 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE. Covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at E3 at the LA Convention Center, 68,000 people milling around, but we got kind of the backdoor access here to the Water Brother Games booth. So we're really excited to be back in here, the inner sanctum, talking about some of the new games coming out. And we got Phil Ring, he's the executive producer of TT Games. Phil, great to see you. No, thank you very much for having me. Absolutely. So you're in charge of this wonderful game that we've got on the wall behind us, the LEGO DC Super Villains. Yeah, I'm lucky enough to be one of an incredibly talented team, because we're really excited about this game. LEGO DC Super Villains is something we've actually been playing around with as an idea for a while. You get to be the villains, you get to be the bad guys. So we're really excited. We actually finally get to show and talk about it. After doing what, three games of Batman. So now you get to flip over, you get to be the Riddler, the Joker. Yeah, this is it. So with the kind of DC universe, we did the LEGO Batman titles, but DC has amazing villains. You've got Joker, you've got Harley, you've got Lex, and we were like, you know what, let's play as those. Let's do something really cool. Let's do a story where we're focusing on the villains, because we've never done it before. We think it'd be quite fun, and hopefully people are gonna really enjoy it. Right, so it's coming out. So give the particulars to everybody at home who's waiting to get their order in. Sure, so it's available October 16th. It's actually available for pre-order now, and depending where you're pre-ordering it from, there's actually a really cool Lex Luthor power suit mini figure you can get. So it features in the game, and then you can actually have that model sat on your desk. So I'm really excited. I'm gonna run off and pre-order it as soon as I can, because I won that figure. Well, that's cool, but the other feature you talked about before we turned on the cameras, you can actually make yourself a two-lego figure, right? This is really cool, yeah. So when we were looking at this game, we were thinking, okay, villains are really, really cool, but I wonder what it'd be like if I could put myself into this world. What happens if I'm playing with Joker and with Lex? So we decided to put the character customizer in. So right at the very beginning of the game, Commissioner Gordon's heading to find out some information about this new character, and then you customize that character, and that's your character. So you make whoever you want, as crazy as you want, there's loads of kind of depth to the customizer. You can change decals, colors, torsos, facial features, hair pieces, and then that character appears throughout the story. So they walk out in a cutscene, and that's really cool. And then that character unlocks new powers and abilities and becomes stronger as you play through the game. Right, so I'm curious on kind of the evolution of the game. Again, you did some earlier versions, they weren't the same game, but this one is kind of built onto that. What did you discover in terms of how people play the game? One of my favorite topics is degree of difficulty. How do you figure out the degree of difficulty to make it difficult enough for them excited to attack a challenge in concrete, but not so difficult where I'm just banging my head against the wall and throw my controller out the windows and I just can't get through this thing. So that's something that the team do really, really well. We always look at it and go, okay, we know that these games are for a younger audience or at least to start with. So we want something that an eight-year-old kid who may have never played a LEGO game before can come along, have loads of fun with this world. So we're making sure that we're kind of educating the player. We have new tutorial system in this game where we can show you little videos to go, so you've just unlocked this cool power, this is how it works. So we can kind of educate people, but then we know that we're gonna have either fans of LEGO games, but also like DC comic fans. We have people kind of telling us that, oh, I play this with my wife and things. So they want a bit more of a challenge. And that's when we get to go into the free play world. So once you're playing the story, you can then go explore all these locations and you find the slightly trickier puzzles where it's like, oh, I need to figure out why I need to do here. What character do I need? What ability do I need to use? So having that kind of accessibility, so it's really accessible to get into the game, but then there's loads of debt to it. So that's really cool for us. And it's one of these things that we're really kind of happy with because we also find that the eight-year-old kids run around doing all the hard puzzles and we struggle with them. So sometimes it swings. Well, I was going to say, so what are some of the things you measure to see if you're hitting that objective? Is it time in a level? Is it time banging there? I mean, what are some of the factors that you guys are actually looking and measuring to see if you maybe have to make an adjustment based on the actual behavior? So we love getting people to play the game. So we bring kids in and we'll sit there and we'll see them playing it. And if they're getting stuck, if there's something that's not really kind of standing out to them, if they're spending too much time in an area not knowing what they're doing, we'll go, okay, right, we need to change that. We need to signpost that disarrantly. We need to turn around and say, how can we make it clearer to the player so they know what they do, but also keep the rewards so that they feel like they've achieved it. They feel like they figured it out. So that's one of the things. Like if someone's getting stuck in a level and they're there for like three, four, five minutes and they don't know what to do, we don't want that experience for people. So we'll sit there and go, okay, how can we make that clearer? Is there something we can do? Is there something we can maybe flash a piece of Lego or something and sit there and go, these Lego bricks, maybe you want to smash those up. And that's also really cool because villains get to smash things up. And then go, okay, if I break that, I can make that clearer than the player will then know what to do and they'll be able to progress. So it's really signaling. It's really the big kind of way to help them get over that versus completely changing that piece of the play. Yeah, we really do think that we can hopefully change the puzzles to be able to do that. We have had instances though where we sit there and go, actually, no one gets this. This is too complicated, back to the drawing board. And so we'll rip a puzzle out and sit there and go, actually, how do we change this? This is overly complicated. It's too confusing. Let's do something different. Let's do something that's really cool. And it also means that we get to go, let's have a second stab at it. And sometimes we get really cool results from it. And some of the puzzles are even better than what we had previously, so. And the other piece I think is really interesting is clearly these are very well-known brands. Lego's a very well-known brand. DC is a very well-known brand. So you've got a narrative, you've got a story. You have kind of a look and feel. At the same time, you want players to be able to do all kinds of things. And you don't necessarily know where they're gonna go, how they're gonna interact. So how do you kind of balance the play with the narrative? So one of the great things about this game is from a story point of view and the narrative, we actually, it's an original creation. We worked really closely with DC. And that allows us to kind of really help with the kind of pacing of the adventure. So as you're playing through and you start off in the first level and you're breaking out of a prison, you then get dropped into the open world tab. And we get to signpost people and say, hey, you can go over here to continue the story. But if you wanna go off and explore, you do that. Go for it, go see what you can find. And then we kind of have something that allows players to keep coming back because these worlds, we know that there are massive fans of them. So if you turn around to someone and say, you can go to Gotham City, they'll know where they wanna go. Like if I'm a Batman fan, I'm like, I'm going to the iceberg lounge. I wanna see what it is. So we give players that freedom to really explore it. But then always kind of let them be able to kind of return to the story path. And that's another thing that we think is really important because when people are playing these games, we want them to be able to make the choices of how they play the game. Right, right. That's interesting. So if there is a place that they want to go to because they love Gotham City, they're big fans of Batman and it's not there, do you guys hear a lot of feedback? I mean, do people come back so that you've got to pump that into the next iteration of the game or the next update? Yeah, we do, we listen to what fans do. And we've been doing that for years. So ever since we've been doing these DC titles, we sit there and go, what do people wanna do? What do people wanna see? One of the things that I love is that we have massive DC fans in the office. So a lot of the stuff we sit there and we'll see requests coming on social media going, I really hope this character's there and we get to look at our character list and go, yep, he's there, who put it in? And then we go chat with them and they go, of course I'm gonna include that character, I love them and some of them are really obscure. But yeah, we love listening to feedback and seeing what people expect and what they want to see from this world. It's a really interesting balance because you get all the leverage from those known brands, those known characters, those named stories. But at the same time, as you said, you got a lot of people that are really into it and they're gonna hold you to a standard to make sure that you're representing everything as they think it really should be. Yeah, very much so. And this is the other thing about having fans in the office is we keep ourselves to that high standard as well. We sit there and go, it needs to be right. I am a fan of GorillaGrad. He needs to do everything I want him to do because I know this character inside and out. And so when we have people who are that passionate about the game on staff, we just wanna be able to show you that with the world. And so when we hear feedback that people go, oh, we love it. It's exactly what I wanted. It's like, we love that. It's incredible to know that we kind of feel like we've got it right. We've got these characters right. It's so cool though, just the integration of the Legos with all these other brands. And it's not even Lego blocks, the Lego people and how well it's been able to be integrated with all these other brands. And the integration just seems to work so well. Yeah, no, I've been lucky enough to be with TT for over 11 years now. So being able to work on these games and see how we can do a Lego version of these stories and these worlds and these universes, I'm so privileged to be able to do that. And the Lego version is different. So Lego DC Supervillains is a world of DC that you won't see anywhere else because it's our take on it. It's the developer and working with DC being able to go, let's make something cool. And then working really closely with Lego and going, what sets are you making? Let's put those in. That's really cool. So it's awesome. All right, well, Phil, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the game and good luck on October 16th. Great, thank you very much. All right, he's Phil, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from E3 and LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching.