Moderator: JC Denton
by Dolt » 29 May 2013 20:41
by Dolt » 29 May 2013 21:26
RPS: What was so special about 2007?
Rob Cunningham: Around then I started seeing what was happening in the industry and in the marketplace. The rise of online gaming, the rise of free to play. I saw there was an opportunity there. Also, I wanted to do some more innovation in RTS. At the time in 1997 I was sort of ahead of the curve. THQ’s appetite for expanding the RTS genre was pretty limited so I thought ‘this has got to be done, let’s start doing it.’ Pretty much then, though, I took a year off from the game industry, did a few other things. The main thing was the eatART foundation – energy awareness through art. It was a complete departure from gaming, an art research lab that’s still going strong now. The idea is to build crazy, kinetic, giant robots. We opened an industrial space here in Vancouver, packed it with welding equipment and got to work building crazy machines. There was the Mondo spider, Daisy the solar powered vehicle, a giant robot snake and there’ll be a four-legged walking mech coming next. I personally funded it for a few years, we bring them out for big shows and they pay us to deploy the creatures. Massive, multi-tonne robot creatures we’re building for fun. And it’s happening in the same building as Blackbird Interactive.
RPS: With so many ex-Relic staff involved, is there a lot of Homeworld’s DNA in Hardware?
Rob Cunningham: Well they’re both science fiction RTS games but the answer to how much of Homeworld is in Hardware is… not that much. In terms of DNA, in the same way parents’ DNA is in their children, you can say Homeworld shares DNA with Hardware in as much as it has similar parents. But that’s where the similarities end. There is an art style that connects them, but the gameplay is very different, the experience is very different, but what will be the same is that sense of epic, immersive story. That connection with what’s happening in the game world. We’ll have Paul Ruskay doing audio and music so we’ll have that DNA in there as well, so from a creative point of view, a vibe, there are quite a lot of similarities, but in terms of the game itself, it’s quite a departure from Homeworld.
RPS: What’s the aim and ambition of the game? What else can you reveal?
Rob Cunningham: The intent was to explore what sort of new evolution we could do with RTS. What can I tell you about the game? It’s all about massive trucks rolling around in a huge desert. A sort of Tonka truck experience. As with Homeworld, scale is a big deal for us with this game. The vehicles are huge and just get huge-er. It’s got that Russian Doll sort of quality, of vehicles going into bigger vehicles and bigger vehicles going inside of even bigger vehicles [laughs]. One of the things we’ll be exploring is epic scope with a vast game-board. We’ll be doing a planet-scale RTS but deploying it incrementally over time. The first betas will be reasonably small and feel like a traditional RTS: limited map, limited canvas. But as we go forwards into 2013 we’ll be deploying ever more, ever bigger maps until ultimately the full vision of the game is a planet-scale map that you spent hours travelling across, a fully concurrent experience.
RPS: It sounds like there may be a free to play element there?
Rob Cunningham: Yeah it’s going to be free to play and there’s going to be multiplayer in there.
RPS: So free to play is one of the things you think will drive the genre forward?
Rob Cunningham: Yeah, there are many things you can do with RTS – the marketplace is huge – but our personal vision is a big map… you could say in a nutshell the vision is Google Earth meets RTS. We want to develop an RTS game paradigm where there’s a very impactive, compelling combat and exploration game on a minute-to-minute basis but there’s also this other layer, a macro game, which takes place over days, weeks, months and it’s all about territorial ownership of a much bigger map.
RPS: So would you say the RTS has stagnated?
Rob Cunningham: There’s lots of innovation happening with it. Look at Kickstarter, things like Planetary Annihilation, I think that’s a lot of fun. Stagnation is a strong word but it hasn’t moved forward as quickly as I would have hoped. There’s a lot of room for growth in the genre, especially in terms of getting it out to a wider audience. It’s not stagnated as much as it’s focussed very much on a relatively small group of hardcore RTS players. There’s an opportunity to bring the RTS paradigm to a much wider audience.
For a game concept, there could hardly be anything cooler: “Hunt for riches among a graveyard of derelict starships on the mysterious planet, LM-27. Reclaim precious cargo and adopt exotic technologies from the space-wrecks littered across the desert wasteland. Combat hostile competitors, equally desperate for wealth. Survive harsh storms and burning temperatures.”
“We are envisioning an epic sci-fi roadtrip where the player gets to experience all of the crazy, amazing fun you’d have from controlling units that are epic in scale,” says Cunningham. “To clarify that: we’re on a desert planet, far away. This is an exo-recon/survival mission! You want a thing that inspires confidence. This is Paris-Dakar but madly in the future.”
It’s a game of PvE, and a game of PvP, set in a giant world of wrecked starships. Salvage and space archaeology as a game concept to underlie reasons for conflict and co-operation. You can understand why I am frothing with excitement about this. Cunningham makes that worse as he talks about the beauty of giant machinery with an air of familiarity: “Understanding all of your options and customizable upgrades is critical to a new vehicle models success, as well as understanding their function, and mission optimization. Trucks are utilitarian, while the Prius is for those who want to save on gas mileage, and the BMW M3 is for those wankers who want to go fast without regard for others…” He goes on to explain that this stuff is reflected in his world: “You can customize all your units. This is the persistent element of the game where our players can invest in, manage the capabilities of and optimize the functions of their fleet.”
Great big vehicles hauling abandoned technologes from the guts of a dead planet. Yeah, that’s the stuff. And that’s been beautifully rendered so far by the concept art. It’s clearly very important to Cunningham to allow concept to meet reality, as he explains: “There’s always a market for good style regardless of any trend, but at the same time technology has brought ultra-realism to the screen, and people aren’t wowed by that stuff much any more. Just being in 3D is no long impressive. They are hungry for a style and ethos in a visual approach. They always have been, of course, but it’s particularly acute now. People are going to respond to a unique style even more than they might have done ten years ago.
“I think we’re entering a wonderful age where the delta between dream and reality is getting narrower and narrower. For Hardware, the concept art is extremely similar to the game. You can get one of the world’s best concept artists to make an image and know that you can pull that off.”
“You’ll see a transition from the concept art to the gameplay,” says Cunningham. “The transition is amazing. The guiding vision is our concept art and the in-game art visuals will parallel the quality of the concept art in all regards. That was a key criteria for me in founding Blackbird, our visual quality of concepts needs to make it into the gameplay just as it has in our other products.”
Oh, but there’s more to be eager for. And that’s the idea of a huge world to explore and work on. Cunningham’s accounts of it thrill me to the core. “This is an immense world,” he says. “A very deep fiction, and for that, we’ve created a new technology that can display amazing terrain. That terrain is a backdrop of the session-based gameplay in the same way that ‘outer space’ was the setting for the original Homeworld, the first real-time 3D RTS game. In that way, Hardware is the spiritual successor to Homeworld. The terrain is immense just like the vastness of space is immense. “
...
There’s lot of reasons to be excited, but perhaps chief among them is Cunningham’s unwavering confidence in their concept. He says, quite boldly: “There’s plenty of opportunity in the RTS genre as well as the sci-fi genre. Combined, we’ll make another pioneering product that starts a new era of RTS and revives the genre in ways that most don’t expect.”
He says this from the position of someone who has created a studio to make a vision of a game, that comes partly from his experience, and partly from technology finally allow him to do things he’d previously only been able to imagine. “For me personally it’s sort of a combination of market development and technology development. Hardware I was dreaming about in 2007, but what was the market doing? What was tech doing? You couldn’t make Jurassic Park without the CG, make it four years earlier and it would have been a disaster. The same is true here.”
Cunningham’s colleague Dan Irish chimes in to support this claim for Hardware to be striking while the iron of innovation is hot: “Similar to how Homeworld was innovative with 3D, the parallel here with massive terrain and massive vehicles, is being innovative with the gameplay which encloses PvP and PvE experiences, and with the online infrastructure. The technology allows us to produce these gameplay experiences at this scale – connectivity was part of the puzzle that would make this game fun.”
by icycalm » 29 May 2013 23:55
by Dolt » 02 Sep 2013 20:36
Hardware: Shipbreakers, the spiritual successor to the Homeworld franchise being developed by founding members of Relic Entertainment, is now, thanks to Gearbox Software, officially a Homeworld game.
The game will now be titled Homeworld: Shipbreakers as part of a deal signed by Gearbox and developer Blackbird Interactive at PAX. What's more, Gearbox Software will help Blackbird complete the game with the help of financial and production resources, CEO Randy Pitchford told Polygon today.
"These guys have been funded by private equity, but it's clear it was going to take many millions of dollars more," Pitchford said. "We're giving them the brand and the resources to make this happen. Now, these guys are cooking and with the money they have now, they can grow the team."
The deal, Pitchford said, was signed last Wednesday during PAX Dev, a developer-only event that precedes PAX Prime.
The game formerly known as Hardware: Shipbreakers was announced earlier this year as a spiritual successor — structured as a prequel, however — to Relic's Homeworld franchise.
"Hardware and Homeworld inevitably share much of the same DNA, and that's a good thing," Blackbird CEO Rob Cunningham said at the time. "Homeworld was a fantastic game and we want to recapture that. But what we're offering with Hardware is really a different kind of RTS experience that isn't found in Homeworld or any other RTS."
"Hardware, in all respects, was Homeworld," Cunningham told Polygon today. "It looked, sounded and felt the same, but we wanted to take that style and experience further. When [Gearbox] acquired the property, it coincided with when we needed to find a partner."
Gearbox acquired the Homeworld property as part of THQ's bankruptcy auction in May with a $1.35 million bid. Blackbird also competed for the IP, but lost to Gearbox.
"We wanted the project to live and thrive and grow," said Blackbird chief creative officer Aaron Kambeitz. "We didn't want it to go to a publisher that would let it die. We reached out to them and congratulated them on [winning the IP] and that turned into a friendship."
Now, with Gearbox's contribution, Blackbird will expand its team — it's currently hiring — and develop the game as if it were an entry in the Homeworld series. "The retcons to bring the two brands together will be painless," Kambeitz said.
"Honestly, this is why we exist," Pitchford said. He and Gearbox chief creative officer Brian Martel — who "personally spearheaded the acquisition" of the IP — "got into this industry as craftsman," Pitchford said, and they'd rather see Shipbreakers realize its full potential than spend their money "on a bunch of super cars."
Plans to release classic and high-definition versions of the first two Homeworld games are still in the works, Pitchford said. Gearbox will talk more about those plans at its PAX panel on Monday, but it sounds like it's leaving development of Homeworld: Shipbreakers largely up to Blackbird.
"Gearbox is not in the best spot to make a sci-fi RTS successor," Pitchford said, explaining that the Borderlands developer's expertise lies elsewhere (and it's also busy with Borderlands and other next-gen projects). "We've become expert at production and that's where we can help. I mean, we shipped Duke Nukem Forever, we didn't build it but we made sure it came out. And that's a fucking miracle."