You were saying earlier that when you make decisions about "no cutscenes", about the integrated UI, one of the hardest parts can be convincing people to do it in the first place.

CB: Yeah. People are really almost religious about their belief in what we should and shouldn't do. It's a big binary switch, like, "Are we going to have cutscenes, or are we not going to have cutscenes?" because it's a big, big deal in design. When we decided in the beginning that we were going to take [the switch], we're like, "Alright, let's go for it. Let's go for it!"

Everyone took a big breath, and they went, "OK! We're gonna do it!" because it impacts everything. With line of sight, you have to design that into the level, so that it becomes part of the fabric of what the experience is. It's much different if you're like, "Ah, now I've got control of the camera, and I've got control of this, and I don't have to worry about anything." So that's a big one.

And then when we started taking the HUD away, and we were going to start making that on the character? People have very specific ideas about what you should be doing with that. Like, as far as camera? If we're taking the camera control, like authored camera, people have very specific ideas about what you should or should not, in a horror film, be doing with camera language, right?

There's a very specific language in the horror genre; we didn't let that happen, because we wanted to stay real. So when you take off into this design decisions and stuff, it's really -- it's really, not new territory, but it's not like you're just aping everything.

It's like breaking dogma.

CB: And it's creating so many [decisions] -- if you are copying stuff, so many decisions are made already for you. Like when you start striking out into these new dial-twists of stuff?

People might think that you're just borrowing from other places, but really, if you're cobbling stuff new together, you have to re-answer all the questions over again, and that makes people really nervous.

It's an internal EA project; do you ever run into difficulties in pitching stuff like that at a company like EA, which ordinarily makes more, sort-of, like...

CB: Not M-rated games?

Not M-rated games, but also, you know, games that are more directly accessible. Not that people won't be able to play this game, but it's more explicitly designed for --

CB: It's the "horror people", it's designed for the horror market, and that kind of stuff. Yeah, for sure, EA likes to make games that have a broad appeal -- that's the commercially viable thing to be doing.

So when we pitched the game we had to figure out a way to say that we weren't just a tiny niche market that's just, you know, torture porn, or all these other things that are even more nichey than not.

So, yeah, it's harder, but once they let us do the M rating, that became the ability to be really hardcore about it.

And so if you don't go too far off the edge, you can actually appeal to a wide bunch of people; and when we were putting the slices together, all the executives were looking at it and going, "Yeah, I think this is going to work for you guys; it's actually a pretty good idea, and I think it's going to be good."

This is a bit out there, but I wonder if, also, the existence and success of EA Partners had any influence on that, in terms of how a lot of that stuff is M rated, and more targeted, and I wonder if they were sort of saying, "Well, this stuff is working..."

CB: Oh. Yeah... I don't know if that's it. That's a good point; I don't think it has. I think that EA wanted to go with M because Godfather, the first one, was an M.

We'd been really family-friendly, and so we figured out that, well, it's harder to be innovative and be creative with so many restrictions -- and not necessarily just the M, but so many other restrictions, in terms of licensed games -- to do new IP.

So EA is trying to stretch out and get more and reactivate the creative core of these projects, so they said, "Alright. You want to be M? We'll let you be M; see what happens." And, it turned out, it's been a really wise decision in the end.