Yeah! So, basically, [in] the living city there are all kinds of vehicles you can just rip off or carjack, even enforcers can just commandeer them. But your own personal vehicles have benefits. Number one, they are completely customized to your heart's desire. Number two, they tend to be better. They tend to be more durable, better performing, and they can have these functional upgrades we talked about. So you can have a car with a ram plate on it that actually makes it to when you ram into stuff, instead of you taking a lot of damage, you're inflicting on another car you hit. So there's different kinds of upgrades. Like, for example, each car can have up to, depending on where you are at in the progression or what you have access to and how much you're willing to pay, potentially up to three of those different little tokens, those functional upgrades, on top of that to increase its power.
And that, also, is all on the interface, in your garage you go to.
And what happens if your car gets blown up or if you lose it?
It's just a repair cost. Yeah. We really don't want you to permanently lose anything at this point. That's just not very conducive gameplay for anyone.
You said you've seen Shaggy driving around in the Mystery Machine?
Yes.
Have you guys in the office made each other in the game, or tried to?
We've had Dave made. We've actually had quite a few of us made. One of the things we thought about a long time ago, we still may do, is actually do our credits where all of the developers actually have a picture of themselves in the game. But we're still playing with that kind of stuff. You know, definitely we've made some pretty wacky stuff. We've had the Dead Presidents roll around. We've had various rock bands. We've had a ninja clan; the network code guys have been ninjas throughout the whole thing and everyone hates them because they play stuff like Mario tunes as their death themes.
Speaking of a death theme, what made you guys decide to put that in? I mean, it almost feels like, it was like a "W're working so hard on this, but oh, I got this cool idea. Let's take a pause and make this, instead."
So, it's certainly been something that our audio lead, Roman Petty, has always had a place in his heart, as well as Dave. I mean Dave comes from the whole C64 and Mig ST background, and the idea was we wanted to be able to have that kind of personal audio expression, as well as the visual. And we started playing with it. It actually kind of dovetailed in really nicely and it was like 'what do we use it for? We can make it really easy, but what do we use it for?' We were playing with it one day, and someone actually, kind of, played in on their own as a kind of a joke. And it was like, "Hey, you know what, that works!"
Yeah. I think Burnout Paradise has that. If you have the Xbox Camera, you can record a face that your opponents forced to see after you've, you know, beat them or whatever.
We've actually -- one of the features we're discussing and trying to decide if we have any sort of time for as kind of a calling card, where, basically, when you get killed, it plays the theme and shows a render of your character in a pose that you pick with the weapon you've killed them with. Again, those are the type of things we look at after we've got the game really, really polished and executed well, and then decide if we have time to do it before release.
So, just going back to advancement, I mean cars are somebody's customized character and, then, tokens that you explained. Do you buy those from a vendor in the game or do you buy them in the interface as well?
So, basically, it works both as kind of the progression works. At the base level, you don't have access to them and you don't have access to equipment that supports them. As you progress in the game, you work for your organizations, we have a lot of successive upgrades of the different types as well as new types that we add on. And, what happens is, we kind of aggregate anything you can purchase either into the editors or into what we call the contact, which is the base vendor in the game. In the last five months what we've done is have different things available in different availabilities. You can buy X number of items per weeklong periods, like you can buy this new car which just launched, but you can only buy one this week you can buy one next week. So you have a lot of options eventually.
And there are different weapons in there as well?
Yes. We have about 35 different weapons, both lethal and non lethal.
Okay. So I can understand the criminals having to do you know, big jobs, bank jobs, robbing a bank, stealing stuff, stealing cars... When you are an enforcer, I can understand stopping the bad guys. What are you doing besides just taking down a bad guy to advance your money in the enforcement? What kind of big things do they have?
So there's two ways to go. There's the moral way which assumes he's being the predator to the criminal. If they are the prey and you are the predator, they are up for trouble. Also they have direct dimensions just like criminals do. So you can go to the contact and say, "Hey, what do you have for me to do?" There's a mode called escort that actually turns one of the players in the team to the VIP and you need to get him across town to the specified point before they are killed in a certain amount of time. So you have different missions such as escort, protect, hunt, where want you to go out and guard this and if you see anybody come through here, you get people we'll match against you. We always theme it to where it's something proactive to do. If you ask for a mission, we're gonna put you in a conflict and both sides are mission-based, so it works similarly for them. But they're actual place is very different. One preys on a city and one preys on the people.
PC only?
It's PC only on release. We certainly exploring console option but those would definitely be their own products. There'll be their own servers, their own IT.
Are you guys planning any sort of -- you said you'll have a movie studio where you can capture footage ingame -- are you planning any sort of social media integration?
We've certainly looked at it. I don't have any definite plans to discuss there. We want this to be something that player can actually record with it, but not just that. The idea is that you can just record whatever you want, it records all the audio things that happen in there. It's really basic, we don't have a video editing feature. It's more to record, and then you can put it into editing.
We want to make something -- its not quite just social -- we've certainly explored that and in fact I'm actually still heading up on a project on that with the guys. But we want first to get out there and have a product that showcases the technologies of game. And then the sky is the limit, you know, depending on success, on the kind of penetration we get. Going from that we could make a some sort of a superhero game, we can actually scale buildings. All that really depends on what the players want and how we want to push the technology..
Is there a drug presence in the game?
We are definitely not a game about controversies. I mean, we are mature in the game, we have language, but we don't really do controversy for controversy's sake. If there is a drug on the game, its meant to be as part of the story. For example, obviously there's criminals, there obviously some sort of darker side to that. We're not gonna glorify that. We're not gonna make it sort of mission play or court play, but it remains, certainly its reality. So we don't wanna hide it, but we don't wanna glorify it.
Certainly. Oh. The other reason i say is because we see that you guys have put so much of effort in the whole design function of this. You're gonna want to play with that pimp stuff out.
Definitely. We have lots of ideas. We have definitely a few things we kept out of the announcement too, but we're not quite ready to discuss. And a lot of it is just because we've been focused on the game more than that.
I was just thinking about the drug question because that's pretty prevalent in Grand Theft Auto and most criminal type games. And you were talking about controversy; however your criminals are advancing by killing people.
It's certainly a violent game and it's certainly a game about conflict but to us, we're not trying to glorify the conflict. It's the nature, it's the mechanic of the game; it's a shooter. But we're not making it especially gory.
Again, it's the mechanic of the game. If there's a bit of controversy in that, that's fine. We're not going to shy away from it, we just don't want to emphasize it. So that's what it is. Certainly there may be references to prostitution; there may be references to drugs. We probably won't have drugs as usables, or activate-able, just because there's no use to.
Where are you at in terms of beta and release?
Right now we're in closed, what we call "friends and family".
Beta stage in friends and family?
No, no not beta; more of an alpha phase. We're looking at closed beta happening in Fall and then we're looking at some sort of large scale beta at some time in the Winter.
Thanks very much!
