GI: Throughout the trailer, there are a number of health bars on the top of the screen, both in human vs human fights and Eikon vs Eikon battles. Whats going on with these, and are they meant to be reminiscent of fighting games?
Yoshida: Regarding the health bars and the UI, I saw a lot of comments on social media after the trailer released about how the UI is kind of reminiscent of a fighting game. When we started developing the game, and we had our Clive versus smaller enemies or our Eikon versus Eikon battles, when we were first developing them we did them with almost no UI on the screen at all. But we found that through playing this that it was just a little bit too little information we needed more information. That said, we didn't want the screen cluttered and so after a lot of back and forth and trying a lot of different things, we came to the designin the trailer, and that it just happens to look like a fighting game is just something that ended up happening.
The overall game design for these Eikon versus Eikon battles, however, is meant to be unique and in fact, we dont actually use the same exact system twice. Each battle is completely unique in its playstyle and so were doing something thats kind of crazy.
For example, maybe one Eikon versus Eikon battle, if you have Eikon A versus Eikon B, that battle will be reminiscent of a 3D shooter. Whereas another Eikon versus a different Eikon, its more like a pro wrestling match, and then maybe even a third with one Eikon versus another Eikon will transform an entire area into a battlefield. And so again, we didnt reuse these systems and each one of these Eikon versus Eikon battles is unique and will change with each battle. Because of that, and because the battles are so different in nature, the UI has to change for each battle. And so you will see slight differences in the UI between these battles. However, we ended up having to cut a lot of that from the trailer because it ends up being story spoilers and we didnt want to have that.
Then you ask, well if youve hidden some of the UI, why didnt you hide all of the UI like those HP bars? Why did you leave those? and that was simply because if you remove all of the HP bars and all of the UI, then people start saying, oh, thats just pre-rendered, thats not running in real-time. We wanted to show that what you saw in the trailer was in real-time so we made a decision to leave a little bit of that UI in.