Capcom On Ninja Theory’s DMC: “It’s The Perfect Marriage”

When Capcom first announced it was handing the reins of the Devil May Cry franchise to Ninja Theory (the studio responsible for Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey to The West) for a turn, the move was largely met with negative criticism from the most dedicated of the series’ fans.

Capcom Europe’s marketing boss Stuart Turner took to the Capcom Europe official forums and issued a statement that instills quite a bit of confidence:

There are a lot of opinions, and people passing off rumours as ‘fact’ on what was a 90 second trailer… Just wait and see. Some of the vitriol is incredible. I guarantee there will be a few sheepish people changing their mind when more information is released. And as for when that’ll be… wait and see :D

As for concerns over NT development skills please don’t worry. Capcom are heavily involved in the development of all it’s IP being worked upon by outside parties. The exact same concerns were raised over Dead Rising 2 being made by Blue Castle games, which were totally ill founded, on what was an excellent game that ‘got’ everything that made the first game so amazing.

When searching for developers to work for Capcom look for companies who skills match up with our own. It’s a perfect marriage of talent and ideas. Like a marriage where one partner likes to cook and the other in the marriage likes to eat!

NT are renowned for the quality of their production everything from motion capture, scripting, design and performance, areas perhaps areas that Capcom have been criticised over the past few years? Capcom bring to the table years of experience with design of fighting systems, characters and the little things that make DMC, well DMC.

Combine all the best elements of Capcom and Ninja Theory you will have one of the greatest DMC titles ever created… and that people is what we’re working towards.

I have long worried that Capcom would — due to their own ignorance and fan pressure alike — largely ignore NT’s strengths in the production of DMC. They outsourced Dead Rising 2 to Blue Castle Games (and were apparently very pleased with the results seeing as they bought the team). While the general consensus seems to be that DR2 improved on the formula of the original, it doesn’t sound like the changes were enough to warrant contracting an outside team.

If your not hiring a studio to play to their strengths, why hire them at all? It’s probably cheaper and undoubtedly less of a hassle to make the game yourself (although it could be argued that BCG probably didn’t have many immediately distinguishable specialties, having a background in baseball games).

The style of games that Ninja Theory excels at making are very character/performance driven and very film-like in nature. They develop their games in a style very similiar to the way Naughty Dog handles its Uncharted games. Would a game like that under the DMC template be very different than what came before? Probably, but why call the game a reboot if somewhat radical change isn’t the point?

Capcom seems to be commited to making a truly great game. Will they lose a few jaded fans? Probably. But they’ll also gain new ones; possibly even more than the franchise had before. And let’s be honest; in it’s current form, Devil May Cry hasn’t been very good in a long time.

Personally, I love Ninja Theory. I think they’re artists, but their last two games (of a total of three they’ve developed) barely broke even. They need a publisher like Capcom to really back them up the right way, so they can win one of these days.

What they don’t need is someone breathing down their necks to get a carbon copy of what came before. Because that’s not the team they are or the game they make. It wouldn’t even be a reboot, but it would be a waste of their time. When make games as good as Ninja Theory, with so little success, I doubt you have much time to spare.