Action Vault - Black9 Interview

Action Vault: What were your key goals in designing and implementing the enemy and friendly NPCs, especially with respect to objectives for the AI that controls their behavior?

Erik Bethke: There are a lot of neutral NPCs in Black9, and there are a good deal of friendly NPCs where, in some missions, you get healthy backup in the form of some heavy marines. Our goals were to create NPCs that have considerable intelligence and depth in their world views as conveyed by the excellent voice acting that Tommy Tallarico and Chris Borders have directed for the game. There is also considerable story development through your in-game communication, as well as briefings and debriefings with your operations officer or handler.

Action Vault: What are your major considerations that went into the design of the mission in Black9, and to what degree can we look forward to diverse types and goals?

Erin Hoffmann: Although the game has a powerful storyline providing the spine of mission design and objectives, a lot of what went into it was purely trying to ask (and answer) "Will players get a kick out of exploring this environment?" Storyline is always important, but the design staff worked to make sure that every mission provided something new and interesting, both visually and in gameplay.

Action Vault: With respect to the multiplayer aspect of the game, wmodes do you plan to offer, and how and why did you choose them?

Erik Bethke: We have a variety of multiplayer game modes centered around the idea that players will host Black9 MP headquarters (game sessions), and that players will get together and play various maps, missions and game types; then return back to the headquarters between missions to upgrade their multiplayer characters. Some variations include a "Play with Oberon" mode where we have a powerful NPC hunter that relentlessly hunts the player with highest frag count. Another mode is like a "sealed-deck magic" game where players start with brand new raw characters without any weapons or skills and, depending on the skillstiks and weapons they find in the game maps, they must grow their characters as cleverly as they can based on their knowledge of the Black9 RPG system and luck.
We also have a cooperative mode where players are able to play through the entire campaign, together with two kick-ass mercenary agents.

Action Vault: Regarding your choice of engine, and what features are especially important in view of the nature of the game? What do you think the system requirements and recommendations for Black9 will be?

Erik Bethke: Black9 is based on the Unreal Engine (current build base of 2226 for those of you keeping score). The primary feature of Unreal that we were attracted to was UnrealEd, the world building tool. Rivalling that is the extensive technical support offered by the Epic team, as well as the Unreal development community. There are multiple mailing lists with heavy traffic, and of course, the development team at Epic who are tremendously responsive to their licensee developers.

Our game will have minimums and recommendations in line with Unreal II and Unreal Tournament 2003; e.g. 700Mhz processors on the minimum side and 1GHz plus on the recommended. For memory, 128 minimum, 256 recommended.

Action Vault: When did the idea for the game arise, and why did you decide to make something that seems very different from your previous ones? When did you begin development, and what's your current status?

Erik Bethke: Black9 was officially born in the fall of 2000, and spent a long time in pre-production as we worked out the stories behind the Illuminati, the feel of the weapons and technology, the art direction of the world, and of course, evaluated our technology path. However, most of the game's bits of backstory were a synthesis of tons and tons of reading and thinking dating back to the earliest days hooked on reading science fiction. Full production for Black9 began in the late spring of 2002, and we are now at a point where we are working on new content, balancing, optimizations, and bug fixing. We closing in on a holiday '03 release on PC and Xbox; this is a worldwide release.

As for why we switched over to Black9 from Starfleet Command, it goes back to a time before Starfleet Command. Zach, Sean and myself had two or three RPGs that we worked on demos and designs for before landing at Interplay. Making an RPG is what we wanted to do, but then the opportunity to join Interplay and work on a major Star Trek title was an awesome opportunity, and then it grew into an even bigger opportunity with us spinning out of Interplay and producing Neutral Zone, Starfleet Command 2, Orion Pirates and Starfleet Command 3. Black9 helps us show that we are capable of developing on the console as well as create a great action/RPG this will help us from being type-cast as solely a PC Star Trek strategy studio.

Action Vault: Since you mentioned parts of it, what's Taldren's history? Where is the studio located and what kind of experience does your team have in the game development industry?

Erik Bethke: Taldren is located in sunny Costa Mesa, in Orange County California. Zachary Drummond, Sean Dumas and I founded the company in 1999. There are 35 of us working here now, with people coming from all sorts of places prior to joining Taldren, including Interplay, Activision, 989, Westwood, as well as many smaller development studios that have now passed on.

As a company, we have shipped several Starfleet Command titles including Orion Pirates, Starfleet Command II and III for Interplay and for Activision. Some of the guys have very long histories in the game industry such as Joe Pearce and Ken Yeast going back over 12 years, and others are newly minted graduates who are just starting out.

Action Vault: What factors will make Black9 stand out from other action-oriented titles of its generation? What duration of single-player gameplay and what degree of replayability do you anticipate?

Erik Bethke: Layering in a robust, yet light-feeling role-playing system to build your own high-tech James Bond-type character, I feel, is our strongest differentiator from most action games. We also have a involved story with multiple recurring antagonists and several big plot twists set in a future Earth that takes current scientific, political and social trends to produce 15 large missions that we measure to take between 15 and 30 hours to play through once. Plus, we have four distinct player bodies to play with, from a hulking mutant male to an elfin female, as well as a normal male and female body that are just the platform for the players to shape into any kind of mercenary agent they would like with skills, nanotech, weapons and cool gear upgrades all through the game. Thus, the replayability should be very high; play once through with one character type, say the normal male as a fighter/thief combo and then play again as the elfin female Nanomage/thief. Then, play a co-op campaign as a hulking male fighter/Nanomage. After that, endless hours of multiplayer play on Xbox Live or GameSpy.

Erin Hoffmann: Black9 has a truly rich world with tons of potential. I think one of its strongest points lies in creating a fully dynamic, imaginative environment that encourages the player to develop their own ideas about everything from what to buy to what behaviors or activities are right and wrong. It invites the person experiencing it to truly think and connect with a world and with themselves, even though it's entirely fictional - and because the design is anchored in the real world, it makes a statement or three about how we live right now.

Action Vault: Is there anything else you'd like to tell our readers, or something you want to ask them in closing?

All: Look for the worldwide release of Black9 for PC and Xbox this holiday season. Thank you.

In a simple twist, unlike the Machiavellian ones apparently awaiting us in Black9, Erik Bethke, Tim Cox and Erin Hoffman are the ones deserving of our thanks for providing this very informative look at their project. We've had our long-range sensors locked on Taldren's game since it was announced early this year, and will definitely be tuned in even more acutely pending its release through Majesco in North America and Vivendi Universal in Europe.

Richard Aihoshi - "Jonric"