How do you make your new game stand out in the crowd? One sure-fire method is to get tongues wagging by stirring up a bit of controversy. Perhaps you’ll release a gameplay video showing off a level in which terrorists walk through an airport mowing down innocent civilians with machines guns. You could model your game after a current and bloody war in the middle-east.
Or your entire game could be built on the premise that crime, senseless violence and paying hookers to heal you with sex and then killing them to get back your money is awesome (it was).
If you’re Capcom and you don’t feel like taking the risk of raising the ire of war veterans, anti-gaming violence lobbyists, and crazed parents, you can just ruffle some fanboy feathers by rebooting one of your beloved game franchise characters. Enter DMC, with a spiffing reboot of series protagonist, Dante.
At the 2010 Tokyo Game Show, Capcom revealed their reboot of the Devil May Cry series – complete with a change to a western developer, Ninja Theory (Heavenly Sword, Enslaved), and a redesign of Dante. This caused quite a debate among series fans and series newcomers alike. For those who missed the initial announcement, have a look at the trailer below to see what all the fuss is about.
Speaking to IGN, Capcom VP of Strategic Planning and Business Development explained the decision: “The original concepts that came back for Dante were actually extremely close to the Dante everyone knows and loves. The feedback that came back from [Keiji] Inafune and [Hideaki] Itsuno was, ‘No guys, this needs to be completely different, we need you to go much further and be much more creative.’ Literally dozens of potential iterations later became what we as a team felt comfortable and actually happy with.”
Svensson conceded that they all knew that there would be a community outcry as the changes were revealed and it was all really part of their plan to begin with.
“I will argue that any changes will bring about a knee-jerk reaction from fans. We know that; we knew that going into it. To be fair, I think some of the strategy here was to create that discussion and dialogue, and I think it drastically raises the visibility of the title versus if we had just done another Dante,” said Svensson.
The new DMC game (aka Devil May Cry 5) is intended to be an ‘origins’ game that sets the stage for the well known Dante of games past. As such, Svensson said that he doesn’t believe that the overall character of Dante is going to be drastically altered.
“This is meant to be an origin story, so this is Dante before you knew who Dante was. There is going to be some interesting changes and twists to what people think they know about Dante or where he came from. We aren’t planning on deviating greatly from the path that is there. There may still be some tweaks here or there – I’m not privy to what’s going on – but by and large that will be the direction the team is going down,” Svensson concluded.
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