Hi. I’m Noriyuki Otani, and I programmed the Gorgies, Burns, and friendly forces in Vanquish. I thought I would take the chance and write a blog and shed some light on the Gorgies themselves.

When I was creating the Gorgies, our “grunts”, the thing I paid most attention to was how to make sure that people wouldn’t realize that the Gorgies were actually going easy on them.

Going easy on the player might be the wrong way of putting it…

For example, when Gorgies faced off against the player, even though you would expect otherwise, you couldn’t fire upon them before they spotted and fired upon you. Even people who were used to shooters and great at aiming couldn’t do it. The worst would be trading attacks, and if you weren’t any good you would lose the exchange, which is guaranteed to stress you out. At Mikami-san’s suggestion, I tuned the game so that there is a gap before the Gorgies fire. It seems really simple, and I am sure that teams with tons of shooting game experience have plenty of know-how in this regard, but we started everything from zero, so this was just one of the many examples of us falling back on our tried-and-true method of “crash-and-build” development.

The Vanquish that emerged from all of these trials has tons of little tuning adjustments where the “game goes easy” to make things more fun to play. There aren’t very many places in the game where you will actually notice these things while playing, but every place we’ve put in these tweaks, we consider them as an act of love from us to you.

I hope you give Vanquish a whirl and enjoy the hell out of those bloody robots!

If you don’t want any of our love, you can get a real taste for what the robots can do to you by trying God Hard mode. I took great joy in not only powering them up in lots of different ways, but also making sure to remove their limiter. Even though our friends usually end up scrap metal, it would make me really happy if you give this mode even just a short try to see what the Gorgies are truly capable of.