Sam Kennedy of 1up.com did a massive interview with Dylan Jobe of Sony about the upcoming PS3 game Warhawk. Here is a little taste:
It’s no secret that Warhawk for PS3 ran into trouble last year. The game just wasn’t working. And midway through development, the team, lead by director Dylan Jobe, had to make some important decisions — decisions that ultimately led to radical changes in the game’s focus, scope, and potentially even its delivery method. People left the project. Rumors circulated that it was cancelled. David Jaffe got annoyed and tried to defend it. And regardless of how any of this could be rationalized, at the end of the day, the game that remained was not what people were looking forward to.
Jobe’s position is not an enviable one right now. As the person most responsible for taking Warhawk in its new direction and for now having to defend it, he faces an uphill battle against user expectation and a product already riddled with stigma. But while he regrets the way certain things have been handled in the past, he’s absolutely still confident in his game, and that the decisions he and the team have made will prove correct in the end. A few weeks ago we sat down with him to discuss everything — what happened to Warhawk, the tough decisions that had to be made, and most importantly, where the game is today — and came away with a much better understanding of Warhawk’s risky new direction. In what was one of the most candid interviews with a Sony director we’ve ever had, Jobe spoke at length about why they went multiplayer, what it could mean for Warhawk to be a downloadable game, and what it felt like when everyone was beating up on them. As we spoke, we began to feel a sense of renewed faith in the project — Warhawk may not be exactly what we were hoping for, but sometimes that can be a good thing.
