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Interview with John Sonedecker, from BlackFoot Studios
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- Detalles
- Creado en Jueves, 01 Mayo 2008 19:08
- Escrito por Santiago Lamelo
- First of all, thank you very much for your time to answer our questions.
Absolutely!
- You are known to be a big fan of Tactical Action shooters. Where did your interest come from?
I enjoy what is today called Tactical Action shooters, but enjoy what some might call old school Tactical Squad Based Shooter even more. I have always had an interest in the military and unconventional warfare. Movies were always a big draw to me so when games started to look better and be more immersive, I guess it was just a natural progression.
- In a moment where console market is focusing main attention from the media, don't you consider risky enough boarding such a "ship" as BlackFoot Studios?
Any business venture is risky. Starting something from nothing is even riskier I suppose. However, I and the others involved have a lot of experience on both the production and business side of things. There were times when I was not sure about continuing and I would talk with my wife about it. I realized that making games, and specifically the squad based tactical shooters, was what I wanted to do. So I could either do it for someone else and live by their visions or do it for myself and do things the way I feel they should be done.
- How many people are working in BlackFoot Studios?
We currently have 8 people working on our projects, including me.
- You have worked in Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games. What do you honestly think about the course the franchise has apparently taken, regarding titles like R6 Lockdown, Vegas or Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter?
I feel that while those games are very good in their own right, but in my opinion, the franchises should have been split into multiple directions Moving the franchises in the directions they have has actually been a success for Ubi Soft and that has proven to be a great business move financially. However, I personally would have also run a secondary team to make some more focused products that continued to cater to the original fan base. That way you keep your original fans as well as expand your market to a wider audience with more of a Action Shooter design.
- Phil Therien, lead designer from R6 Vegas 2, has recently said there is not place today for hardcore shooters. Would you comment about it?
I completely disagree. This is exactly the reason I started BlackFoot Studios. I guess using some mass market twisted logic you could make the point that there is no market for hardcore shooters that would sell 1.5 million units. So if that is his angle then I would agree that a hardcore shooter most likely wouldn't sell that many units. However, I firmly believe there is a strong enough market to support 500,000 - 1million units if done right. The key is to design and budget properly and not try to be "the next big Hollywood style shooter".
In my view, this guy did more in a couple of interviews to Alienate the remaining original Clancy game fans than anything. There is a healthy market.. It just isn't as big a one as HALO or Call of Duty 4. That doesn't mean it isn't profitable.
- We believe any good game with a good promotion may become a bestseller, whatever its genre is. Do you agree?
I agree to an extent. All that promotion will certainly get you noticed and on everyone's mind as well as help to generate tremendous first day/week sales. But if the game isn't any good then it will die very fast. Brand recognition is another big thing. A lot of products, not just games, get attention by the brand name alone. It's usually only after a sale that a customer might decide it isn't good. But you know what, the sale was made none the less.
- I find quite hard to grant a publisher for a game like this one. Any publisher yet?
We are not currently working with a publisher, though we are talking with a couple and are keeping in touch with others. It is very difficult to get a project signed and especially when a lot of publishers use the" make bigger and badder games with huge budgets" business model. We don't share that same view on making games so we have not built the studio to sustain such a model. A lot of the larger publishers don't understand that.
It also goes back to the question above about the market. Almost every publisher we talked to was only interested in products that would sell at least a million units. Our proposals would usually get shot down by the marketing department since they didn't think they could sell those numbers.
Luckily there are a few publishers out there that "get it" and we are actively targeting them.
- Do you consider any online distribution platform as Steam as a good option?
Sure. We like Steam and are actively watching Stardock to see how their new Impulse platform shapes up. Digital Distribution has many advantages and it is something that I would like to see used for our games.
- Will Ground Branch use its own graphic engine?
No. We are not a technology company and will license technology when we can.
- Rainbow Six, as well as SWAT, seems to be focused in CQB while other games such as Ghost Recon or Armed Assault are set up to use open scenery. At what point could we locate Ground Branch?
I would say somewhere in the middle, but more along the lines of Ghost Recon. We are definitely not shooting for the visibility ranges of something like Armed Assault and are not going for strictly close quarters either. So anyone that has played Ghost Recon will feel comfortable with the sizes.
- Rainbow Six offered a great tactical component regarding team management options. Will Ground Branch show this feature as well?
Yes, there will be team management options, but I can't go into details.
- We really like cooperative multiplayer, specially for tactical games. Several games I mentioned before offer this feature, but not a cooperative campaign along with some kind of story/script. Obvious question then... Will Ground Branch offer a cooperative multiplayer campaign?
The plan is to offer the entire SP campaign as a cooperative experience.
- Any action videogame being set in a real situation usually becomes controversial, though the attraction to virtually participate in such situations is very powerful for the player. Will there be such real life situations in the game?
The game does not take place in a current conflict, but does take place in a real world location. The storyline is very plausible and something that could happen tomorrow under the right circumstances.
- According to several BlackFoot's website comments you will try to make the game as much realistic as possible. R6 was very realistic in fact, regarding tactical situations and command orders, being ballistics though not so precise as in SWAT 3. I would like to know if GB ballistics will reach this precission level. I mean, will you take into account damage, penetration, speed, materials...?
Yes, our model takes things like weapon caliber, bullet weight, how the weapon is set up and distances. Materials as well as object thickness combine to determine the amount of penetration of a bullet. We even model actual bullet deflection off surfaces depending on the bullet's trajectory, velocity and surface hit. Our ballistics go further than any of those games mentioned.
- What weapons can we use in the game?
We are not going for the big arsenal of weapons, but for a nice selection of weapons that the real teams would actually use. Then we are making sure that these weapons operate accurately in the game based on their real world characteristics. We will not artificially balance our weapons. I can hear a collective gasp from all the game designers out there!
Seriously. Our ballistics model is designed so that everything in the world has a property and each weapon has real world characteristics. A player will choose a weapon based on need and situation rather than what looks cooler or which one the designers "balanced" the way they wanted. Quality over quantity.
- Damage is a critical point when talking about realism. Life bar is mostly used in shooters and some tactical games, but that's not very realistic. Sometimes, we find body damage by impact zones. Taking SWAT 4 as example, you can disarm a suspect shooting to his arm or weapon, or killing him with a head shot. Will this be possible in Ground Branch?
Yes. No regenerating health for us.
- We think that is very important the community's work, which, with the proper tools, could extend the games' lifetime with addons and modifications. That's what happened with Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon. Will Ground Branch have editor or SDK?
We are strong believers in modding and keeping a strong community. There will be a full set of modding tools and SDK available when the game is done. My hope is to also lend as much assistance to the community as possible as well.
- Will the player be able to drive vehicles?
In some circumstances. The AI will drive all vehicles, but you as a player will have the ability to take over driving wheeled vehicles if the driver happens to die while driving. You will be able to work any onboard weapons systems of a vehicle as well as shoot your personal weapon from vehicles.
- I will not ask you about the release date, I already know the "when it's done" label, but I will do about developing time. Assuming BlackFoot was founded in 2004, have you been working since then in Ground Branch?
Ground Branch actually started as a concept for a game based on the Army Special Forces and was tied to a book. I believe we started working on that idea sometime in the middle of 2006. By 2007 it had turned into Ground Branch and we were working out the design and producing some demos of various things.
- PC games are being criticized by their excesive hardware requirements. Can you tell us something about hardware requirements and GB?
That is an interesting situation really. Some games are so advanced that they require "excessive" hardware. Take Crysis for example. It has big requirements, but that is justified with incredible looking graphics. You get what you pay for. Other games are simply not optimized properly and you can clearly see that the developer was lazy and just ported the game over from another platform without putting much effort or time into making sure it ran the best it could on a PC. A game like UT3 is a good example of something that sits in the middle. It looks good, is technologically advanced with plenty of features and is highly optimized to run great on various PC configurations.
I would say we are like UT3 in that respect. We want to compete graphically, but not alienate a large portion of our market.
- From time to time, the "PC games crisis as a gaming platform" talking arises. Funniest thing is we can see new titles coming every year, many of them quite successfully. What's true about that supposed PC gaming crisis?
That could be a really long answer! I don't think there is a crisis as much as a shifting of expectations. In a way, I think the industry is creating a self fulfilling prophecy in that their actions are what is fueling this talk. Games are more complex today, but there seems to be more and bigger bugs in PC games now. There are fewer demos and more "public betas", which I believe is just a demo with a built in excuse for its bugs and less than fun game play. Publishers need to put more effort into supporting the PC and it's customers. I mean real support and respect. Releasing Day One patches that include missing features and fixes for bugs that are extremely obvious is ridiculous. If you can put out a day one patch with those types of things in it then you should have put them in the game in the first place. Unfortunately that style of development is considered the normal way these days. Make a quality product and you will be ok.
- Piracy is commonly blamed as the main reason for low sales. However, a game like Sins of Solar Empires became a bestseller even lacking any copy protection system. Their creators consider copy protections as more annoying for legal users than any pirate. Would you say copy protection systems are useful?
That is an entire book in itself! I think most copy protection is annoying and does more to hurt the legitimate buyer than it does to stop piracy. That doesn't mean that I am against copy protection though. I like the idea of something like Steam, but with a better system for offline play. I think something where you sign on to activate the game then sign in for MP play, but are able to run the game in SP mode on the system you last signed in on is a good way to go.
You can't argue against what Sins has shown though. But I'm not sure you could do the same thing with something like HALO and get the same results. So I think there needs to be something that activates the software, but pretty much leaves you alone once it does that.
You also need to look at the previous questions answer as well. There is a segment of the pirating community that does so simply because they are tired of paying a lot of money for junk games. And since a lot of games do not release a demo, the pirated copy becomes the demo. That doesn't make it right, but publishers and developers that put out a good product could potentially wipe out that segment of the pirate community.
- West markets seem to be stuck, lacking any evolution, and games seem to continuosly offer the same old gameplay. However, Eastern Europe countries are creating games and trying to provide new ideas, and as a result we sometimes get games as IL2 Sturmovik, STALKER, Armed Assault, The Witcher and many others, very sucessful ones. What do you think about Eastern games?
I honestly don't care where a game comes from as long as it's good. I don't think that Eastern games necessarily offer more innovation either. I would say though, that in my limited view, I think Eastern European developers don't rely on marketing input as much. Development in the West is driven so much by marketing and maybe it is more developer and design driven over there.
- Have you been playing any tactical game lately?
I play all the Clancy games for research and of course Call of Duty 4. But there really isn't much else out there at the moment. I really enjoyed Medal of Honor Airborne. There were a few things that annoyed me, but the experience overall was enjoyable.
- Do you know if there will be a spanish localized version release?
We hope to!
- That's all, Mister Sonedecker. We really thank your time for answering our questions. We wish you, sincerely, best luck for your proyect.
It was my pleasure! Thanks for having me.