In a surprising move from its usual silence, Microsoft-owned Rare decided to answers IGN’s invitation and send a 5-man delegation out to be interviewed on their launch games, Kameo: Elements of Power and Perfect Dark Zero. We’ve taken out a few of the highlights that may interest most gamers.

On Perfect Dark Zero, senior designer Duncan Botwood blatantly ignores a direct question about the singleplayer part of the game, and mainly focuses on the quality of the multiplayer, notable considering many people have indeed been frustrated about the singleplayer mode which seems unpolished and perhaps even unfinished at times. Other questions were answered more honestly though:

What would you have done differently if you could? I mean, hypothetically, were there elements of the game you would have liked to have seen changed, altered or bettered?
The things we did right were resisting the calls to put a jump feature in the game, because that led us to come up with the roll move. That’s taken the game in a slightly different direction to others which is good for us and good for the genre. The cover move is another good feature that adds to the level of tactical play available.

What kinds of downloadable content is Rare working on now for Perfect Dark Zero? When will Perfect Dark Zero Counter Operative appear for download? Also, will it be free or will it cost money?
Stay tuned…

Obviously, downloadable content is going to happen, which is a good thing. As for Kameo most of the talking was done by lead designer George Andreas. We have taken out most of the usual “the game is so great” parts and are only quoting the questions that present some nice-to-know insights:

In Kameo, there are 10 elemental characters. Were there any elements that didn’t make it into the final cut? Or were there ideas for some that you didn’t use?
We originally started with over 100 warriors! We soon decided to have a smaller overall number (which we scaled down to 18) but make more use of them. We eventually settled on 12. Then, toward the middle of Xbox development, we cut an entire element (the wind element) and reduced the overall number to 10.

Deep Blue is one of my favorite looking characters, but for an element that originates from water, he’s one of the most frustrating characters to control underwater, especially in shallow areas. Was there much discussion about this internally? Also, why is this character actually easier to use on land?
Poor old Deep Blue. He’s taken some flack over the last few months. Yes, he went through many iterations of water control schemes but and we eventually discovered that what worked well for one group of people, didn’t work well for another group. No matter how hard we tried, and how many times we tackled the issue, we could never unify people’s opinions. […] We slowed his movement down to accommodate smaller areas in the Water Temple areas, but we ‘over looked’ the other areas. Another area that proved a pain for some players was the Water Boss area - Corallis. Again, we simply didn’t slow his movement down enough in this small space.

At E3 2005, Microsoft said that Kameo: Elements of Power would feature an online co-operative element. But as we both know, the game offers only offline cooperative play. Giving it an online cooperative feature would be fantastic. Please tell us about your future online co-op plans if there are any, and what they entail.
You might be hearing something very soon.

So consider the online coop confirmed to happen soon once more. Also hidden between the lines is a confirmation that both games could very likely be getting a sequel on Xbox 360, so let’s hope they have time to finish Perfect Dark (Two?) single player mode this time around.

And finally, for those interested, there are some great technical answers about how both games utilize the Xbox 360’s huge power to their advantage. Especially during Kameo development they were often surprised at how much they had to pull from the system to really tax it:

We always wanted to have crowd scenes in Kameo and started to do some experiments with the Xbox 1 and figured we could get maybe 100 or so NPCs. Once we moved onto the Xbox 360 we thought, “Let’s try something that will slow it down, how about 1,000? Ran fine, no problem whatsoever! How about 3,000? Still fine!” Then we thought we had better try it with something more taxing than a test level so we put them on the Battle Field level which was all parallax and normal mapped, had a huge draw distance and lots of special effects like volumetric smoke; it still ran fine. In the released game we had something like 3000-plus NPCs because more than that was hard to choreograph, but the 360 can do much more. At one point during debug we found that each of the NPCs in one scene were being drawn 4 times by mistake, that’s 12,000 being drawn and still no sign of slowdown.

Read the full interview over at IGN.