In its 24 months underground (or should that be underwater?) the biggest change has unquestionably been its shift from full retail release to Live Arcade title. Hydrophobia's story has been split into three episodes of around five hours each to be released within a twelve month window. If it proves to be successful there's potential for more episodes beyond the original three.
Although digital deliveries are normally associated with lesser games nothing has been scaled back to squeeze Hydrophobia's file size down. It's a game comparable to most full-priced titles you'd care to mention (and indeed, offering more than some of them), and is best described as a kind of damp amalgamation of Tomb Raider and Dead Space.
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The shift from retail release to XBLA resulted in some unexpected knock-on effects. Microsoft rules state that every Live Arcade game must support Leaderboard functionality, and so Dark Energy Digital has had to write scoring systems into Hydrophobia. Episode one is split into three distinct acts, and at each interval players are awarded a score for the previous chapter. Completion time, accuracy, health, environmental takedowns and stealth all play a part, so perfectionists will find plenty of replay value.
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
