Yup...Nicole.
Some interesting info:
Active Camo seems a little useless in a fighting game...although I suppose with Xbox Live...Our last new character is also the one most recently revealed. A Spartan warrior from the Halo series, the girl beneath the suit is called Nicole (just like Master Chief is called John) and has a secret background story that will only be touched upon as you play through DO4 (90% will remain a secret, waiting to be unveiled by Halo developer Bungie itself). Itagaki has made some reference to the character slipping through time in order to end up in the Dead or Alive universe, but that's all we know at this point.
From what we could gather after sampling the character for a few play sessions, Nicole is a slower, powerful character, offering the qualities of a heavy-weight fighter. With her Pillar of Autumn move, she picks up opponents and sends them flying. Her MAC Lunge move pounds opponents with a speedy right fist. Nicole also has a couple of Halo-inspired moves, including active camouflage which makes her translucent, and a plasma grenade which causes an explosion in the opponent after a few moments.
More:
And for those of you that are curious as to why all the DOA4 screenshots have motion blurred characters...there's going to be a camera mode where you can take pictures of the fights, and more. *with motion blur...duh!*As we did with the Nassau Station stage for our last update, we posed a few questions to Itagaki about Nicole, the Bungie tie-up and the character design process in general.
Q. Did you have to create your own model for the character?
Itagaki: Similar to the stages, the method of creating characters is different between Bungie and Team Ninja. We did receive models, resources and assets from them, but to start, the software toolsets are different, so those have to be converted over. That's just a first step. Then, to bring it to the level of visual quality that's required for Xbox 360, a lot of details have to be added. To do this, we used official Bungie materials, like high end graphics that they provided and their official licensed figures, to get a physical representation of the characters. Also, we had Bungie check the work and they gave feedback and comments during the process. And once all that was done, we had a finished character model.
We then showed that to them for their approval, and they said that they'd never seen one of their characters in this high quality of a model. I was really happy that they not only appreciated how faithful we were to the character, but how high quality the finished character turned out to be.
Q. Why did you chose the female Spartan character?
Itagaki: People say "The Spartan Character," "Spartan this" and "Spartan that," but there's a human being inside the suit. Each one is an individual personality. So, when the original idea for this collaboration, which had the codename "Slugfest," came about, Bungie suggested that we use this original female character. They proposed it, and we thought that was a really good idea. We really liked that character. I personally thought she was a very attractive character to use, to bring about something new, that no one had ever seen before.
Q. Can you tell us her background story?
Itagaki: Her background story is something that the Bungie people have thought up, and it's part of their universe, so it's not something that I can talk about personally.
Q: But will the story appear in the game, like in story mode?
Itagaki: She won't actually be one of the characters selectable in the "story mode," but you will get a feel for her character and how these two universes -- the Halo universe and Dead or Alive universe -- overlapped. Just a bit.
Q: Is the character's fighting style based off a current DOA character, or was it a completely new concept?
Itagaki: As I said before, inside of each of these suits of armor is a person. The character that appears in Dead or Alive is named Nicole. We thought about her, what her personality should be and what she was like -- what fighting style, what kind of moves would best match her personality. It was a matter of picking up those moves and designing new ones, then play testing that, seeing what worked and what didn't, adding new moves, taking out moves that didn't work. She's probably now in about the third revision of her character in terms of fighting style. And that's still going on right now. It's just a process of saying, what would this character Nicole look like fighting? What seems most natural for her character?
This morning, starting at 5:00AM, I spent about three hours or so doing a final check and tuning of her moves, saying, is this really what she would look like fighting? Like, for instance, how she ducks or walks -- do I think that really matches her character's personality? Two people doing the same move are going to look different because they have different body types, personalities and movements. And that's really the key to making an attractive character. So, this morning, I went in and changed dozens of things in order to get her fighting style exactly the way it should be based on her personality and my perception of what her character should be.
We're not creating fighting dolls. We're creating virtual personalities -- individuals. And if the visual image doesn't match what I think the character's personality should be, to me that isn't Nicole -- that isn't the character. I'm now starting to get a really well defined image of what the character should be, and I'm making sure that everything in the game fits that.
Q: Can you discuss some of her moves? We noticed her active camouflage move and the plasma grenade, for instance.
Itagaki: The purpose of those is to just add fun. It's just more fun to have those kinds of moves in the game. This is a game where, in the safari stage, you can get attacked by a cheetah, so we can have a lot of elements that are in there just for the playful aspect. And it's just cool to have her attach a plasma grenade and have you blow up, or have her turn invisible using the active camouflage. Those kind of things just add to the fun, and add more depth, making her character more interesting.
Q: Does the camofauge actually give her an advantage, or is it just for show?
Itagaki: I'd say you'd actually have a better advantage with Hitomi wearing black pants because you can't see the movements of her legs in darker stages.
Right now, one of the final things we're deciding is whether or not to allow the active camouflage in Online competitive play. At this point, we're tentatively thinking of not allowing it for Online play because we don't want anyone to be accused of being cheap. But the people who've played it have said that they'd really like to use it in Online as well, so just as we have throughout this entire process, we're having communications with Bungie to make a final decision. One solution could be to make it available Online only when two Spartans are fighting each other, because then neither has an advantage.
Q: So why the decision to not include guns?
Itagaki: It's pretty simple, once you start firing weapons and shooting bullets, it stops being a fighting game.
Q: Did you have lots of freedom in designing the character's fighting style, or did Bungie ask you to do things a specific way?
Itagaki: That's really the kind of thing that's decided through discussions. You can think of if as a conversation between two friends. Both respect each other, and have a lot of respect for each other's work, so we just talk things through, going through several rounds of talks about what we think is the best for that character.
Q: You said something about different revisions of the characters. We noticed that in the version we played today, Nicole hits hard -- she's not a fast character. Was that different in the previous versions?
Itagaki: People want to try to classify things by numbers -- how many revisions, how many moves were changed, and so-forth. But that's not the way I like to think of it. There's not really much point to that in the long run. The key is, is what is Nicole's character supposed to be like. And how close can we get her to that. And that's why things were changed and revised.
It's like, if we just considered what a ninja should be like, and based our characters solely off that, you wouldn't be able to get four individual, different ninja characters. What I have to do is say, okay, we've got Kasumi, Ayane, Hayate, Hayabusa -- these are four individual human beings with different personalities. And so how would they act? They're all ninjas, but they all act differently. They have different personalities, different motives and so-forth. The same thing with the Spartan. She's a soldier, and if you just take that stereotypical image and create a character, it's not going to be attractive.
We have this story that Bungie created for us -- they didn't have to, they did it because it's their universe and they value this collaboration as well -- and we also have their script and the voices that they recorded. That gives me an image inside my head of what the character is, what her personality is. And then it's about making her fight in the way that matches the image.
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