Deep Down management producer discusses concept, long-term approach

Deep Down management producer Teruki Miyashita shared new information regarding the development of the free-to-play PlayStation 4 dungeon RPG during a recent Capcom company interview.

According to Miyashita, Deep Down was born from the idea of a game that would take advantage of the current generation’s enhanced network functionality.

“The plan started from the idea that we should try to make a full-scale online game for home video game consoles,” Miyashita said. “To make the best use of the performance of PlayStation 4, we have brought our technological forces together in the development of Deep Down.”

Miyashita adds that “the most notable feature” enabled by the new generation of consoles is the game’s graphics.

“We’re focusing on things like how to recreate real life gases and liquids, such as flames and running water,” Miyashita said. “In addition, we can now portray minute details, such as the degree of rust in weapons and dirt on a piece of cloth.”

Deep Down sees players exploring dungeons, fighting monsters, gathering items, strengthening their weapons, and solving riddles. Players act as “Ravens,” who have the special ability to read the memories of an object. Miyashita says that Capcom will update the game with “special stories and additional events on a regular basis” and “expand the game content so that you can enjoy it for a while to come.” Major updates are planned to be “released regularly under a planned schedule.”

That said, the approach is long-term gameplay. Capcom is trying to deliver a game where players can experience “intensive exploration through trial and error” that has an element of “progress,” but at the same time is “neither boring nor strenuous.”

“We’re looking at a ten-year span for the online games,” Miyashita said. “For the first three years, we’ll be diving in deeply to see what features are popular among the users. That is to say, if we prepared five plans at the start of the service and two of them gained positive responses from the users, we will further develop those two and reform and transform the other three plans that didn’t work out.”

As far as its dungeon crawling goes, Miyashita teases “a brand new gaming experience which is unlike a traditional dungeon-based game” that he can’t talk about in detail yet. Players will also be able to team up with friends online, with Capcom “thinking of some new team play ideas.”

Capcom is also planning to make use of the DualShock 4 controller. When you first come across “Mementos,” for example, their voices will come from the TV speakers. But when you pick one up or put one in your pocket, their voices will come from the controller speaker.

A release date for Deep Down is still to be announced, but development hasn’t slowed down, despite challenges faced by the development team.

“We’re still facing a ton of challenges,” Miyashita said with a laugh. “For starters, there’s the whole process of developing games for the newest next-generation consoles. 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.”

Miyashita continued, “We are putting our shoulder to the wheel with the development of Deep Down. We’d really like to create more opportunities for people to come into contact with the game. We just ask for a bit more patience from our users.”

We last saw Deep Down in motion at the Tokyo Game Show. A new set of screenshots were released in December.