Infinity Blade II Interviews, Launch Trailer
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And then we'll move to Gamasutra for the first interview:
When you started the first game, I get the sense it was a little bit of an experiment -- but now it's a franchise. Did it go much further than you thought it would when you first started with the idea?
DM: Geremy [Mustard, technical director] and I, and the team, had been thinking of this Infinity Blade franchise for quite a while. Not so much the gameplay itself, but we had this fantasy story that we wanted to tell. And we're like, "You know what? We planned to do this someday, so maybe if we're going to make this, we have this fantasy IP and we have this cool idea for a sword fighting game that we thought about for motion control stuff." And we're like, "Yeah, it could totally work on these handheld devices."
Let's think of as if... The Hobbit is kind of the prelude to The Lord of the Rings. What if Infinity Blade I was like the prelude to The Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings -- a prelude to this much bigger story we wanted to do?
And so we just thought, "Let's imbue it with some of the context of what we think we'd like," and again, it was totally an experiment. "Let's put it out there, let's see what we can do." We had no idea how to make any kind of game in five months. It was very much like running straight at a brick wall a thousand miles an hour, where it's just like, we can't. You've just got to make snap decisions and hope it works out, and amazingly it did.
It was totally an experiment. We had no idea what to expect. We imbued it with some hooks for this larger IP just in case, and it totally took off. I mean, it took off bigger than we could possibly imagine.
A lot of -- at least my -- work for the last year has been, "Oh, wow, this has taken off. Good thing we had some ideas for what this franchise could be!" But we now have millions of people asking, "What the heck is going on?" and "Who are these people?" and, "What does it mean?"
Followed by a Q&A on Epic Games' website:
Q: Can we mix and match swords when we use two?
A: Infinity Blade 2 features three new combat weapon classes: Light, Dual, and Heavy. With Light weapons equipped you will play very similar to the first game with a weapon in one hand and a shield in the other allowing you to attack, block, and dodge as you are used to. With dual weapons equipped you have a weapon in each hand and are able to attack much faster however you will have no shield and will need to rely on parry and dodge for your defense. With Heavy weapons equipped you hold a large weapon with both hands and while slower are able to deal out massive damage though because of the extra weight you cannot dodge and will need to rely on parry and directional blocking for your defense. These new styles add a lot of strategic depth to the combat and we think they are super fun!
