Back in September, Britsoft luminary, David Braben, announced an ambitious new project for his Frontier Developments studio. The Outsider is to be an open-ended military conspiracy thriller set in and around Washington DC.
Interestingly, character development and personal motivations are given as the key driving forces behind the action, rather than an oppressive plot. Although the setting sounds like familiar videogame fare - you're a CIA operative with a fistful of high-tech gadgets, framed for a crime you didn't commit - Braben has been hinting that complex moral questions exist at the game's core. The Outsider is, apparently, about each individual player finding their own way out, depending on their own conscience.
We sent a few questions over to David, hoping to find out more about the game. Here's what he told us...
Can you provide a little background on the game - when did you start working on it? And where did the initial concept come from? We have been working on the concept for the game for quite some time now, but we have just started production. I find the concept of 'the wronged good guy' a fascinating basis for a story. Cinema has done it often, with great films like "Capricorn One", "The Fugitive". It leaves open, and even justifies quite extreme behaviour from the protagonist, without committing them to a particular path of action. This makes for interesting plots in film, but is even more important when you are this protagonist in a game. It leaves the choices wide open to the player, without breaking the overall story.
I have always felt a little annoyed when I am forced by a game story into certain actions, like drive-by shootings, or pimping in Grand Theft Auto; it means there is no real choice.
And about the plot... There seems to be some elements of 24 in there... The plot centres around 'off balance sheet accounting'. Seriously – just not with money, with military hardware. To explain further, this is a practice that has gone on for a long time – where even in times of war, munitions are still accounted for, but soldiers would tend to report slightly more bullets fired than was the case – in case they lost any, or 'accidentally' fired a few off at another time. The first fictional mention of it was in Joseph Heller's Catch 22, where it was being done on a commercial scale, but I'm sure it went on much earlier than this.
In "The Outsider" a secret organisation within the CIA has been doing this for a long time, and the player is an unwitting part of it all, and it has all started to go horribly wrong…
You spoke in the press release about a number of new technologies developed at Frontier, which will be employed in the game - can you elaborate on this at all? What areas of the gameplay are they aimed at? Each of the new technologies has been chosen with their game-play benefits in mind. We will of course have fancy display rendering technologies, but the emphasis is on game-play, and the most important new technology is the way we are scripting the characters. In addition we have new speech technologies, and new ways to simulate destruction of buildings (amongst other things).
Also in the press release you mentioned player freedom in the game, and the way in which the action is based around character motivations rather than plot. This sounds ambitious - how have you approached the structure and plotting of the game from this character-driven stance? How has it changed the way you work? It is ambitious, but is a vital step forward to achieve non-linear game-play. The biggest change is in the way the story has to be written; the kinds of problems that arise are quite different to the traditional way of plot design.
There's also a mention of Elite in the release - in what ways are there similarities with that game? Open-ended gaming, where the player really can do what they like, is harder to achieve than it first seems, as there has to be things of interest wherever they go. This open ended nature is the biggest common factor.
How are you finding the next-gen consoles as development platforms? The new system architectures, particularly the multi-processor nature means the code has to written very carefully to avoid wasted time when one processor waits for another, or where one processor inadvertently 'interferes' with the data that is currently being processed by another. The advantage is that for a given cost, you get a great deal more performance than you would have done by spending the same money on a single processor.
Do you think more developers apart from Frontier will be looking at innovative ways to use all the power of the Xbox 360 and PS3? It seems most are just utilising it to chuck more polys and lighting effects around... I am sure they are – they certainly should be, though many of the early titles will simply be fourth generation games, with fancier graphical systems.
What do you think of the Nintendo Revolution, then? Is that on your development map at all? Not currently. The controller Is very interesting indeed, but I am still unclear of the specs of the machine itself – from what I've heard it is nowhere near the performance of PS3 or Xbox 360.
Finally, Elite again. People have been crying out for a massively multiplayer version for years - others have tried and failed to come up with something similar... You seem to have suggested in recent interviews that a next gen sequel is on the cards... Yes, we will be coming back to Elite soon. For me it has always been vital that this next iteration is what I want it to be, and we have been waiting for certain key technologies.
