[Donbabbeo]

Intervista su RPS a Mark Diskett, queste le risposte più interessanti.

RPS: Another departure is a class-based system for the agents. Can you tell me about that?

Diskett: One weakness of design in both Syndicate and Syndicate Wars was that people tended to band all four agents together and use them as one single awesome tank-like gun-toting super agent. You didn’t get the strategic splitting up and independent control of agents that we wanted in the games. Having a class system means you have to use them in different ways. The classes in Satellite Reign are the assassin, the soldier, the hacker, and the support class. The soldier is the traditional agent, who will take people on in the streets. The hacker can hack into and take over mechs, and augmentation of civilians – he’s an agent which takes the role of the persuadatron in the original Syndicate games. The assassin is more stealthy, and able to go in close for cloaked melee attacks – and all these mean you can use them independently. The assassin will be infiltrating over rooftops while the hacker is breaking into the city’s grid, disabling CCTV. A class-based system will make the game more tactical, and less of a shooter, than the original. It’s an improvement.

RPS: You also have a persistence of agent characters? How does that work?

Diskett: You will be able to upload and download the history and knowledge of your agents and put them in new clones. All the augmentations you’ve stuck into an agent, if he dies and you can’t retrieve the body, that’s what is lost. The levelling up of the agents is where we have this concept of downloading and uploading minds into new agents. An agent can die, but a cloned version will have his talents uploaded to it. The penalty will be that you’ve lost money because you need to redo the augmentation. You will also need to keep the clone bank updated, because you need a high level clone for a high level mind.

RPS: I think the thing people are most thrilled about, at least if they are anything like me, is the idea of another city simulation. Just watching a Syndicate city functioning was always a grand thing. Can you tell me about your plans for that?

Diskett: We’ve got all the standard stuff – a vehicle system, a traffic system, a police force. But, okay: one of the classic sort of things is /behaviours/ being implemented, not scripting. I’ve been doing a lot of AI in the past few years, and I was an AI specialist at THQ. Consequently I am into implementing behaviours as you would expect, rather than scripting them. You think about how a person would react, and make the game character act like that. You make them react to what they perceive, and you make their perception work correctly, with vision cones and true line of sight. That means they act without having 100% information about something. One of my pet hates is AI like in Borderlands, which is where if you shoot them from half a kilometer away they instantly start shooting back. I prefer AI that says: What do they know about it? What’s the reaction time for them? How long do they take to look around before they decide whether to shoot or run for cover? Does it need more gunfire before they make a decision? So that’s the approach for individual AI entities in the game. But you’re asking about another aspect, which is the wider simulation of the city itself, and I want to simulate that down to the powergrid. That’s one of the things I’m really interested in for hacker class is to have power nodes all through the city that are correctly modelled, so that you can trace where power lines are, and see them with EMP perception. So if you place explosives here, you can shut down a gun emplacement there.

RPS: That’s the stuff! Tactical demolition.

Diskett: We’ve already got repair drones in as part of the simulation, so if you attack something they will come and repair it before flying off again. So there’s that. Then there’s the third aspect of the simulation, which is the political aspect. We have a sort of regional system where civilians will be against, neutral, or in favour of your new group of agents. You can play the game not caring about civilians and use them as a meat shields. But if you do that, then they realise that the government propaganda about you is true, and that you are evil. This can go as far as them fleeing from you or attacking you, rather than ignoring you. If you’ve been good to them, however, and you’ve stopped them being strongarmed by corporations, you will see a reward. They might even help you of their own accord in a gunfight situation. That plays into the simulation in an area by area basis, where we track everyone’s political allegiance.

RPS: So how is all this presented in the metagame? How do you oversee what’s going on?

Diskett: We’re going to be open world, or open city. It’s not as big as GTA, but imagine if we took all the Syndicate maps and we put them into one giant map? That’s the sort of size we’re talking about, perhaps slightly bigger. The city is gridded up with checkpoints between, which is a part of oppressive government regime. You’re be circumventing those ID checks, and travel with all your weapons between areas – finding secret tunnels, that kind of thing. With the open world, though, you don’t drop in and out between missions, there’s no dropping back to the overview screen. Instead, you stay in that world and head back to the safehouse. In there you’ll do what would be typically out of world metagame stuff, but you do it using the computer systems that actually exist in that safehouse. You are the fifth agent, and the game is basically you issuing orders from your viewpoint from drones as your agents move about across the city.

RPS: So how do you find missions to do and so on?

Diskett: I hate being spoon-fed missions, so I wanted to do something different. You get given the standard mission of “go assassinate someone” or “get the briefcase” or “follow this person”, and we have all these missions available in the city, but in Satellite Reign the player has to spend some time uncovering the missions as he plays in the city. This part of the game is about the needs of a group of agents. They need money, they need access to weaponry, they need meat for their clone banks. As well as you wanting high-level power in the city, you have this basic need of gathering resources to do it, and uncovering missions to get to it all. Initially you are doing things to get weapons, to gain influence with civilians, or killing them and stealing their money, or killing corporations and cops to get their weapons. That’s all down you. Your choices. That said, we do need to be able to guide the player, because if we just give them the world they could be lost, so there is a story fed to you by your mysterious benefactor. There are twists there, like the start of the Matrix. Follow the white rabbit! As the fifth agent you have access to this feed of information, some of which is true, some of which is false, some of which is a test to see if you goals match up with that mysterious person’s goals. Players are, of course, used to “go here, do that” instructions in games, so we do need to help them on their way, and that’s how we’ll do that.

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