I was kinda looking forward to a Jagged Alliance kickstarter. Shame it's by a fairly unknown company.
Well, truth be told, I like what these guys say in the interviews.
I love you, bro. I want there to be a great new JA game. But I gotta speak truth to powah.
RPS: When the Kickstarter craze – and I hate that word – began, I figured Jagged Alliance, or something very much like it without the name, would crop up sooner rather than later. I’d class this as later.
Lund: Yes! We expected it to.
No, you don't. Also, "we're doing this because that's what you do on Kickstarter?" What, violate good old franchises? Why isn't this about why they're making the game at all and why they need to use KS as a platform? This is dumb.
RPS: I do wonder if XCOM and other games have helped to create a new audience, or at least to create excitement.
Lund: The audience has been there the whole time. That’s been our pitch the whole time, although on a smaller scale, that it’s possible to create old-school games for old-school gamers, some of which have families and don’t have as much time anymore. The publishers have disregarded this niche for ages, only going for cover shooters and first-person shooters and racing games. You know the story. XCOM and so many Kickstarter projects have opened up the realisation that the market is there. And it’s much bigger than people expect.
I get that this is a job, but they really spend most of this initial period just talking about selling the game. It's not "this is a dream game" or "I'm committed to making a good game" or even "there are underserved segments of the game playing population," it just sounds like cashgrab type stuff. I don't know if this is the interviewer's fault or the interviewee's.
RPS: This new Jagged Alliance won’t be a reboot but a sort of restart, set during the Cold War and telling the story of the founding of A.I.M. What drove that decision?
Andreas: This is the area of prequels – we’ve seen lots of movies looking to tell origin stories. We thought this was a unique opportunity for us to look at the beginning of A.I.M. and to bring back some of the cool mercenaries and tell their early stories, looking at how they became who they are.
Lund: We want to look at why they became mercenaries, where they came from, why they joined this organisation. Why was all this founded? At least for me, if we were just going in and doing yet another dictator on an island story, we would instantly be trying to copy Jagged Alliance 2. Being put on the same shelf, even though that’s not what we really want to do. Being just a copy of what has been isn’t what we want to do. We want to bring something unique and a little different into the mix. And that’s the story part, where we can twiddle around and change things. Because on the other side, the mechanics and the turn-based part obviously, we’re going to see how much of JA2 we can bring back.
Oh, look. "Videogames should totally do what movies are doing." They waste time talking about the story and irrelevant bullshit.
RPS: And will that include the complications of the strategic side as well? If you look at the new XCOM, the strategic side is streamlined, but the original X-COM wasn’t as complex on both levels as JA2.
Lund: Yeah, we are going to bring back the strategic side. I think we’re going to run with something in terms of base-building and an open world is something we want to have as well. We’ll have movement in realtime until people hit a combat situation and then it’ll become turn-based again, in a direct copy of JA2’s mechanic. We’re keeping the combat absolutely turn-based but the real-time setting will be open world, with the strategic setting utilising base-building and transportation, those kind of things.
Oh, look. Interviewer talking out of his ass about games he's spent two hours apiece with, X-COM and JA2. There's some potential incline in the response, though, I'll grant Mr. Lund points for that.
RPS: I know it’s still early days – but have you thought about presentation? Will it be full 3d or do you see the possible advantages of 2d?
Andreas: I think we’re going full 3d. But we’ll keep our own style. In terms of the strategic and tactical, neither layer will be dumbed down. We’re going to improve usability but we’re going to keep it – not hardcore – but up there.
Translation:
Q-Will you make this game look stupid?
A-Yes. But asodifnapoibhbuzzwordpnaefra??!!(&$#TU?=)U#$?!buzzword?!:
RPS: A little bit hardcore.
Lund: It’s similar to Space Hulk in that the core element of the game is challenge. If we remove that, it’s not JA anymore. There are some of these absolutely core mechanics that games like Back in Action removed, or dumbed down, to the point where it wasn’t JA anymore. At least not to me. They may have opened it up to new players, but they also alienated a lot of the core players.
Points to the interviewer for a polite "WTF did that mean?"
Also... JA2 is about challenge as opposed to other games...? Are we talking about interactive fiction? Is something without challenge as a core element still a game? WTF does this mean?
RPS: The cornerstones of the series, as far I see it, are the mercenaries, their personalities, relationships and the RPG aspects. But also, of course, the complexity behind the scenes.
Andreas: You can’t remove the humour.
Lund: And the dialogues, the environmental interaction. It’s a mix of turn-based action, RPG triangle thing, with a layer of strategic management that really defines the complexity of the game. We really hope that with Kickstarter we can get these things back. Working with the community, we can figure out what triggers the core players want in this game. We have the setting, the technology and the means to make a new Jagged alliance, but there’s definitely a lot of places where we can work with the community toward a common goal. It doesn’t have to replace Jagged Alliance 2 – it will be a cool new, turn-based game.
Does the interviewer know what cornerstone even means? This may be that thing Orwell was talking about, but Jesus Christ, you hypothetically write about videogames for a living and you think emotional engagement is the foundation of JA2. Either he's retarded or he doesn't know words.
Also, dev response: we don't understand the core elements of this game, so we're going to leave it up to a community to tell us what to do. In other words, we don't mean to make a JA game, we want to make some new, community vetted, please the hipsters TB game while wearing JA's skin.
RPS: I think people often think that a spiritual successor, or reboot, is an attempt to replace something that they love. I love the original X-COM, but I also love the new XCOM. They’re so different that I’m happy they co-exist. Are you looking to create something along those lines? Something new that doesn’t try to take the place of the older game?
Lund: Just doing a JA2 remake is, I think, the wrong way to go now that we have a chance to make something new. We want to bring in some new pieces, while still keeping the essential parts of the franchise there. There were also some significant changes between Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, and some of the expansions. They all kept the core alive and that’s what we have to stick to – to discover what is the core. We have an opinion on that and so do a lot of fans. We have to find this common denominator together, and then we can build story, features and characters. Bring in new characters, bring back the really cool ones from JA 1 and 2, and tell their stories. Why were they mercenaries? They must have been something before – farmers, soldiers…
More of this shit. "We have no clear idea about what kind of game we're going to make, but we're going to steal this game's skin and ask for money. Oh, and we'll tell an emotionally engaging story."
RPS: Presumably the Cold War setting gives you some interesting angles on some of the mercenaries in the other games. So many of them are clearly culturally and ideologically opposed, at least on paper, at that time.
Andreas: It’s also important to note that everything isn’t set in stone yet. We’re going to build on everything in the original games, but we’re also going to be listening to the fans and the modding community from Jagged Alliance2. We’re going to listen to everything that comes to us.
Lund: At the end of the day, it’s going to be about how successful can we make Kickstarter and how many features can we add, so we’ve tried to come up with stretch goals that will demonstrate that. More mercenaries, destructible environments, that sort of thing. We have to look at what we can do for the amount of money we’re asking for as a minimum – we can make a cool game but we can’t make a replacement for JA2, that has been modded for so many years. It’s impossible. But depending on success, we can add more and more, so hopefully that’s possible.
"We have no clear idea yaddayaddayadda..." Also, why the fuck are you making another game in a series when you have zero confidence that you can make an improvement on the existing games in the franchise? Oh, right. Money.
RPS: I’m always interested when people use the phrase ‘modern context’. People still play Jagged Alliance 2 today, and many people, myself included, would argue that a complex strategy game fits perfectly in a ‘modern context’. What is it that you mean specifically by that phrase?
Lund: Some of it is about accessibility and usability. In earlier days, fifteen years ago, you could get away with any kind of UI. You could get away without using tutorials – that’s actually the wrong word – but players weren’t necessarily eased into the game. Anybody who has played Jagged Alliance 2 knows that you’re thrown in at the deep end right away – it can be overwhelming.
WTF? Patently untrue, Mr. Lund.
RPS: A lot of it seems to be about communication. Allowing the player to make choices more easily and the game to communicate the meaning and consequences of those choices.
Lund: Also, computers are more powerful. You can put status icons on tiles that show there is cover and which sides the bonus works on and how much. You can calculate all of these things on the fly, which wasn’t necessarily possible in the past. That’s what we mean by modernising.
Except JA2 does. What is he smoking? Has he played this game? Is he stupid? Does he think we're stupid?
for that remark.
