I can’t remember much about Battlefield 1942, two decades on, but I’m pretty sure I never thought “by golly, what if this + enormous sad stone monsters” while storming the beaches of Wake Island. It’s one of many things that separate me from Fumito Ueda, director of melancholy PS2 titan-feller Shadow Of The Colossus, first released in 2005. In a new interview, he and other staff at Team Ico and Sony explore the game’s development from start to finish, including some early dabblings with multiplayer.
That SOTC – aka Nico, aka Ico 2 – was envisaged as a group hunting sim is reasonably well known, but this is the first I’ve heard that it took inspiration from DICE’s khaki ballistics fest. Read all about it in this oral history published by Design Room, a longread mothership recently launched by former Polygon writers.
The piece begins with Ueda and other staff reflecting on the poor sales of Ico, their reputation-making Gormenghastian escort questathon. “In terms of inspiration, I wasn’t playing many offline games back then,” Ueda recalls. “But I was really hooked on Battlefield 1942, an FPS. I felt immense potential in the experience of that as a competitive game, where you’d shoot at or help out other players you didn’t know. That desire to create a network game – meaning a game where you play together, battle, or cooperate with others online – led me to start with the idea of a game where you cooperate to defeat giant monsters.”
Design Room include a cheeky offstage Jerry Springer-style reaction here from Johan Persson, the lead programmer responsible for Battlefield 1942’s original concept. “You tend to just assume these ideas were the result of someone having a eureka moment, waking up one morning, without any context,” he says.
You might think that Capcom’s original Monster Hunter would be the major influence, but that only came out the year before SOTC, and it’s hard to imagine the development timelines lining up. Still, the prototype outline given by then-Sony Computer Entertainment America producer Kyle Shubel certainly evokes the team tactics of Monster Hunter Wilds and co. “I’m going to stun it. I’m gonna tie its leg while you mount on top of it. I’ll go in front of it and blind it while he takes it out,” Shubel expounds. “That concept, and then jumping back off onto your horses, and riding off in the sunset — yeah, if we could have pulled that off, everyone would be talking about this game.”
The multiplayer concept didn’t come together for mostly humdrum reasons. Team Ico had little experience making multiplayer games, and PlayStation’s online support was in its infancy at the time. The idea never progressed beyond some early prototypes. “We probably hadn’t gotten as far as testing multiplayer, or maybe we just connected two controllers on a local network and were able to move characters around,” Ueda says. “That was about the extent of it. We hadn’t reached the point where you could play online.
“Personally, I thought we could attempt making a multiplayer game because we were developing within Sony’s first-party studios,” he goes on. “But looking at the production resources at the time, I decided that we couldn’t realistically do it. To efficiently concentrate resources, we cut the multiplayer portion.” Ueda adds that it was likely other parts of Sony’s Japan Studio would have had to help out.
SOTC was a humongous undertaking even without the ability to gank the lonesome juggernauts. “Compared to Ico, this game had to have the following: an open-world setting with dynamic loading to express infinite space; “deforming collision” where you cling to giant structures; and a quadrupedal animal for the horse,” Ueda details. “All of these features were already raising the bar significantly compared to Ico.
“We had nearly the same production team as Ico, and we knew network games were tough to make. Adding network support would also require the player to have more hardware to play, limiting those who could experience it. For these reasons, I decided to cut our losses early.” It wasn’t the only thing they ended up chopping – the game had 48 colossi at one point, not 16. You can read more in the full feature, with selections reserved for paying subscribers.
Given SOTC’s story themes, introducing multiplayer may seem utterly ruinous. It’s hard to imagine losing yourself in the mossy undulations of massive grieving metaphors when you have DorminNova69 spamming “revive me” in chat.
Still, grief is as much a collective ritual as a personal ordeal, and there is such a thing as “emotive multiplayer” – see the sherpas of Journey and the gloomier covenants of Dark Souls. Somebody should make a proper mod for it. Somebody should mod the colossi into Battlefield 1942 as well. I’m frankly appalled that there don’t appear to be any such mods already – SOTC at least has the excuse of (somehow) not yet being officially available on PC.
As for what Ueda is up to these days: he and Team Ico are getting into the mech business.
- Security Camera Installation – indoor/outdoor IP CCTV systems & video analytics
- Access Control Installation – key card, fob, biometric & cloud‑based door entry
- Business Security Systems – integrated alarms, surveillance & access control
- Structured Cabling Services – voice, data & fiber infrastructure for new or existing builds
- Video Monitoring Services – 24/7 remote surveillance and analytics monitoring
Author: 360 Technology Group
