Interviews// Wet Lead Designer, Ashraf Ismail

What was behind the decision to have it be a single-player game with no multi-player mode? Obviously that (having multi-player) is fairly standard for shooters now...

Ashraf Ishmail: As far as it being single-player – that was from the beginning. We had this story, and we had this universe and this character. So, from the beginning it was a single-player experience. We also felt that we wanted to put all our efforts into Rubi and the story, and that’s where we really pushed away from doing multi-player. We really wanted to focus on that aspect.

And we felt that adding a multi-player component might take away from that. Even in the sense of the effort that we put in, the time and resources. So, really, we dedicated everything to the single-player, and that was something from the beginning that we went for. We never thought of doing a multi-player and then cut it at any point. We just, from the get-go, wanted all our focus on the single-player experience and have something that had a lot of depth and a lot of character.


In the demo you mentioned you’ve always got the pistols on standby. Then you’ve got the shotgun, the SMG, the crossbow. Is that everything? It seems a little limited... Was there a particular line of thought behind that?

Ashraf Ishmail: For us, the focus is on acrobatic shooting. So, the four weapons types we have, we felt grabbed hold of the different mechanics that you’d have in many different weapons. So, the crossbows are explosively-darted, so there’s where you get your explosions from.

But our focus was on the acrobatics. We’ve put a lot of effort into chaining acrobatics, doing a lot of different moves. With the right set-up, and if you play well, you can really keep your acrobatics flowing constantly, chaining move after move, after move. And that was where we wanted to put our focus… and maybe not on the specific weapons that you use. It’s really about the flowing nature of things.

How you kill people and not what you kill people with?

Exactly. That even goes into the scoring system. (It) doesn’t account what weapon you use. It’s more about the move you did to kill that enemy.


Any online leaderboards for that stuff?

Ashraf Ishmail: There won’t be leaderboards. There will be achievements and trophies, that kind of stuff. We do have different kinds of modes that have targets you need to hit to get certain rewards and so on.


What about the gore factor. It was getting kind of crazy, people losing hands. Does it go any further than that?

Ashraf Ishmail: Australia! (the journalist asking the question was from Australia, land of no 18-rated games). We do have mechanisms in place to tame things down. We did think about Australia and Germany.

This is a mature game. For sure, we’re not kidding ourselves or anybody, and that was, again, something we envisioned from the get-go.

In my opinion, it’s not very gory, but it adds to the… the blood aspect… the name, that’s something that we pushed for – the blood aspect of being Wet, the environment is Wet with blood. Ruby’s Wet with blood.


Any plans for DLC?

Ashraf Ishmail: Actually, I’ll let our Mr Pete Hines answer that question. It’s more in the hands of marketing right now.


What’s in the case? Is it a Pulp Fiction thing, you never learn what’s in the case?

Ashraf Ishmail: I won’t tell you what’s in the case, because it is part of the story, but you do find out what it is – I’ll tell you that much.


Were you ever interested in doing a Wii version, with the sword mechanics, at all?

Ashraf Ishmail: No, this has always been specifically Xbox 360 and PS3. So, we never toyed with the idea of Wii.


Thanks a lot for your time!