September 6, 2007 - The critical mauling Lair received last week is now the stuff of legend. But according to Julian Eggebrecht, the title's director at developer Factor 5, the problems didn't begin with the game's release. In a recent interview with MTV's GameFile, Eggebrecht says the entire course of Lair's development was plagued with problems and setbacks.
"I am not a believer in ghosts, but this one was haunted," Eggebrecht said.
Going all the way back to Sony's PlayStation 3 unveiling in May of 2005, Factor 5 was rushing to finish the game's first trailer.
Factor 5's Julian Eggebrecht"Our trailer was very dark, and we delivered the trailer with a different black level for the frames than Sony was expecting, making them even darker. They showed the material at the last minute to Kutaragi-san, who didn't see a thing and bounced us off the [PS3's demo] reel. That's why the first tech-trailer was shown at the PlayStation meeting a few months later. That was the start of one catastrophe after the other -- deaths in the family at the worst time [and] sudden surgeries for key members, which bounced the technology off-track. And just in general, every single time there was a crucial delivery, something bizarre went wrong -- all the way to power outages when writing the master disks."
As for the poor reviews, Eggebrecht seems to chalk them up to the fact that Lair is a first-generation PS3 game. Factor 5 also created the well-received first-gen GameCube game, Rogue Leader.
"That is exactly the kick of creating a first-year game: exploring the not-yet-finished hardware and growing the technology while the hardware is coming together. I think both Rogue Leader and Lair gave a good stab at poking into the depths of the systems for such early titles, and from that you have a second-generation growth opportunity that surpasses most developers that jump onto the bandwagon later."
Perhaps the most oft-cited complaint with Lair is its motion control system, which Eggebrecht admits, by the scheme's very nature, isn't perfect. When asked how often he pulls off the 180 turn, he says, "about eight out of 10, which is the same ratio that I get in Wii Sports tennis when I try to do a backspin.
"The Sixaxis motion control itself feels a lot more organic and free-form than the rigid controls of other flight games and does much better for casual players, as we saw in focus tests. It does seem to alienate some reviewers who are at the top of the hardcore crowd and seem to have a passionate hate for all things motion, be it Wii Sports with sometimes absurdly low scores for what might become the defining game of this generation, or Lair as their newest poster child of evil. It's an unfortunate development that, if the players themselves listen too much to the motion-hatred message, will divide the gaming community. Our potential for growth as an art form for the mainstream is in the easier-to-access control schemes that might be less precise but a lot of fun."