Highlights from GI MM11 Article

(Excerpts from the article "Blue Moon Rising" in the current issue [297] of Game Informer.  [Bracketed] items were added by me for some clarity.  Koji Oda is the guy in charge of Mega Man 11; Kazuhiro Tsuchiya is one of the producers.)

[p.49 explains internal conflict when Inafune left.]
	"To be honest with you, when Inafune left it was a difficult atmosphere within the company," says Mega Man 11 producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya.  "It was difficult for somebody to step up and say, 'I really want to work on Mega Man.'  Inafune-san was definitely a brand leader for the franchise.  He helped pave the way for its success, and he had a lot of brilliant ideas.  That's an absolute truth.  So when he left, there was a sense of emptiness, and a sense that no one was appropriate to pick up the mantle and pave a new vision for Mega Man."

[p. 50 explains what kind of guy Koji Oda is.]
	Koji Oda grew up on the Capcom games.  As a young student in the 1980s, Oda would sneak out to the arcades whenever he could.  Whenever he scrounged up enough money, he would buy games for his NES.  Unfortunately, gaming magazines were scarce and the internet was primordial, so gamers rarely knew if a game was going to be good before they bought it.  Oda felt like half the games he purchased turned out to be duds.
	"Sometimes you would buy a game and it would be a 'kusoge,' which literally translates into s----y game," Oda says.  But then there was Capcom, which always had that Capcom logo on it.  Those games were always promising.  There were no 'kusoge' coming out of Capcom.  That was the main reason I decided to apply to work here.  I figured that if a company was able to make games that were this fun, it had to be fun to work there."

[p. 50 also explains Oda's feelings toward Mega Man.]
	After Inafune left the company in 2010, Oda began to wonder what Capcom had planned for the little blue robot.
	"I still feel like Mega Man is one of the most important pillars of the company," Oda says.  "At the end of the day, we asked ourselves, 'What does Capcom need to do for its fans?  Should we act like Mega Man is a thing of the past?  Should we toss him aside?'  I felt like that would be a foolish gesture.  Mega Man is such a treasure to the company that it would be a waste to let him go because someone left."

[p. 52 shows where Oda looked back, compared to what he wants to do with MM11, and shows where his values lie.]
	"Late in the series, we had heightened the animation quality so much that it actually impeded the controls and it was less intuitive to figure out combat timings," says Oda.  "That was a hurdle that we had to tackle for this.  That was something I felt we had to address, because by pushing the visuals forward, I felt we risked taking a step back in gameplay."
	To better define the "authentic" Mega Man's gameplay, Oda ordered his entire team to play through the mainline Mega Man series as well as the Mega Man X series and take note of the things that made each game special.  Oda also scoured message boards and read fan surveys about their favorite Mega Man moments.

[On p. 54, GI describes how the game feels, as well as Oda's thoughts on controls.]
	The Mega Man games have always offered a challenge, but the series' precise controls and predictable enemy behavior help alleviate frustration.  Overcoming Mega Man's difficulty is often a thrill, not a chore.  From what we've played, Mega Man 11 lives up to that legacy.  Mega Man's movements feel incredibly tight and responsive.  His slide move returns, which makes it easy to dodge enemy attacks and other falling obstacles.  Meanwhile, Mega Man's charged buster shot remains a satisfying way to deal with groups of small enemies or power through large obstacles.
	"One of the biggest things I've learned in my time in games is mastering the controls," Oda says.  "No matter how good the visuals are, or how good the sounds are, at the end of the day, if you pick up and play the game and it doesn't feel right then it's a failure."

[p. 54 also details how robot masters are handled.]
	Following the series' tradition, players can pick the order they tackle each of the eight Robot Masters in Mega Man 11.  Unfortunately, Capcom isn't ready to talk about these bosses.
[...]
	"We went back to the original concept, where the robot masters were created by Dr. Light then kidnapped by Dr. Wily and modified for evil purposes," Oda says.  "I think with every Mega Man game, it's all about Dr. Wily doing something devious, but we wanted to go back to the original plot where Mega Man is fighting against former allies.  We thought that was just inherently more interesting and added a little more depth."

[A caption for a picture on p. 56 points out some considerations.]
The studio is considering some new quality of life features, such as putting Mega Man's slide on a single button and allowing players to charge up their buster without holding down the attack button.

[p. 56 also has some thoughts about the concept of which boss is weak against which weapon, and other weapon-related concerns.]
	"If you look at the series and how it's evolved over time, I feel that the relationship between the weapons and the Robot Masters that are weak against each weapon had started to become a lot more difficult to discern," Tsuchiya says.  "They made a lot less sense, and the further the mainline series progressed they became really difficult.  We put more thought into how they link up this time around."
[...]
	Capcom says it is trying to design multiple uses into all the Robot Master weapons.  Thankfully, stringing together different Robot Master attacks is now quicker than ever thanks to the ability to flick the right analog stick to hot-swap between Mega Man's various weapons, kind of like an invisible weapon wheel.