Jenova Chen Talks More About ‘Journey’

As you’re most likely aware, we are looking forward to Journey.  Jenova Chen, creative director of thatgamecompany, has been speaking over on the US PlayStation Blog regarding some of the choices they made when designing the game.  The first, and most obvious, question that was asked is exactly who do you play in Journey? 

“I want the player to find it out, it’s part of the fun. This is a world where there are no plants, no animals, and not even a single water drop to be found. The only things that are moving are these things, these characters, made out of cloth.”

As we have mentioned previously, in Journey there is online multiplayer, but all PSN IDs are stripped away and there is no waiting around in lobbies or voice chat – it’s a very primal affair.  Chen says that this is because thatgamecompany not only make games for PS3 owners, but for their family too.  There’s a high chance that your grandma won’t know what a multiplayer lobby is, and won’t give a stuff about latency – it has to be accessible.  There were also technical issues too:

“We eliminated the lobby concept, we had very few choices — other players have to be able to connect at any time, not just the beginning of the game, and a player has to be able to finish the game by himself he can’t find someone. All these technical issues came in with that one decision to get rid of the online lobby.

If your grandma asked, “what’s Journey?” I’d tell her “Journey is just like hiking. You go to hike a mountain, and there are other hikers you might meet and if you like them you can hike with them.” And that’s it.”

The whole focus of Journey is to get from A to B, but in an interesting way.  You can “surf the sand dunes, collect cloth to fly over larger distances, cooperate with another player to get faster travel…sometimes you can ride things.” Originally you could level up in the game, but thatgamecompany wanted you to feel small and weak, so that was replaced with a system where you borrow power.  There are special cloth patches that can be found in the wild, and if you call them they will lend you their power for a time, before returning to their resting place.

As of this moment Journey only uses two buttons on the controller – “Calling” lets you collect patches and communicate with another player, a very primal form of communication. And then there’s a “Fly” button.”  The camera is controlled via the sixaxis motion sensor.  There is also an auto jump feature.

In terms of a bad guy – “Nature is your enemy. If there is an enemy, you can’t do anything about it. You’re small and weak. You can’t slay the Shadow of the Colossus!”

So far it’s sounding like a fantastic experience, and we can’t wait to hear more!

Source: US PS Blog