Deep Down development has been "one step forwards, two steps back"

Capcom has admitted that development of its free-to-play online next-gen dungeon crawler Deep Down has been hard going.

We’re still facing a ton of challenges. For starters, there’s the whole process of developing games for the newest next-generation consoles,” Capcom’s senior manager of consumer games development Teruki Miyashita said.

Every solution we came up with seemed to create more problems than it solved, so it has really been one step forward, two steps back the whole way. On top of all that, we had to tune up the servers for the online management aspects. We had a really hard time trying to develop a game that combined all the elements.”

But what of the game? Despite being announced over two years ago, so little is still known of the F2P game, although a video late last year showed that it will have an Assassin’s Creed or Inception style world-within-world.

The most notable feature in Deep Down is that the latest next-generation consoles have allowed us to incorporate more incredible graphics than ever before,” Miyashita added. We’re focusing on things like how to recreate real life gases and liquids, such as flames and running water. In addition, we can now portray minute details, such as the degree of rust in weapons and dirt on a piece of cloth.

You will explore a dungeon, gather items to strengthen and refine your weapons and armour, and figure out riddles. However, because it’s an online game, we will release special stories and additional events on a regular basis. Thus we’ll be continuously expanding the game content so that you can enjoy it for a while to come.”

The developer also admitted that the game will be F2P as he believes that the model could become a console standard and future, warranting its exploration.

This kind of game format for home consoles is unusual even at Capcom,” he admitted. But this business model has already been popularized by browser games and applications for smartphones. This could become a standard in the future. Although there’s always pressure when any unusual initiative takes off, I think it’s worth trying.”

Capcom’s consumer games development boss Yoshinori Ono admitted last month that much of the game had already been scrapped and re-done.

When looking back at the previous ideas we had for deep down, we felt concerns about it not being able to capture an audience as we would’ve liked, so it was decided to give it more time so that we can further enhance it,” he said.

We’re thinking about showing something that looks completely different from what previously shown, although it might be a while from now. The ideas we have for the game is much larger now compared to when we first announced it. The ideas we had before might not have been good enough.”