Gamersclick has conducted an interview with Executive Producer Ken Levine about Freedom Force, the superhero RPG that will soon hit the stores. Here's something for you:
GamersClick: How hard was it to shift your development resources from the first-person shooter genre, (like in System Shock 2), into the realm of role-playing games and the superheroes culture? Do you have any particular challenges that come to mind?
Kenn L: It’s always a challenge to do a product that’s so different. None of us had ever really done a game like that (however, we were joined later by a bunch of really good guys from the Fallout Tactics team, so their experience was certainly useful). But that said, none of us had done a first person shooter/rpg before System Shock 2, and none of us had ever done a first person stealth game before Thief (or a third person PS2 survival horror RPG before The Lost, for that matter), so we’ve never had the luxury of say, the guys at Bioware or Blizzard or Ion Storm Austin who really get to fine tune their craft through sequels.
However, I believe there is something similar in all of our games, the Irrational secret ingredient if you will. We like to give the player as much control as possible, to let them fine tune their personal (and character’s) skill set(s) to take on the the challenges we present them. In Shock 2, you could be a Psi guy, or a tech guy, or a weapons guy, or any combination of the three along a continuum. In the Lost, you can develop your character along four tracks, also mixing and matching as you see fit. In Freedom Force, you can develop a team of a dozen or so heroes, all of whom grow RPG style. You can also create your own characters, and mix and match any group of four to take on any mission. The characters play really differently.
For instance in the third mission, it’s early in the game so you can only take two characters out, Mentor and Minuteman. MinuteMan is a very “in your face character”, essentially the fighter of the group. Mentor is physically weak, but he has two powers which are crucial to breaking up the throngs of baddies that come after Minuteman: First, he can enrage individual baddies, which turn them against the nearest putz they can find. Secondly, he can cast a spell that just might blank out the minds of a clump of bad guys, leaving them easy prey for his brawny pal.
If you had a different set of heroes, you’d have to solve the problems totally differently. If you had Eve and El Diablo, you might do powerful ranged attacks with her cool nature girl bow, while El Diablo burned things up from on high. |
Freedom Force Interview at GamersClick
