Sleeping Dogs tells the tale of Wei Shen, an undercover cop who infiltrates the Triads–and like any good undercover story, Wei may be in it too deep. In order to get this premise just right, the developers didn't resort to stereotypes–they did their research.
For those that have played the game, the research shows, yeah? On an interview with CVG, Sleeping Dogs' producer, Dan Sochan, went on record with what some of this research involved.
"We did a lot of research on Triads, they're gangs who've been around for over 400 years, their involvement in the community and even society. Going over there and meeting with a few Triad members, meeting with some former undercover agents, meeting with the head of the Triad taskforce, to try and really flesh out each of these characters and making them unique and standalone.
So we've really tried to create a range of rich and deep characters in the type of people you're going to encounter. We've tried to be very true to Hong Kong cinema as well and not make it a parody."
Later, the interview also talks about how sometimes the development team would fall on stereotypes anyway–what someone thought something was like, or what they'd heard. Thankfully, the combination of research and on-staff team who were from Hong Kong set the record straight.
"But we tend to always err on the side of realism in that case and we had several Hong Kong natives go through all of the signage all of the dialogue and make sure that things were correct, were accurate, were true to the city itself," Sochan explains.This allowed the team to create a more believable, immersive world with a cast of characters who had compelling stories.
Usually, the more a game is researched, the more it shows–games like LA Noire and Assasin's Creed are prime examples of this at work. As we go forward, hopefully we can expect more and more games to do their homework as a means of creating a better game.
