The developer’s senior community manager James Stevenson tells Videogamer that it was the long-running fan reaction to Resistance 2 that weighed heavily on the team. Stevenson laments that “the overall opinion of it is that it was a failure by fans, that Resistance 2 was a failure, because maybe the expectations were so high for it.”

Stevenson bemoaned that negative fan feedback to Resistance 2’s design choices was “like your dog turned on you”.

Personally, I wasn’t as big of a fan of the second Resistance as I was the first, even in light of the ample multiplayer component that Insomniac added to the game. Fortunately, for Stevenson’s mental health, I was probably lower on the rabid fan totem than the rest of the community.

Insomniac Games’ newest title, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time, releases next week. Early reviews, from the critics at least, seem to be pretty positive.

Insomniac: Fans believe Resistance 2 ‘was a failure’ [Videogamer]

Before you say anything, yes, we know Metal Gear Solid 4 has been out in select PAL territories for months now. Guess it’s now out in more territories.

Mario can swim. Sonic would not. A jump in the water used to kill the anti-heroes of Grand Theft Auto. Altair, the deadly hero of Assassin’s Creed couldn’t get wet. His successor can.

Large bodies of water are fatal in inFamous, act as pools of quicksand in the new Bionic Commando and are just off-limits in games as wide-ranging as Animal Crossing and everything beyond the first 30 minutes of undersea adventure BioShock.

Problem: Swimming Can Be Boring
There are smart and serious design reasons for the omission of swimming in so many top games. But before even thinking about those, a fair assessment is that video game swimming can be dull. There may be fans of Super Mario Bros.’ World 2-2 and the opportunity it affords players to throw fireballs underwater at squids. There may be fans of swimming in Metal Gears and Zeldas. Swimming, though, isn’t what carries most games, and it’s frequently a source of gamer frustration.

“Swimming is not as fast as running or jumping or flying, and is generally not as fun,” Darren Bridges, a game designer at Sucker Punch, the studio behind the swimming-not-permitted hits inFamous and Sly Cooper. “The gameplay [for swimming] is often bland: mashing a single button in the best cases, and just pointing the stick in a direction at the worst.”

Pete Wanat, veteran producer of many games, including Scarface: The World Is Yours, backed Bridges up. Scarface, which was primarily played on land as an open-world crime adventure in the style of a GTA, allowed swimming — until players got too far adrift and were chewed by a shark. But it also gave players the option to have hero Tony Montana stay dry and summon a boat. That ability, he wrote via e-mail “hopefully kept players in the action and not doing the 300 medley in Miami Harbor trying to reach the nearest dock.” That was a merciful decision, explained Wanat: “Because in almost every game, swimming long distances is ultra boring.”

So un-fun is a lot of video game swimming that developers who plan to include it often cut it. “Most [development] teams want their character to do everything under the sun, but reality kicks in and they start tearing out the ability to dance and swim pretty fast,” veteran game designer Dave Perry told Kotaku. “Many games have you instantly drown. Plenty just let you go up to your ankles. Some let you swim off into oblivion with nothing out there, and then you have to swim back. If there’s no good reason to swim (nothing to find or do), then it’s a waste of valuable team attention, so that’s why so many teams just trash the idea and focus on something more important instead.”

Swimming Bans Help Game Creators
Maybe many games are better off without empowering heroes to do the backstroke or the doggie-paddle.

Developers say that omitting swimming helps them. Making a dive in the water deadly can add a core element of the game’s difficulty, no matter how absurd that element may be to the game’s fiction — or how much the fiction must be stretched to accommodate it. Really, should water barricade a bunch of athletic freedom-fighters and animals?

“Fictionally speaking, it really doesn’t make sense to have water as a boundary in the Sly Cooper
games,” Bridges admitted. “There, I said it. The three main characters are Sly the Raccoon, Bentley the Turtle, and Murray the Hippo. Real raccoons are decent swimmers, and turtles and hippos spend the majority of their lives in water, but our heroes had to swear off water as part of their transition to
the video game universe.”

Capcom’s Bionic Commando producer, Ben Judd, stressed to Kotaku that the metal arm of his game’s hero is just too heavy to keep its hero — a guy who can survive multiple bullet shots and steep falls — afloat.

That’s the story explanation.

The real reason they limit swimming from games like Sly and Bionic Commando is to add an aspect of difficulty to their games. Heroes like Sly or inFamous’ Cole McGrath are so strong that other obstacles won’t do. “Cole and Sly are both excellent climbers,” said Bridges, “So tipping a car sideways to block an alley entrance is not enough to keep them out.” He noted that “water is often a better alternative than other boundary options, such as ‘Steep Mountains,’ ‘Giant Walls,’ ‘Flaming Lava Fields,’ or ‘Infinite Cliffs.’”

Judd described how water was used to add challenge to Bionic Commando: “With Bionic Commando, we needed something that could be used as an obstacle that would both limit where Spencer could go but also prove to be a danger so that if he fell into it he could die… early levels have very few ‘pit traps’ at all. If you fall, you just need to climb back up in early levels. Around the middle of the game, we use water as a device that people want to avoid. But if they do fall into it, there is a small window in which they can hook onto something nearby and avoid death because we didn’t want any insta-kills so early in the game. Toward the end of the game, there are more tried and true pitfalls that will kill you if miss the swing.”

And if water won’t kill a games’ heroes, stuff in the water might, like that Scarface shark. Or, as Drew Murray, lead designer of PlayStation 3 first-person shooter Resistance 2, reminded Kotaku, there’s the Fury, a classic deadly-swimming-enemy type seen in that game: “The Fury went through a number of iterations, from its initial design as a ‘Chimeran walrus’ that would be fast and deadly in the water but slow and lumbering on land (with arm-mounted guns to boot!), to our final design as a purely aquatic enemy that essentially acted like a sign next to a toxic lake reading ‘Swimming Here Is Hazardous to Your Health!”" he said. “We also used them in several places as timing-puzzle challenges for swimming sections, where the player would have to time their swimming based on the speed and location of furies in the water.”

Just Add Swimming
There are so many reasons not to have swimming in games, that the addition of it can be a feature worth promoting. It’s a literal game-changer, as players who transitioned from the death-water of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to the pearl-diving-permissible depths of GTA: San Andreas can attest.

To add swimming, developers need to draw more graphics, tweak their camera system, add animations and find that elusive fun in video game breaststroke. Some have determined all that works’ worthwhile.

The Assassin’s Creed series is making the move from non-swimmable to swimmable with this fall’s sequel. The sequel’s lead game designer, Patrick Plourde, told Kotaku, “We listened to the feedback of the players who were pretty vocal that the fact that that Altair couldn’t swim wasn’t feeling right for a master Assassin – they were right. Also our new setting which included Venice has a much stronger need to interact with water. So that explains why swimming wasn’t in Assassin’s Creed but is in Assassin’s Creed II.”

Swimming wasn’t available in the first game, Plourde said, simply because the team knew water wasn’t going to be an important enough part of the game’s terrain to make getting in it worth the development energy. The threat of water wound up shaping one port-based assassination mission in that first game, forcing Altair to hopscotch across moored boats. In Venice, new Assassin Ezio will have to have other hazards to worry about than a bad soaking.

Just Remove Swimming
For all the nice things that swimming might add to a game, it’s not a must. Some designers have de-emphasized it. See the drop in swimming content from Super Mario Sunshine to Super Mario Galaxy.

Others are removing swimming completely. That’s happening in the next Ratchet & Clank. That series’ creative director, Brian Allgeier of Insomniac, explained how swimming had served Ratchet well in the past but proved a reasonable omission for the next adventure, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time: “On the Ratchet & Clank games, we included swimming as another means of exploration and felt that it rounded out a nice set of moves for our main character,” he said. “Ironically, water was also used at times as a level boundary along with lava, toxic goo, and fall-to-death areas to prevent people from exploring too far. Sometimes we’ve used swimmable and non-swimmable water together. For instance in Quest for Booty, we had a lagoon area in the Hoolefar Island level where Ratchet could swim, but further out there was deadly water that bounded the level. For A Crack in Time we’ve decided to change course and not include swimming. We’re putting a lot of new gameplay features and modes in this game and decided that swimming wasn’t Ratchet’s strongest suit. Plus we also wanted to avoid the confusion of swimmable water versus non-swimmable water. So he won’t be swimming in the latest game in favour of Hoverboots, Clank time gameplay, new gadgets, and a lot more.”

Who would miss swimming in a game, anyway? It’s not like Insomniac is cutting the ability to hover, shoot cartoon weapons or smack enemies with a big wrench. That’s what the people pay for.

As 2009 turns to summer for many of us, and as you dip your toes in the pool or step toward a crashing beach wave, enjoy this one easy thing you can do that so many video game characters can’t.

Swimming can be a chore in games, a hassle for gamers and game makers. But wouldn’t we all rather swing giant hammers and double-jump over cars instead?

The ruined cityscapes of Resistance comes to life tomorrow, when it will be filled with countless lifeless avatars running about, eager to win Resistance-themed prizes via the “Four Barrels of Fury” mini-game. The game lets you take control of a turret, blasting Chimeran ships out of the sky for a position on the global leaderboards and a chance at fabulous prizes.

PlayStation Home community managers will be on-hand tomorrow to do battle with players, and the folks from Insomniac will be making an appearance next Thursday, from 5:00-6:00pm Pacific to do the same. They’re also holding “Resistance 2: SRPA Siege” nights every Friday from 6:00pm-12am, giving players good reason to wander about the rubble of our once-proud planet.

Insomniac will, later today, be releasing two new pieces of content for their shooter Resistance 2. One is a map pack. The other? Some new multiplayer character skins.

The map pack is called “Aftermath”, and offers three new maps: Aftermath, Pit Stop and Outpost. All three support 20-player Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, while Outpost goes the extra mile by offering 20-player Core Control. Those three maps will cost you US$6.

In addition to this, six new multiplayer skins are up for grabs: Rachael Parker, Female Soldier, Ravager, Cloven (Retribution model), Ranger Variation, and Black Ops Variation. They’ll cost you $0.99 each.

Oh, and one more thing. There will also be a patch for the game, bringing it to v1.50. And it’s a big one (as it suggests a PS3 firmware update is imminent, if you look at the third option down). In fact, it’s so big it’s probably best to let Insomniac tell you about it in their own words:

Meltdown Mode: We’ve read the message-board comments. We’ve seen the online petition. You want it? You got it! Patch 1.50 brings back Meltdown, the popular Resistance: Fall of Man multiplayer mode in which each team attempts to gain control of the map by capturing beacons.

Superhuman Co-op Mode: Does your eight-man Specter squad possess the skills to survive this all-new difficulty? It features stronger enemies and disables auto-respawning (only another squadmate can revive you), but dishes out bigger rewards (double the Grey Tech and XP per round).

Second PSN Login Support: Your fellow couch potato can now save their character’s multiplayer progress, thanks to the added option to log in with two unique PSN accounts.

* XP balance adjustments for competitive mode
* Announcements screen
* Failsafe save support
* Password protected custom games
* Added ability to “Report” player
* Teams switch sides between Core Control rounds
* Players now automatically go to staging after every competitive or cooperative game (regame)
* Localisation updates
* Various stat fixes
* Collision fixes on Bryce Canyon and Holar Tower cooperative levels
* New leaderboards
* Map fixes for competitive Chicago level
* Games with Friends and Clan members in them are now highlighted in the “Find Game” screen
* Limited late joining has been added to ranked games
* Deathmatch spawning has been improved
* Players can’t earn progress towards Berserks when they are dead
* Reduced sprint speed of core carrier in Core Control games
* Cooperative XP bonuses have been increased by 30%
* Cooperative games respawn time is now 20 seconds
* Players keep their grenades if they get revived in a cooperative game
* Players now have a “Join Game” option for players on their friends list
* A player’s own name is now in white in the obituary text

New Medals:

* Savant – Come in first place 30 times in ranked matches (Comp)
* Hero – Come in first place 60 times in ranked matches (Comp)
* Legend – Come in first place 100 times in ranked matches (Comp)
* Tools of Destruction – Score 100 kills with every single weapon (Comp)
* Master Strategist – Score 100 kills with full health (Comp)
* Arch Rival – Kill 500 rival squad members (Comp)
* Full Honors – Take each class to max level (Coop)
* Prophet – Revive 500 players (Coop)
* Secret Agent – Obtain all spec ops upgrades (Coop)
* Surgeon General – Obtain all medic upgrades (Coop)
* Specter Elite – Obtain all soldier upgrades (Coop)
* Like a Surgeon – 100 Splicer Kills (Comp)
* Shake N’ Bake – 100 Pulse Cannon Kills (Comp)

New Ribbons:

* Quickdraw – Get the first kill of the round (Comp)
* Manic Medic – Heal for 1000 points within 3 seconds (Coop)
* Solid Solider – Absorb 500 points of damage within a few seconds with your force barrier (Global)
* Specter Survivor – Survive an objective without dying (Coop)
* Specter Medic – Revive 2 or more allies within a few seconds (Coop)
* Hail Mary – Throw ammo and hit your target from at least 10 meters away (Coop)
* Quick and Painless – Score 3 headshots kills in a row (Global)

Resistance 2 DLC and Patch 1.50 Available for Download on March 26 [PlayStation]

Next week’s Game Developers Conference is going to be packed with hands-on, presentations and even a little news.

Over at the Playstation Bloggers Lounge, Sony has set up a number of interviews for some of their upcoming and current titles.

Q-Games founder and president Dylan Cuthbert will be on hand to talk about PixelJunk Eden Encore. Sucker Punch will also be around to show off some new content for inFamous and Titan Studio will have Fat Princess on hand along with the game’s creative director and producer.

Most intriguing, though, is what Insomniac will be there to talk about. The folks behind Resistance 2 will be on hand to discuss Resistance 2 map packs and what’s to come for both cooperative play and mulitplayer gaming.

What’s on your wish list for the Playstation 3 shooter?

We’ve a soft spot for Resistance 2 and Japan. Why? Because the game’s marketing there was vastly superior, and also because it’s led Sony Japan to come up with adorable little bundles like this.

To be released on March 12 for ¥8980 (USD$95), the little box will include a copy of Resistance 2 along with a DualShock 3. While the box pictured has a white controller, Sony say the pack will also come in black and silver as well.

We’d recommend the white one, as we do in all DualShock 3-related matters. Its matte finish just feels better.

Last August, Sony asked you to vote for your favourite Resistance 2 cover. One option was the classy European cover, the other two, they looked like PS1 games. The classy one didn’t win.

Today, perhaps realising their mistake in letting Joe Public in on artistic decisions, Sony have released all three covers as large, printable image files. So if you don’t like the one you’re stuck with, you can download, print off and replace it with one that’s easier on your eye.

Download the Resistance 2 Cover of Your Choice [PlayStation]

In a post on the official PlayStation blog, Insomniac Community Manager Bryan Intihar detail the changes coming to Resistance 2 when patch 1.40 is deployed on January 26th.

Most importantly, patch 1.40 for Resistance 2 will see the return of levels to players who have had there level reset back to 1. Players who had the misfortune of being reset will not only gain back what they lost, but also keep all of the experience they’ve received since the reset occurred. Huzzah!

There’s also some changes to trophies, including a fix for the bugged “Killing Machine” trophy that wasn’t being rewarded to players who achieved 10,000 kills. They’re also balancing the hell out of the game, adjusting Medic-class XP gain in co-op and (thank goodness) preventing parties from joining free-for-all deathmatch games.

Check out the link below for a full list of the improvements coming to Resistance 2 on Monday.

Resistance 2 Patch 1.40 Details [PlayStation.Blog]

DC Direct know you, Resistance fans. They know you love Nathan Hale, know you love his alien foes, and know that you’re the type to probably spend money on plastic representations of the aforementioned.

So they’re releasing a series of four figures, based on characters/designs from Resistance 2. Due in September, you’ll be able to get Nathan Hale, an Advanced Hybrid, a Ravager and a Steelhead, each standing around 6″, give or take an inch.

[via Action-Figure]