MercurySteam, Kojima Productions relationship on Castlevania: LoS was "quite tense"

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow dev boss Dave Cox has told Eurogamer the relationship between Spanish developer MercurySteam and Kojima Productions was "quite tense."

However, Cox admitted the releationship between MS and KP, who were overseeing the project while MercurySteam developed it, didn't quite turn out to be the way he thought it would.

"There was pressure. It was quite tense. But it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be," he said.

"We thought, oh, we're going to have to submit everything and he's going to have a say on everything. He [Hideo Kojima] was clear right from the beginning: this is your baby. You need to run with this. I'm just going to help you. I'll give you my advice, my experience, mentor you if you like, but it's your baby.

"A few times we submitted things to them and they said, 'Well, maybe if you do this, do that.' Nine times out of 10 we'd try to accommodate what they wanted. But occasionally we couldn't. If there were technical reasons we'd say we can't actually do this. I'm really sorry. And they'd go, 'That's fine.'

But it's been great. I knew Kojima from Metal Gear Solid. When Metal Gear Solid was being developed I was a product manager for that. I went out to Japan and I met him and we got to know each other. We had the same interest in films and we got on well."

When asked to give an example of how the development process worked between MercurySteam and Kojima Productions, Cox added:

"We had big problems with lip-synch and facial animations. We did mocap but we didn't capture facials. When it came to doing all the lip-synching we were having a nightmare. The Kojima guys came to Spain – they said, 'We can't explain this on the phone. We're going to have to show you.'

"So they brought all the rigs of Snake. Then they showed us how they did it, how they rigged it. They helped us set it up."

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is out now on PS3 and 360.