Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed Q&A with Martin Kreuch – Bringing back the alien you remembered

With the impending release of the Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed remake launching 30 August for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X | S, we had just a few curious questions to ask about the game. In the hot saucer seat we have Martin Kreuch, Senior Creative Producer, Licensed Games at THQ Nordic Gmbh. Let’s get right into it!

When remaking any game, there’s always that challenge of wanting to make it “enhanced” vs preserving the original feeling. How did the team feel about this with Destroy All Humans 2?  

Martin Kreuch: We went about dissecting everything the original games had to offer, getting a lot of know-how from THQ Nordic who had been carefully analyzing the original games from a product perspective, and we had access to some – if not most – of the original design documentation. This enabled us to see what the original vision was for the franchise, and we started by comparing that vision to the eventual product, giving us the first window into the “feeling”. Early game development is always a lot of paperwork, lists, documentation followed by prototyping and seeing how the vision we want is experienced on screen.

Then, we went about dissecting exact components of that feeling: first, the humour, and the second, the fast-paced massive action. We also dissected the reviews of the original games and looked at them through the filter of that era, and noted the points where the expectations of players had moved on or matured. 

“The original ‘feeling’ is part initial conception, and part the player’s memories of the experience back in the day.”

Our challenge was to “enhance” that experience. A direct example of this was the game’s legendary voice-over lines that we wouldn’t touch at all, but we would “enhance” the comedy through better animation timing and on-screen acting for the characters. It’s not only a “visual” enhancement, but also one of re-shooting, re-framing, re-editing these scenes. 

Were there any lessons you guys learned from Destroy All Humans 1 remake that you brought forward to 2?

Martin Kreuch: Our remake of the first one gave us a great deal of insight about what worked and what didn’t. As the franchise still emphasized fast-paced combat and destruction, we spent a good amount of time on enemy and weapon balancing. We tried to make sure each and every new weapon coming along for the first time into Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed is in-line with the core ideas of the franchise. One core change that worked really well for us was almost doubling the active actor count on screen: more civilians, enemies, and props mean more combat, more visceral action, more things being PK’ed and flung about in all their funny, explosive and bouncy glory.

We also took a hard look at how the Saucer gameplay worked, and we re-aligned some features to accommodate for bigger combat instances – boss fights included here as in this installment we get to fight none other than a famous giant mutant lizard. We also did a lot of under-the-hood systems retouch to accommodate two players on the same screen, new tech, better user experience flow and bigger and more crowded worlds. One more bit that we believe adds to Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed is a better audio system that makes justice to the soundtrack.

One key learning was to re-do some of our tutorialization systems, and re-use a little robot from the game’s lore as a guide. One final learning was our fans‘ love for Crypto and Saucer skins, and we will not disappoint this time either. There are many new skins in this installment as well as all Crypto skins from the first game. We are also introducing Saucer paint-jobs as these were very much requested by our fans. And if you grab the Skin Pack DLC or get it via pre-ordering the Dressed to Skill Edition of the game, you’ll get even more skins, including my personal favorite: the space ape!

Personally, I think Destroy All Humans 2 was one of those games that’s very emblematic of the PS2 era. Did you guys notice any major differences between the design philosophy of Destroy All Humans vs modern console games? 

Martin Kreuch: Destroy All Humans 2 came from an era where “standards across platforms and their users” were not really in place yet. Every game from the era used a different control scheme, user interface and interaction had different functionalities or expected results, making for an overall different “experience”. Over the course of titles doing the same things differently, the audience naturally gravitated to the few methods of interacting with the player character, whether through gameplay or user experience design.

Destroy All Humans was one of the first free-roam open-world games out there, and charting a path through that blue ocean must have been a challenge for the original team. Thankfully, most of those design choices were well-made, and thus timeless. As developers, we also realized some of the other choices were constrained by things like time and technological limitations. Modern audiences’ expectations and how games work with them mostly converged from “many” to “a few” over the past 15 years. 

“Standardization is the keyword here. The challenge for us here was to choose the right one among the “few” that fit well with the Destroy All Humans franchise, and apply that properly.”

My own memories of DAH2 as a kid was that there was quite a lot to do that wasn’t just advancing the stories. Is Reprobed doing anything to enhance that feeling of just messing around and having fun?

Martin Kreuch: We’ve remade the side-missions in addition to the main story. Those side-missions have been re-crafted and streamlined, making sure the locations they take place in are not “one-off” throw-aways with the areas recreated, enhanced, and modernized. Mayhem and carnage is fun; this ridiculous sense of going about wrecking people and things is, for example, enhanced by the improvements we have done on the weapons. For one, we’ve revamped the Dislocator to be a much more curve & physics-based weapon where you can gloriously create fun and happy chaos that emphasize Crypto as a deadly-yet-entertaining character. Ping-ponging a bunch of human enemies in, around and about other enemies, vehicles, buildings is a core example of messing around and having fun.

Imagine doing this with your friend on the same couch! Our Challenge Accepted DLC also adds more activities to the open world, based on the challenges from our remake of the first Destroy All Humans.

One of the touted features is a much larger and more open world. Could you talk about creating something people are encouraged to explore?

Martin Kreuch: Philosophy-wise, you want “consistency and unique identity” in every piece of work you do in a game i.e. consistency within the whole game, and unique identity within the parts of the game that still work together well as a whole. We first went about creating the game’s visual and humor identity based on the 1960’s and what a modern audience visually expects. Then, we defined each location’s identity, and went about creating the unique pieces that feed into that identity.

“At every location, players will walk, skate and destroy own unique pieces fitting to the game’s era. Graffiti, flyers and posters… we’ve spread environmental storytelling all over.”

For the game worlds themselves, we have taken into account what they were like during the era, and made them akin to their real life equivalents, while keeping an eye out on how we can best make a mission or an open-world “wander about & mess around” flow. Bay City, a take on a sunny, hippie and counter-culture-dominated California city, is made out of rolling hills, colorful vistas, beautiful sunshine and the typical American buildings and vehicles of the era. By contrast, Tunguska is greyer, more sullen, representing a “less-fancy but more-functional” location, as expected of a Russian city of the era surrounded by tundra – and we did go fully creative for the Solaris missions, where not even the sky was the limit.

When you take all of the elements above, and fill out your world properly, you already have a great place to start. We naturally remade the side-missions of the original sequel as well, and optimized those missions‘ locations, incentivizing the players to see more of the world in a meaningful fashion. 

Our overall priority was ensuring that the player travels only as much as necessary and that everywhere they travel to should be equally beautiful and enticing for the game. Even in locations where the game wouldn’t guide you by the missions‘ flows, we’ve added (and sometimes hidden) a lot of easter eggs, references to jokes or relevant movies. We want the players to explore every single location in the world, as we have carefully planned out and crafted even the tiniest street, the dirtiest canal or the most remote beach-side.

Would there be any online co-op? Could you talk about the technicalities behind implementing co-op? 

Martin Kreuch: We’re not doing online co-op this time round, wanting to focus on couch co-op that we believe isn’t getting enough attention. We’ve seen it as an extremely engaging level of fun to destroy cities and go through the game with your friend next to you, where you could laugh (or scream) at each other. We wanted to bank on that feeling and focus on that direction.

Split-screen came with its own set of challenges. First, we wanted to make sure that the two players have no tethering to one another. Our tests showed two Cryptos tethered to one another really limited the fun, so the goal was then to make sure that all the systems worked properly with untethered player characters. This basically meant duplicating the player’s viewport twice and optimizing the game systems to support that. Keeping 60 FPS in split-screen as with single player mode was difficult, and we had to evaluate our options and weighing them against time, effort, and expectations. We settled on 30 FPS per viewport to make it a comfortable experience for modern audiences.

The next challenge was then managing enemy and civilian AI controls. The systems have to deal with two aliens rampaging through the city, and we hope we’ve managed to make it look good.

Any message to the former children who grew up with Destroy All Humans 2 seeing the game come back all shiny and new?

Martin Kreuch: As one of those former children, I can safely tell them we’ve made every single possible effort to keep the spirit of the original, and taken the time to add the flavor of the franchise from 20 years ago. The comedy in the cutscenes, in the gameplay, the crazy slogans of the 60’s peppered in the game, the whole Cold War and espionage background of the original story are part of the new & shiny. While the coating is new, the spirit is still there. 

“We hope the people of my generation will remember our remake with the same fond memories of the originals another 15 years later.”

Thanks to Martin Kreuch for answering our questions! As someone who’s never played the originals, I’m certainly curious as to what the rest of you think. Sometimes, you just really want to be an alien and mess up the human race because god knows we deserve it at this point. See you Cryptos on the not-chain!

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