Atlus announced Trauma Team with the tag line “six doctors, six specialities”. Since there wasn’t much info I asked Yu Namba, Project Lead at Atlus, to tell us more about Trauma Team before it comes out on the Wii next spring.
Can you set up Trauma Team for us?
Yu Namba, Project Lead: The Trauma Center series, until now, has focused on the surgical portion of the world of medicine. With Trauma Team we’re expanding that focus to the entire hospital experience by having six doctors with their own specialty. We do have a surgeon still. There is an orthopedic surgeon, a technician that specializes in endoscopy, we have a diagnostician, a paramedics person, we also have a forensics person, a coroner.
The coroner… I *think* we’ve seen her in another Trauma Center game.
Yes, yes. For some reason she is not working as a surgeon any more. You might discover what happened to her in this game.
And the surgeon isn’t he a cryogenically frozen criminal?
Sort of. I don’t think we can reveal that much right now, but he has been sentenced to 250 years in prison. He made a deal with the government to lessen his sentence by performing surgeries.
Does he have a healing touch-like power?
Our main focus of this game is to be more realistic so things like the healing touch won’t be seen in this game. Maybe characters have their own special things, but it won’t be as outrageous as the healing touch.
What will we do if GUILT comes back with a vengeance?
As far as I know there will be no GUILT or Stigma in the game.
Oh, so there won’t be any of these sci-fi —
That I really can’t say for sure.
Crystal Murray, Public Relations Specialist: It’s going to be much more grounded than the other Trauma Center games dependant on more real world situations.
Since you have six different specialities are there going to be significantly more procedures than the other Trauma games?
Basically. Game wise it’s going to be a little longer than the other Trauma Center games. Surgeries will be divided equally among the six doctors.
Do you start with one doctor and complete say Dr. Weaver’s story or can you freely pick scenarios?
You can do both. If you would like to complete one person’s scenario that’s fine. If you want to jump over to another person that’s fine too.
Is each doctor doing their own thing, kind of like Trauma Team is one day at the hospital all of these events are going on at once?
Something like that, yeah.
What kinds of new medical procedures are in the game?
There’s really nothing to explain about them at this point, except that we’re trying to make each part of the game as different from the other parts as possible. For example, the surgeon and the paramedic sound about the same. The surgeon concentrates on the traditional Trauma Center style surgery while the paramedic’s job is to work on multiple patients at the same time and keep them alive. And you have to pick between the patients like who you want to operate on first and which one do you need to switch over immediately to.
Will there be a branching story where there are consequences if you don’t save some of those patients?
That I really don’t know so I can’t say anything about it at this point.
How does Trauma Team connect back to the other games? Are the stories connected at all?
Not really. It’s just in the same universe, another happening in another hospital in the US.
Will we see some of our favorite characters again?
Possibly, you already saw Naomi Weaver so…
Are there any online modes like leaderboards?
No leaderboards, but there will be two player co-op just like New Blood. There is no online co-op mode. We think the co-op in this particular game only works if two people are basically next to each other, communicating directly.
Maybe for 360 it might be better since they have the headset and whatnot, but at least for the Wii unless you’re next to the other person you’ll probably miss a lot of different timing of when someone should be working on a certain procedure.
Speaking of co-op play, some people thought New Blood was too hard to beat without a second person. Does the co-op mode still use single player levels or are you making special two player levels?
What I know is the single player mode and two player play will be balanced enough so nobody will be struggling with one particular thing. Of course, there will be different difficulty modes so, if you think the regular mode is a little bit on the difficult end you can always go down to the intern level.
What about Wii Motion Plus support?
This game, to be accessible for everybody, does not use Wii Motion Plus.
Do you feel like the Trauma series can benefit from Wii Motion Plus?
This will be my personal opinion. In this game, Trauma Team, there are a ton of new ways to use the tools or navigate the menu and whatnot that I honestly couldn’t come up with more things to think of. There is still a lot of potential in the Wii remote itself.
Maybe in the future we will consider Wii Motion Plus, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
What do you think about the PlayStation 3 wand? Could the Trauma series ever use that?
I really can’t say. We would definitely like to test it out, but we’ll have to see.
Published: Jul 1, 2009 03:13 pm