How do you feel
knowing your company has earned "The Game of the Year"
accolade from Game Spy?
<Mike G> That's very cool, I know we had some strong
competition this year from games like NOLF and Deus Ex, both of which are very good games. I, of course,
think it's the one of the best games we've done here so far and we're all
very proud of the game and hope it continues to do well, but I'm not going
to presume anything.
<Kenn
H>
It's certainly a great honor. Elite
Force has been one of the most
highly-acclaimed games that Raven's ever done.
Earning "Action Game of the
Year" from the GameSpy staff and from their readers' poll is the
proverbial
icing on the cake.
Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, think this
would happen when you
created ELITE FORCE?
<Mike G> Well, we had high hopes for the game, there were a
lot of things we wanted
to do- we wanted to bring a real, solid cohesive story with (relatively)
well-developed characters to the first person genre... I kept thinking of
the Wing Commander series when I was writing the dialogue and discussing
the story-gameplay relationship with Brian Pelletier, et al. We were hoping
the game would do well, that people could overlook the past performance of
Trek games and/or their potential resistance to the Trek license, and I think
we were successful to a large degree. Did I expect EF to get a game of the
year award? I was hoping.
<Kenn
H>
Early on in the game's development, magazines and gaming news sites
were
raving in the previews about how much potential Elite Force had and how
much
they were looking forward to playing it.
I felt then that we had a really
good shot at both a critically and commercially successful game, but you
can
never be sure in this business. I
try not to get my hopes up too high for
any project. That way I can be
surprised when great things like this happen
to Raven and its developers.
What do you say to those people who think ELITE
FORCE is too short?
<Mike G> There are a lot of factors to a criticism like that-
for one, I think a lot
of those criticisms came from the hardcore gamer market. The ones who are
very experienced (and skilled) at first person shooters. But the game was
intended to hit a wide market, we wanted average gamers to enjoy the game
without being frustrated and giving up. And average gamers are more
likely
to slow down, take in the surroundings, find their way around, talk to everyone, etc. Hardcore gamers tend to want to zip through it - their goal
tends to be to finish the game, not play the game. Another thing is, most people don't finish games, so maybe the fact that EF kept them interested
(and not frustrated) enough to actually finish a game led to them thinking
the game was too short. The last thing that I always find annoying about that comment is that it tends to ignore that EF comes with a multiplayer
game that is as complete as Quake III's was. There were quite a few games this year that were multiplayer or single-player only- the ones that did
have both didn't tend to do a whole lot with the multiplayer. We, essentially, made two games in one.
<Kenn
H>
The length of Elite Force has caused somewhat of a stir in the
gaming media
recently by spawning a lot of "quality vs. quantity" arguments. For the
most part, gamers seem to be siding with Raven and saying that they had a
lot of fun with the game and they were disappointed that it ended so soon
because they were having
so much fun. It
is extremely difficult to make
everyone happy...especially when dealing with an audience that is a
combination of shooter fans, hard core gamers and Star Trek fans.
I
personally think we had a pretty good mix with single player and
multiplayer
to accomplish just that. It's
just unfortunate that not everyone agrees on
the subject. =(
In your opinion, do you think the Quake III engine
has been maxed out?
<Mike G> Not at all, it's a very good engine with a lot of
potential. I think we're
going to see Q3A-engine games for at least another 2 years while id works
on
the next engine.
<Kenn H>
Not at all. If you look at
how far game companies pushed the Quake and
Quake II engines before they were retired, you'll see that Quake III has a
lot of life left in it. The first
run of games has only scratched the
surface of what the engine is capable of doing if properly modified.
What
is to come of ELITE FORCE? Will there be a part two? If so,
will you
use the ICARUS script again?
<Mike G> We'll
definitely be using ICARUS again, it had some growing pains but was
very useful. Josh Weier did a great job putting it together
and supporting
it throughout EF. He also made sure to make it portable, so
when we move on
to
our next projects, it's very likely we'll use it after
tweaking it out a little.
<Kenn
H> The future of Elite Force is largely up in
the air right now. There
are a
lot 
of
factors to be considered before making such a decision.
For the most
part, we're in a holding pattern right now until we can
process all the
information we have.
Do you feel the patch addressed most
of the concerns people had?
<Mike G> I
do think so, there are some things a patch just can't fix
(like bad
hardware or a screwed up system configuration), but we
addressed the bugs
people reported (there were really only a few of them). There
are other things we wanted to do- add some features, but at
this point I don't know exactly what the verdict will be on
that.
<Kenn
H> I
think so. Most of the
issues we addressed were minor and could be worked
around without the patch. The
1.1 patch did everything a patch should
do...tie up all the loose ends and not create more problems in
the process.
You can't ask for much more than that.
Thanks, Have
a Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year From PCShooter.com
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