A few weeks ago, Cubed3 was invited to a world exclusive hands-on preview session of PDC World Championship Darts 2008, coming out on Wii in the next few months, a sequel to the surprisingly popular Playstation 2 game of a similar name. Mike Mason was the one who took the trip over to developer Mere Mortals' studios to take a good look at the forthcoming game, as well as learning more about the company and their work.
It was Thursday September 20th 2007 that I woke up knowing that my first visit to a developer was on the cards, and so naturally it was a little nerve-racking. Of course, though, this visit was a big step forward for C3, and the opportunity had to be grasped whether nerves were rife or not. Details had been negotiated previously, and so now all that was to be done was to go on the visit itself. Into a bag went all the essentials – camera, check, DS, check – and away I went to catch a train to sunny Newcastle, with my beloved Bully in tow. Well, he wouldn't want to miss out now, would he?
Surprisingly given the season, sunny it actually was in Newcastle – but enough about that, you're not here for a weather report. From the train station I took a taxi driven by somebody who had no idea where they were going, but somehow got to Mere Mortals' studios in one piece. There I met Simon, the lovely
PR person who arranged the whole visit and operations manager of Mere Mortals Mick Stockton, who would be showing us around that day. There was also another man in the room; none other than Chandra Nair, editor of Nintendo Official Magazine UK, meaning that this visit was exclusive only to to Cubed3 and the official magazine!
After some introductions, Mick told us a little about the history of Mere Mortals. They have been around for a few years now and have been involved with hundreds of titles, mainly helping out other companies with ports and conversions from other languages, but also being subcontracted to help other companies with their franchises and developing their own original titles, such as PDC World Championship Darts. For now, they are mainly seated in Playstation 2 and Wii development, but in the immediate future they are looking to move into DS development and possibly Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
After our brief history lesson, it was time for a look around the studio to see the game being created and meet some of the team. By this stage, it was already plain to see that PDC 2008 was looking better than its first, PS2 only, outing. There's a reason for these improvements, at least on the visual front – Mere Mortals were actually able to work with the darts players this time around. While licensed for the first game, the players were basically created by consulting source material alone that had been found through a combination of watching TV and some skilful Internet stalking. This time, however, they have watched a huge amount of footage and had some access to the professional players in order to get expressions, mannerisms and signature techniques as close to those in reality as possible – though this has created new problems in that the darts players have been requesting changes to their character models whenever they change their hair or lose weight throughout! All this extra work has clearly paid off, though, as the characters look more like the beautiful people that they're representing more than ever before. There was also talk of a new physics engine being used to better simulate how the darts behave, both mid-flight and when they strike the board.
During all of this, we discovered that Mere Mortals as a whole are big fans of Nintendo, and it showed – there were Wii development kits everywhere. PDC 2008's primary format is in fact Wii, with the Playstation 2 version being secondary, which makes a lot of sense given Wii's controls and the sort of game that darts is. Members of the press covering the Sony version had visited a week prior to us and were clamouring to play the Wii version, but of course they had to play their format's version instead. I can't say that I blamed them at this point – after seeing some of the work on the game and having it hyped up a bit with the blatant enthusiasm and preference displayed towards the Wii version amongst the team, I was fully ready to have a go myself. Away we were led to a separate room...
While gorging ourselves on a buffet lunch, we were shown around the various parts of the title. As previously said, it looks much better than the first game in the series and has had its numerous modes expanded on, such as the career mode, create-a-character and the party games (which I tended to overlook in the first game). Brushing the crumbs from our fingers, Chandra and myself went hands-on with it ourselves. Rather than controlling the game as you do in the darts mini game present in Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, where you hold the Wii remote as though it is the dart itself, PDC takes a different approach. You simply take aim at where you want to aim with the pointer, lock your target in place by clicking and holding A, pulling your arm back and then thrusting it forward again, releasing A as you go to release your dart, with how successful your shot being determined by your judgement of how much force is needed in the throw, how soon you let go of the dart, and so on. It was impressive (aside poor Chandra being jinxed and having the still-in-development build crashing every so often, always when it was his turn) and played well, but you'll have to wait and read my full in-depth hands-on preview in a couple of days to get my complete opinion about all that I saw.
We had an hour and a half or so of playtesting the game and then retired to the main room of the studios, making a swift exit before everybody else got wind of the buffet spread and descended to pick it clean. Sitting again in the place we had initially spoken and learnt about the company, it was fantastic to have a good chat about various issues in gaming (including touching upon all of the major three's respective situations, under appreciated titles and supposed negative things in gaming that the media like to drag up) with a group of guys who are genuinely enthralled with the industry in which they work. After a decent discussion and some lamentations about Driv3r with another member of the team (who had worked on the game), it was sadly time for me to go and catch my train home to return to my Mancunian abode. Though only spending a few hours there in total, I took away a lot – not least the desire to give PDC World Championship Darts 2008 another go...
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