We managed to grab an in-house Q&A with a 'mystery Ubisoft employee' regarding their upcoming "Rabbids Go Home" Wii game. 

Can you talk about the story of Rabbids Go Home and its origins? Do the two Rabbids in the game have names?

For obscure and evidently irrational reasons, the Rabbids have chosen a ridiculous objective. Luckily, they’ve got an infallible plan…equally absurd, of course. Is a ridiculous plan the best way to attain a ridiculous objective ? I doubt that the Rabbids doubt it or even know what doubt is!

The fact is, something has changed. After three invasions and a lot of intense partying, the Rabbids are ready to go home, and that shiny, round thingy in the night sky has captured their imagination like Moses before the Promised Land…OK, more like a kid in front of a toy store window! To the Moon or Bust!

So the Rabbids come up with the perfect plan: just build a huge pile of stuff and climb to the moon! ‘See, if I jump up and down, or stand on my tiptoes I can almost touch it!’ Now…where to get the stuff… Lucky for the Rabbids, the humans have more stuff than they know what to do with! So they go grab as much stuff as they can carry in that shopping cart they found, and transfer all the stuff via toilettes through the sewers and back to the Pile where it keeps growing higher…and higher…
The story starts here with that simple surreal premise and evolves as the player progresses through the game. Eventually the humans revolt, sick their vicious pooches on the Rabbids and join the Verminator volunteers to exterminate the Rabbid pests. After all, that’s HUMAN STUFF the Rabbids are stealing! They’ve toiled their whole lives to amass that precious stuff!

What’s worse, the Rabbids make a mess wherever they go, disrupting the normal flow of human drudgery to provoke a gag a minute, and shocking the humans right out of their socks, literally! In fact, Rabbids live to make a mockery of our numerous human neuroses and inhibitions. And we, as players, thank them for it… with a bellyful of laughs!

As for the second half of your question, yes…the Rabbids in the game bear any names you want to give them: “bunny”, “honey”, “doodoo”…but we decline all responsibility for their reactions!!

How did you introduce the wiiremote and nunchuk in the game? Will we be able to play with the zapper or any new peripheral?

Driving the shopping cart is at the heart of RGH’s gameplay and players will steer it using the nunchuck and control acceleration (boost) and other driving actions with the Wii Remote. We make good use of both controls and have imagined a completely unique set of delirious activities that uses the Wii Remote in a way you’ve never seen before... Can’t say more for now ;D

Can you explain the basic concepts of the gameplay? Is the game simply about collecting junk? What are some examples of variety in the game?

The player controls a team of two Rabbids pushing a shopping cart. The supped-up cart is a blast to drive around the open environments, skidding, accelerating, breaking and super-boosting over chasms. Players will learn to master this tuned-up caddy, which is key to the main objective: collect stuff, little and big, to grow the Pile.

Lots of the stuff the Rabbids snag throughout the adventure will give players new abilities for moving or attacking with the shopping cart. A jet engine strapped to your cart will suddenly propel you at three times your normal speed. With a big tire attached, you can bounce off surfaces and off enemies like a bumper car… Float and glide with the Bubble Bed on board, and upgrade your caddy with a jet ski to power slide through water!

These transformations radically change the sensations and driving controls, varying the pleasures and creating new challenges for the players.

There are of course plenty of obstacles along the way that will make collecting stuff a lot less easy than it sounds. Humans will start defending their freedom fries, sicking mean pooches on the Rabbids, designing surveillance robots and generally equipping themselves with anti-Rabbid kits and traps…until they become Verminators! Anti-Rabbid propaganda explodes and with it the Verminator craze, anything to sell more stuff and get us back to the quiet, boring and stuff-laden existence we led before those heinous Rabbids showed up!

In some screens and footage, we’ve seen the Rabbids rolling their grocery cart through skyscrapers, on planes, etc. Is this an open world, or is it level-based? How does everything unfold?

Rabbids Go Home is definitely an open world.

The action in RGH takes place in a world that concentrates everything one might find in a typical US city and surroundings. Some other environments include a beach, a desert …. The game world is organized, like a spider’s web, around neighborhoods (the Hubs), each giving access to several levels. Players can move around freely and choose the level he/she wants to play from these Hubs, but they can also collect resources, strip humans naked and even combat enemies in the Hubs. These neighborhoods evolve throughout the adventure.

The game is immediately accessible with super-simple controls and gameplay early in the game. How much more complexity can we expect to see later in the game? Do you think the game will appeal to more hardcore gamers?

We aim to vary the pleasures and challenges of driving, enemy battles, mission formats and the shopping cart controls, and try to introduce a new ingredient every 5 minutes of play in order to constantly surprise the player with either a gag, a story event or a gameplay mechanic.

I’d like to think that many skillful players of all ages will be as thrilled by the depth of humor as the depth of play.;D
 

Thanks again 'mystery Ubisoft employee' for this very interesting Q&A.