We get to hear feedback from the fans directly. The team is always constantly like, “We’ve been working on this game for four years,” and lucky because we get to be out front and get to interact with people and we go - for example, over the weekend we went to MadFest in Australia, an anime event we actually got to meet fans. That’s how we came up with the whole idea. That was just me and there’s a game designer guy that really wanted to do that, so the two of us got talking. I noticed on Twitter that for the Devil May Cry 5 wrap party, Capcom had t-shirts printed that said “I survived DMC5 development hell!” Obviously there’s a play on words there, but was it a particularly challenging development process?
We’re all going back and forth and trying to figure out, doing this, how much do we think we can make? “OK, here’s how much money we can get at this many copies or whatever, so what can we do with this much money?” We do a lot of back and forth where it’s like, “With this much money, we’re not going to be able to make something that’s going to hit the quality standards of what Capcom’s known for, so can we do this, can we do that?” We go back and forth a lot until we settle on what we feel like is realistic, but then also something we’re confident we can make a good game with. Really, there’s a lot of back and forth, between the producers and the business team and the creators. We’re going to be in the red for this, so we can’t do this.” There’s always that possibility. Itsuno: There was certainly the possibility that we’d come up with a plan and bring it to the business team, and they’d go, “Yeah, no, look, this isn’t going to make us any money. He’s the one who puts us through the greenlight meeting and stuff like that.ĭid it feel like it was a risk whether the game would get approved or not, or was it more a question of scale and how big to make it? So I’m responsible for the creative side, but Okabe-san, as the senior producer, is the one then that takes all the information and has to set up a plan, set up a budget, set up a schedule, determine how many copies we think we should be able to sell and whether that makes it worth doing for the company. But obviously, we still need to have a proper business plan in order to actually make something. Itsuno: It’s great that Tsujimoto-san says that we’re only going to make good games if creators are able to make what they want. In that year, what kind of paperwork and designs are you putting together to convince your bosses it should be official? I was working on DMC4 Special Edition at the time. So how long would it have been between that conversation and the game actually being an official thing with a budget? For a Dragon’s Dogma 2, I kind of felt like, well, that’s something we could do now, we could later, and timing wouldn’t really change so much, but for DMC5, now seemed like the perfect time.
So, I wanted to kind of put that challenge out there and say, let’s do a game like that, a game that we haven’t necessarily seen in a while. That is really what I felt we hadn’t seen a whole lot of. And you know what you have to do, and you practice, and you get better, and then you overcome that and you feel that achievement. The idea that you come up to a challenge, and maybe you don’t necessarily win against that challenge on your first try, but you keep going. And I thought, you know what? Over the last 30 years, what makes an action game fun hasn’t changed at all. All kinds of different advances like that, but, not a whole lot of what I considered pure action games. We’d seen action games where the scenarios had elevated the games to something like what you see in movies. I went up to Tsujimoto-san and was like, “I either want to make Devil May Cry 5 or Dragon’s Dogma 2.” And Tsujimoto-san, to his credit, he’s like, “Creators should be able to make what they want to make, so go ahead, do whatever you want to do.”Īnd at the time, I had looked at the action game market - and this is four years ago - and we’d seen all these amazing advances in action games. Hideaki Itsuno: The portion you probably didn’t see, or maybe wasn’t written in those articles, was that that was just a discussion. That strikes me as a very casual way to pitch a game of this scale. Polygon: I saw a quote that was going around recently, where you were saying before you decided to make Devil May Cry 5, you went to Capcom’s chairman, Kenzo Tsujimoto, and asked him whether you should make Devil May Cry 5 or Dragon’s Dogma 2 - and he said to do whatever you want, so you just decided to make Devil May Cry 5.
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