Volatilegame Blog
Are you a psychopath or a professional?
Bob Hands & Ben Fisher
Volatile Games
I’m sure that everyone who’s seen Reservoir Dogs (the movie) remembers the scene where Mr. White and Mr. Pink discuss just how crazy Mr. Blonde is. In the words of Mr. Pink:
“…you panic on the inside, in your head, you know? You give yourself a couple of seconds. You get a hold of the situation. You deal with it. What you don't do is start shooting up the place and start killing people”
On the Reservoir Dogs: The Game team, this quote (and the conversation it came from) told us a whole lot about the personality of the Reservoir Dogs universe. The conversation is what Mr. Pink and Mr. White think about the situation, but what about Mr. Blonde, Brown, Blue? What about
you? The more we investigated different ways for the player to explore the Reservoir Dogs universe, the more we were drawn to this conflict of criminal philosophies.
In Reservoir Dogs: The Game, you can take the same approach as Mr. Pink and Mr. White – but this is an adaptation of a Tarantino movie, so of course you can gun down cops, security guards, and innocents alike.
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Psycho mode is easily the most accessible way to play the game. As soon as cops see the player, they’ll try to arrest you – they’ll move in, shouting at you to put the gun away and put your hands up. Why not take advantage of the situation by opening fire?
Touches like this are what give the bad guys in Reservoir Dogs: The Game a richer personality than some games. We tried every idea we could think of to make the world feel more alive, but still in keeping with the tone of the film. Eventually, we ended up with a weave of behaviors that we feel give the game its own unusual character.
Once you start gunning down cops, they’ll call for backup. Unlike a number of games however, backup will actually arrive, piling over fences and rushing the player. The more damage you’ve done, the more backup will respond – and eventually, the player will have to face gas masked cops with riot shields and SWAT guys, trained to kill.
You can try and deal with that by jumping behind a nearby surface and taking cover, because every surface in the game can be used as cover – but that doesn’t just apply to the player. Cops will run for cover, ducking out only to fire or to throw flash bangs and teargas the player’s way. Try and make a break for it, and the cops will radio ahead, bringing squads of patrolling cops running straight for the player.
Sometimes a situation can get so heated the only way out is to go off the deep end…
Bullet Festivals
When the player has dealt with a number of adrenaline-heavy situations, they will earn the opportunity to blaze through resistance in a high damage, slow motion, black-and-white killing spree. It’s an easy way to deal with a difficult situation, but it’s an opportunity that doesn’t come along all that often!
The game rates the player’s performance throughout the game. Using lethal takedowns will mark you as a Psychopath – and if you take out everybody you can find, the title of Stone Cold Psycho is yours.
Now, a regular 3rd person shooter would stop right there… but we felt that Reservoir Dogs is a higher caliber film, and that players should have a more intelligent approach available to them. This is where Professional play comes in.
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Let’s wind back to that situation where the player is surrounded by cops, shouting at him to empty his hands. Why not put your gun away, stand still – and at the last minute, grab a cop and take him hostage? As soon as you do that, maybe you can bluff your way out of the situation by shouting the other cops down, steering them out of the way by threatening your hostage – and maybe, if you rough him up a little, making them drop their weapons. With a hostage, you can manipulate the situation to your advantage, and the cops won’t open fire unless you fire first. They will, however, work together to flank the player, and try and shoot you in the back.
Balancing pro and psycho gameplay took a lot of time and a lot of effort to get right. When it comes to these play styles; the most important thing to us was to let the player move between styles seamlessly, whenever they wanted to. Make pro too easy, and the player can shut down the threat in a room in a heartbeat. Make pro too hard, and the player will be gunned down before they’ve issued their first threat.
Eventually, we hit a balance: most folks start by trying to play pro because it’s genuinely exciting and new – then they gradually make little mistakes, accidentally forgetting to disarm a security guard for example and ending up in a high-pressure situation, then falling to pieces and gunning everyone down. If you think about the story of the film, that’s more or less what happens to the Reservoir Dogs in the warehouse, as the situation gets more and more desperate. If you can deal with the pressure, you can make it through undamaged.
Sometimes though, it’s useful to have a Professional equivalent to the Bullet Festival…
Signature Moves
So Mr. Blonde ends up surrounded by cops, with nothing but a hostage to protect him. Guns are pointed every which way at him, adrenaline is high – how’s he going to deal with this situation? How’s he going to do something to shock the cops into submission, to effectively say “I’m doing something nasty, but if you don’t behave, it could get a whole lot worse”? Do you remember what he did in the film?
In the second blog entry I pointed out that one of the first questions people ask about the game is “How on earth do you turn Reservoir Dogs into a game?” Without fail, the very first question is “so,
can I cut someone’s ear off?” – and the Signature Move was an opportunity to let the player do this, without cheapening what is such an iconic scene from the film. Much like the Bullet Festival, you can earn adrenaline by neutralizing threats (lethally or non-lethally) to earn the opportunity to use the Signature Move. This is a way of neutralizing a whole bunch of cops in a non-lethal way – they’ll all drop their weapons and kneel, hands behind their head, to stop you doing anything nastier to your hostage.
We thought it would be a nice touch to give each of the Dogs their own Signature Move. For example, fans of the film will remember Mr. White’s suggestion of how to deal with an unruly bank manager…
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Inspired by the conversation from the movie listed earlier, the pro / psycho roles gave us the extents of the player’s Reservoir Dogs universe. Whichever situation you face in the game, you can deal with it in your own way – and the game will respond in kind. Despite the fact that I’ve just spent two years playing the game during development, I still think it’s cool that I can complete the game without firing a single bullet
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In fact, as soon as I got my hands on a box copy, I put it in my PS2 and played through as a Consummate Professional, to earn myself the Pro Ending. “What’s a Pro Ending”, you say? Well…
We spend the whole game watching the player’s play style and figuring out whether they are a Pro, a Psycho, or somewhere in between.
We watched the movie and began to wonder, “…Whatever happened to Mr. Pink?”
We decided to stick these two together. Depending on how the player makes their way through the rest of the game, Mr. Pink’s fate is shown during the end credits – and it’s either a psychopath one, a professional one, or somewhere in between.
So, ultimately, even though we went to every effort to make sure that Reservoir Dogs: The Game takes place in the universe dictated by the movie, the fate of Mr. Pink is up to you.
Linear Mode
