um and it's pretty rare that uh we our studio team ninja um share some of these stories in sort of the public forum or or panels and sessions like this so I'm a bit nervous but hopefully um I can share some stories that will be of uh help or informative for all of you here today so I'd like to start out with a brief history of Neo

uh so the development history of Neo is it's a bit complicated um as you may know it was announced in 2005 which is quite some time ago uh Co shibusa the founder of koi first announced this title Neo and initially began um development on the KO side um but uh after a few unsatisfactory attempts it was sort of put back in the closet shelv away for a while and then soon after techmo had merged with Co Tim ninja was chosen to take on the Neo project and ultimately began development in 2011

and so in 2011 um we started the project uh the overarching sort of I guess goal or or theme was that we would make a samurai giden uh action game based on ninja giden franchise um but even that it didn't really work out so we disc continued that direction and then put it on sort of a pause for a second um in 2014 we restarted the development with a new Direction with about eight people in the beginning including Hayashi Yos

Hayashi the head of Team ninja and myself the game was announced to the public at Tokyo game show in 2015 and then it was finally released uh just last month on the PlayStation 4 so the first thing I did um when taking over or or restarting the project was that uh in 2014 that was to define the target audience and a new approach for this title uh

I personally felt that team ninja should not attempt to make a userfriendly um or accessible too accessible of a I guess a g a game targeting a wide consumer base I wanted to take an approach that separated us from most traditional AAA titles released in the west to develop a spe specific type of game targeting hardcore Gamers who would enjoy this very challenging content um because they and ourselves are the most dedicated and Di hard of all Gamers uh so our target audience in the new approach aimed directly towards what

we call in Japanese shini and a massacre concept and gamer community um so I was also uh the director in charge of ninja Guiden 3 as well as yba ninja Guiden z uh two different projects which I learned uh very difficult and valuable lessons from and based on those experiences I really just had to remind myself from the beginning of Neo's development that I should never compromise our core audience and the Integrity of our work

so one thing that we thought about was um as you see in the slide here we were asking ourselves okay what are we going to do to make sure that we keep track uh keep on track of our core concept and approach uh so I think most of you here are uh developers yourselves or or at least in

the development community so I think you would understand or agree with me but we have to continuously struggle or juggle a lot of elements under various um constraints that may be time budget uh technical issues and so on so um I think that we all get to a point where we feel very anxious whether our Concepts and Direction meets the players expectations so we decided to reshape the development process by communicating directly with our target audience throughout the process with um these game demos

[Applause] so the demos became a development tool to validate and confirm our approach rather than an advertisement or marketing or um or PR sort of tool um they were to be released several times in this case and ended up being a few times but during the course of development mid to late term where feedback uh would be us utilized or addressed um as this game took quite a few years to develop I wanted to confirm whether there was a gap between the game Direction and The Players expectations during that period and especially with Neo um because it was announced 10 years ago and uh there were people who are still hoping or maybe following looking

forward to it I wanted to make sure that those fans uh were getting the information and being able to sort of communicate back with us um and to look forward to the uh final product so as you see here uh the schedule it ended up being three times uh the first one in uh starting in April of last year the second one the beta being August and then uh just before the release during just one weekend in January we had the last trans Last Chance trial demo

um the main goal for the alpha and beta demos were to collect feedback and improve the quality of the game uh the last chance trial demo I actually was sort of uh hesitant or opposed to doing that um and it was released for just a small uh amount of time just the one last weekend um but that was because I was told or informed that our pre-order numbers were not as high as we had thought so I went ahead and committed to doing a last chance trial demo so here's a a quick snapshot of the results from the alpha

demo so um this chart that you see here is not divided by region or territory so it's hard to tell um however I'll give you some information on what we saw is that many players in the west were quite positive uh overall about the demo but that was actually not the case with our players in Japan and Asia um we sort of concluded or realized that this sort of

Gap is probably caused by cultural differences and how perceive uh how they perceive difficulty and probably um some of the contrasting ways that players navigate through or perceive what is an alpha demo and a beta demo um however interestingly there were common opinions such as the lack of tutorial elements and improving user performance or controls so what we did here is uh based on the feedback that we got we made these improvements uh for the alpha phase

so gathering information uh from players was uh definitely not an easy task as you may also have experienced uh the data that I showed earlier is a combined result of a questionnaire uh together with the demo but since the players Who provided uh these opinions and filled out uh the questionnaire were uh very few in numbers we had to kind of proactively go out and seek where everyone was talking about uh whether it was through the boards the forums or social media um we had to really go out and dig further so that we had um enough feedback to really look at and I think people were a lot more honest and open about their their feedback and opinions

uh in those areas and throughout that process you know there were new things that we learned or discovered um such as I don't know I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly but is it Wu or weabo or get good um these are new terms to [Laughter] us and so once we completed the um Alpha demo process collected the feedback um 3 months later we went to our next step which was releasing the beta demo

and so the top is the alpha demo results as you can see and then the lower being the beta um after making these improvements based on the alpha feedback you can see that pretty much in every single element uh the feedback was increased on the positive side so I like to go in deeper um with what we ended up doing with that feedback uh from going from the alpha implementing and reflecting and then reflecting the feedback and then going into the Beta demo

so the first problem that we encountered uh had really nothing to do with the feedback that we were actually getting it was more about that our own staff our own team members became way too influenced and affected uh by the opinions of the players so for example if someone uh saw feedback that says oh we want this to be be changed just because some of the

players said that or even maybe you know a few players said that we didn't want it to be like okay that's something that we want to change or uh some of the feedback that we got was make this boss battle easier do we make it easier probably not we needed to really think about it um same with the difficulty level not just with the boss battles but throughout uh therefore I Tred to remind everyone that we are the developers um who are creating the game and by attempting to consider all these uh various sort of range of feedback that we were getting uh we weren't arriving to a solid solution or an answer but these were rather more questions that we were supposed to be asking ourselves

so one notable change that we made is the one at the very top to um the removing the equipment durability system now if we had just said okay let's do that we're going to cut that out then that would not be probably the right answer um or the right solution that we're looking for um so what we did was we didn't entirely remove it but rather we changed it to a weapon familiarity um system that way uh it had the same sort of effect or result from the player standpoint um but we just made a an adjustment or a change so that we still kept something that we wanted the players to feel um as they were playing the game

uh another opinion was to create an open world system uh the third one here this was also rejected um as we wanted to shorten the load time after death and raise the frequency and density of the battles so um the other bullet points that you see here are some of the changes we made uh we adopted did some of the feedback regarding the behavior of the camera lock on feature uh

increasing the level of difficulty uh and so forth so it was pretty easy to determine whether to incorporate opinions about the technical issues or disregard some of the negative feedback um but what was really important was to really stay true to the concept and uh approach that we had uh from the very beginning of the game and it might be a small thing but uh something that we learned an important lesson is that we opened up uh about the feedback that we received

so this was a process um that we a process or a step that we took and it served as a way for us to communicate with those who played the demo and provided their opinions as well as a commitment to the fans uh of what they can expect from the final product so in some um I have the good and the bad so we'll start out with a good so the first one being um acquiring

player feedback and obviously not just that but we were able to then take that and proceed with adjustments um reflect some of the feedback based on the player's response this was the main objective of the demo so we are very satisfied with the results um and also it was a really positive learning experience for our development team not just myself but everyone who worked on it um we were able to find uh answers and things that we wanted to still sort of keep on our checklist and what has happened is that we are able to then take that and whether it's going to be in the form

of dlc's or updates we'll be able to uh follow through with some of these things that we still have remaining and wanting to do and uh lastly uh lishing new fans even though we have been creating producing and putting out games uh under other franchise names Neo technically would be a brand new IP so if you think about it we're really starting from scratch there was really no fan base to begin with but the fact that we through these demos we were able to um gain youth land and start establishing a Neo player community

uh and another thing is that this title is actually published by Sony interactive uh Entertainment Group um in I think all territories and what happened was is that after seeing the results or the positive reception of the alpha demo we were able to um put together the publishing deal with Sony interactive so that meant a lot for us um and it pro that this game was going to be something that would they would support uh throughout the launch and and with marketing so obviously after the good let's look at the bad

so the first one is spoilers and I don't know if spoilers is the most accurate term here and also I don't know if um people looking forward to Neo were really wanting to know it from a story or a narrative perspective but nonetheless to be able to check out the game prior to its final product or final release it does take away from um being able to experience that first time impression um so that might have been something that uh was not really intended in terms of spoiling it but that you do get that uh feeling of knowing something prior to its final release

uh secondly it was a really uh heavy burden on the development team even if the demo is at an alpha stage the quality still needed to be reflective of a final um product or a stage within the final product so that was something that we really had to uh concentrate and make sure that it was uh good enough quality to put out uh as a demo

um and lastly a really big problem none of our guys were able to work or concentrate on what they were supposed to be doing um you know we were happy that people were checking out the demo but it's very hard to block anything that's maybe made online and are made available online and so we were constantly checking on these players who are live streaming on Twitch and we just couldn't we just couldn't ignore that and so um it wasn't a very productive time uh spent uh time well spent during uh this period but it wasn't all bad even though we couldn't concentrate on our work because we were seeing a lot of positive reaction and responses as they were [Music] streaming uh

okay and so we have uh these key lessons here uh so in Hind I felt that the first Alpha demo could have been limited uh to a certain number of players to some extent I don't have any specific ideas but maybe I feel that it would have been more effective to limit the amount of players

and um maybe even uh a purchase to play demo option what happened was is that because it was free to download free to play uh there was a very very wide variety of sort of feedback and opinions we got yes that's important but at the same time um you know there would be players who would probably play for a very very short amount of time they would die instantly and then that would then become their first impression and maybe only impression so uh there is this feeling that maybe we should have limited uh we should have had a a way to limit the number of players who had access to the demo

um and so I want to mention here that there is really no correct answer with regards to conducting game demos uh or in the way that we did this time around I think there's both the good and the bad um it's definitely a uh requirement for us to develop to at least listen to The Players voices um whether that takes shape or form in the way that we did or not I think it's just fundamentally important to you know have our ears open so that we can listen uh so it's important for us to prepare and come up with new methods to acquire these valuable insights from our fans

um with confidence I can say that uh even though it was our first time kind of operating in this way and changing the way that we developed the game we are seeing results in terms of reaction uh reviews and even sales numbers so I do want to say that uh this was a great learning experience not only that but I think it added value to the entire project for Neo uh so that was a very small window into our journey with Neo and the uh Communications that took place uh with us and the potential fans I hope this

provided you with a better understanding of our creative and development process and how we ultimately shape this game uh so it was a unique experience for myself and the team uh we learned so much about our intended fans and their

expectations for this game more importantly this user engagement provided us with an opportunity to reaffirm our Direction and gain the confidence to steer boldly forward um it added motivation for us as an exercise that was designed to learn more about our fans and gain valuable feedback we ultimately learned a lot about our ourselves our own selves in the process and so that is a Priceless lesson that we will not forget um it may not have been all good but in addition to what I said we've learned about about our own strengths as team ninja and what we're able to

achieve so we want to definitely take that and carry that into whatever next project we have uh and so that's it uh thank you again for coming and I hope I get the privilege to speak to you again someday in the future thank you thank you so we have about uh 20 minutes um and we're going to open it up to Q&A there are two mics down the aisle here and we are recording audio so if you could come up if you have any questions and we'll take one at a time hello uh I was wondering if you have any like hard and fast rules on when to look at feedback seriously like if you see 10 Forum posts be like okay maybe we should look at this or there's

100 Forum posts about a single topic like we need to fix [Music] this so the short answer is no we don't we didn't really go by any sort of guideline in terms of quantity the number of femac um and not quality but

it it wasn't that we had a a threshold that we thought we should meet and then and then start looking into feedback it was really about the content um what they were saying what we thought was something that was important that we had to bring it up and reflect um into the next so uh we started with really no guidelines and just looked at the raw responses that were you're getting thank you thank you I can't see is there one person there hello my name is IIA and first of all thank you for the lesson uh well I have three simple question first one uh is uh how technically did you distribute the Demas uh second one uh how many players participate in both Demas in three Demas and uh uh last one uh how technically did you

uh gain results from the uh feedback it was emails or maybe a Facebook page or maybe some special mechanics in the game that's it okay I just want to make sure the first one was you asked how did we distribute the demo exactly uh okay so you mean outside of the PlayStation store and that uh so it's just was be uh play St demo yeah okay okay I can [Music] react

spee okay so the way that the demo was distributed was you could uh download it for free uh through the PlayStation store and that was the only way there was no other method of distribution um the second question how many players so approximately this is on a global level approximately 700,000 to 800,000 downloads of the free demo and then thirdly in terms of uh where uh social media channels where do we opponent on or look at um it was really everything

um including neoaf and redit so anything and everywhere that you can think of that we can collect feedback we were trying to cover thank you thank you all right thank you for your presentation first um my question is how did you prioritize the choices you had to make during development uh was it more depending on how strong the player feedback was to make like this or this specific choice on the top of the list or was it more depending on how time consuming it would be for your [Music] team

for so I mentioned this um in the presentation a little bit but yes obviously we had a lot of constraints

whether it was time or money or just resources even if we wanted to maybe address something that we thought was really important we would just have to make that call at the end of the day to say yes we can or no we can't um but really it comes down to the very main sort of theme of today's uh presentation is that we wanted to keep true to the gamec concept and approach that we had set for ourselves and hopefully for the potential consumers um later on and we didn't want to sacrifice anything um or uh affect the concept in a way that we didn't think it was going to be the Neo that we set out to do um additionally what I can say is that um I hope it comes out right but this game has a lot of good qualities from many different types of maybe games um I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing um but in

doing so we did want to really have a Neo like a Neo specific combat experience and I just wanted to keep that very tight and very important and that was a high priority we didn't want to mess anything up um in delivering that combat experience so we put a lot of weight and focus and concentration on that all right thank you mik on hi uh do you feel the timing of the demos uh was appropriate do you feel now in hindsight that doing them earlier may have been more beneficial

for um in a way maybe we could have uh uh timed the beta testing or the Beta release of the beta demo a little bit earlier uh there was quite some time I think about three or three and a half four months in between uh the Alpha and the beta it did sort of work in parallel

with our uh development process uh or sort of knee deep into US creating the game you know developing and really aiming for hitting some of these schedules and milestones we had so we could have probably uh pushed up the beta demo a little bit however at that same time we were very aware um of these other titles that were coming in or maybe aiming for release at the same time so we had to make sure that we hit our schedule uh and not hopefully be in a super competitive sort of time frame for release and so those were maybe some guidelines that served us to do demos at a certain time thank you thank you hello uh thanks for the talk um when work when the idea for these public demos uh came across uh did you encounter any uh resistance from uh from Sony or KO or or even

internally a team ninja uh and how did you kind of address that and mitigate the potential risks of doing something like this so

so um Sony was actually pretty positive about it they had no issues or um opposing opinions about it uh I can say that our own Dev team was entirely opposed to the idea um so it was a it was a really tough decision or a tough call but um the main thing was that we knew that if we had executed this plan that we put in place that our schedule was going to really be tight and we were you know basically It Was a Race Against Time um but when you think about it you know releasing a new IP already has its own challenges and trying to communicate what this title is all about so you know 3 years down the road to not have released anything and

to put it out on the shelves and to hear sort of feedback for the first time that's also a risk in a way and so I feel like maybe going through this we were able to mitigate those risks um and people picking up a brand new IP for the first time so um I'll use an analogy for maybe cooking you know when you have a dish that you're aiming for or targeting you add ingredients and you add spices and you add Umami along the way so that's how we maybe saw this as perfecting the dish at the end we had to make these fine adjustments in the middle great thank you thank you um as a as as a designer um how did did you uh how are you guys able to take uh player feedback and actually um dissect what they were

saying to actually help with the game for example they instead of a just taking something like like a player would say oh this I don't like this about the game or this part sucks or something like that how do you actually take that kind of feedback to apply to the system and say Well they're actually talking about this mechanic they don't really like how this works or maybe this can be improved or tweaked a little bit so that it's easier for the player to understand it design [Music] for

for for so there isn't a um hold on one second sorry about that

um so there wasn't really similar to the answer that we gave earlier there wasn't really a a rule book that we really played by we would collect all the feedback look through it sort through it um and the most important thing was that we had to look it from a non-biased point of view so we would take sort of ourselves out of the equation once and then look at it from that perspective um but then also to jump to the other answer that we had earlier is that next thing is we had to work within some time and budgetary constraints and Technical maybe constraints that we maybe wanted to do but we knew that we couldn't achieve um we knew that in making these changes or reflecting these adjustments in the game you know we're not going to make everyone 100% happy um it's almost impossible to make a perfect game for everyone who's going to be purchasing

this game so um knowing that we would make adjustments changes Implement new systems and so forth hoping that by the time this is in the alpha but then by the time we reflected that in the beta they would be either addressed or sort of proven um and if not addressed we had make that um sort of open um and so by doing being an alpha and beta and as a result we did do the third one to kind of make sure that we can check that earlier feedback in the next one was actually a really um good I guess idea or plan that we followed through with the feed with the feedback from the users thank you I don't see I no other questions no other

questions everyone's very quiet because it's in the morning oh okay I see someone walking up hi I was curious what kind of telemetry and metrics you are tracking over your Alpha Beta clients and that kind of thing thanks [Music] for

uh so as you see in this logo too the Katan zuka um this is something that so whenever a player dies we were capturing where location and when um so that was something that uh was amongst other data that we collected that was something that was kind of an obvious thing that we wanted to catch um and it also would tell us or inform us kind of the difficulty level um uh of the demo but you know obviously from the results we would see where people were dying the most or the least all right one more question for me um the how was uh how was your experience uh testing this game with players and

getting feedback from them uh significantly different from doing something more like traditional internal focus group testing or something like that where was the nature of the results very [Music] different for so we actually did both we still did our

sort of you know usual traditional methods um but uh obviously when you put something out in the public and they're free to say whatever in the public forum there is a very wide variety of feedback and opinion that we could get so that was the probably the biggest um difference uh when you go through maybe like a focus group test test there's maybe a questionnaire that's already given or it's already you know fit in a format uh that they have to follow so that was number one and then obviously the volume of responses we can gather from doing a public demo is very different from doing a kind of restricted you know time scheduled um whether it's QA testing or forus group testing thank you thank you hello uh thank you for making a great game I noticed that Neo has the very best performance options uh on any

any game that we've seen on Console you can pick 1080p 60 frames per second or you could go HD and uh this is something that's a big topic of discussion among players now is that the performance and when you guys have it on PS4 Pro you can choose between resolution or uh High frame rate and I was wondering if uh your team was in tune with these discussions and uh the desire for higher performance on Console games now or if that was just a company internal or team internal directive of your own to bring out U the best of your tight [Music] gameplay

for um this could actually be something that uh we can uh say that was a result or an effect from doing the demos um so it's

kind of thanks to the demo because with uh you know when we work on our games especially with action games you uh performance-wise you aim for the highest even during development but it's really the last stretch that we put in so much effort to make sure that the performance isn't lagging um and so you know while we put out a demo we would hear some of this feedback and our engineer would try to say well maybe we can address this um let's give it a try uh knowing that this is not just you know a pure action game but it has its RPG elements as well we're like you know what it might actually be good to offer these user uh or these settings and have the user um pick and choose kind of what they want to do so thanks to some of the feedback um and discussions we had post Alpha demo it I think helped our our engineering team to look into that direction and at the same time the PS4 announcement came out and so we felt

like it was a natural uh fit or a good idea for the game you've said a very good example for all games on Console so keep up the good work thank you thank you okay I think we have time for one last one oh perfect I have another question actually um so how do you feel about doing more changes uh to the game in the future alongside season pass content for example do you feel you should uh still um do changes to the original gameplay experience or not

for so obviously you know release day and what you get out of the box or download the first thing that you open up is really important we need to have the game there but um as you know know online uh day one patches or updates or DLCs become more and more of a common thing we kind of expect to get more um

and we thanks to the demo and the feedback But continuing on that path we feel like there's going to be um a wealth of sort of opinion exchanges hopefully for Neo and we will take a look at it and see you know when the right timing or what the proper content is that we could reflect in these updates and dlc's coming forward so we will in a way probably put more weight in doing that than we did for our previous titles thank you very much thank you thank you I think time's up so this is the end thank [Applause] [Music] you