With each day inching Captain America: Super Soldier nearer and nearer, a second Developer Dossier has been released from the lads at Next Level Games and SEGA. Previously, they provided an inside look at why Baron Zemo’s castle was chosen as the location, and how they managed to tie it in to the film. Now, who are we fighting, and why?
The obvious villain for Captain America is Red Skull, in much the same way Batman is paired with the Joker, Superman with Lex Luthor, Green Lantern with Sinestro, and my cat with the feather-tailed catnip mouse we gave her to keep her from driving us up the wall. Other Captain America regulars appear as well.
Written by Brandon Gill, Game Director, Next Level Games
The villains that we added to the game were chosen for a mixture of reasons.
For characters like Arnim Zola, who is a genetic scientist and much less of a military figure than the other villains, we felt that he set a wonderful stage for Cap to question himself and what he believes in. Zola augments biology to extremes that Cap feels is wrong, but it’s a slippery moral slope, because Cap himself has been genetically altered as well. This conflict was a major part of the narrative.
Other characters like Iron Cross, who is a huge mech, were brought in based on the enthusiasm of Christos Gage (the game’s writer) and gave us the opportunity to re-envision them in the more “realistic” setting of World War II.
Our designs for the boss characters were strongly based around the game’s combat system. Since the combat is designed to deal with multiple enemies, we felt that it would be a disservice to the game experience if Cap was set up to fight every boss one-on-one.
To this end we designed the bosses to be enhanced versions of existing enemies, for example, ranged, melee, etc., and then placed them into unique multi-enemy encounters and highly scripted situations to elevate them as climactic battles.
This allows the player to naturally assess each situation and fight the boss by using the skills that they have learned through previous battles, while still maintaining a high level of excitement and unique flavor to each individual boss encounter.
