That makes sense. At that point visual and auditory cues become very, very important.

CC: I mean the Hulk definitely [involved] a lot of tuning, a lot of playtesting to get it right. He started out much more complex than he currently is right now. Right now he has weak points, and you hit this set of weak points, and it unlocks this set of weak points, and it unlocks this set of weak points...

But when we initially started designing him, I designed him in a way that his weak points would only show up during certain moves. Like, for me, as a hardcore gamer, that's awesome. I've got to like see like okay, he's about to charge up, and that's when his weak points are there, but it was just not coming across in the playtesting. And so we ended up not doing just state-based…

And so we went a little too complex with it, and we kind of reined it back in, but it's still something where you've got to figure out where his weak points are, you still have to shoot him, there's not this requirement of all this knowing what exact state he's in, or if he's charging. There are balances like that that we had to do.

It's kind of too bad though, that nowadays we have to dial the difficulty down so much to where you can't do something like that.

CC: Yeah, it is.

You have to be like, "Okay, you shot him and now his weak point is giant and exposed, and here you are!" and it's too bad.

CC: It is the trade off, though. It's like the hardcore gamer in me is like, "Aw, I just want it to be old-school, where people really had to figure it out." But I think gamers have changed a little bit. Where gamers used to pound on this thing, and they'd play 10 or 20 times to figure this out, gamers [now], they'll set down the controls.

Yeah, they'll just give up.

CC: It's just something, as we become a much broader medium, unfortunately.

But there are other ways of doing it. A lot of indie games are more like that, and you've got Demon Souls where people are throwing themselves against the wall, because the game puts you in the position where it feels like you should.

CC: True, true but the whole idea going into it…

You've got to go into it with that mindset making the game.

CC: And playing the game. You're going in playing Demon Souls thinking that the game is going to be a hardcore game.

I had a question about the overarching narrative style. The humans have lost, Chimera have won.

CC: Yes, pretty much, yep.

So why are there so many dudes in the Chimera still running around with guns? If the humans have lost... It's just pockets of resistance?

CC: Well that's the thing, they're just trying to clear out the rest of the resistance. That's the big push is like sure, we have technically lost the war, but there's still pockets of resistance. They're going around in these big squads of the terraformers, just trying to like wipe out any part of human civilization they can find. That's what they do.