Front Mission Evolved Continued

11 Jun 2009 at 13:25:40 by Tim McDonald

Are there a lot of other characters, then? And how do they join you – is it a linear game, or do you have choices as to what to do next?

LEE: Without getting too much into the story –

You're not able to talk about that?

LEE: Well, it's a Front Mission game, so there's a lot of political intrigue, a lot of twists and turns – characters that you thought were on your side maybe aren't, and then there are new characters coming in and out. A lot of the story is told real-time. We don't want to cut the player out every five minutes to tell them the story, but it's definitely a Square product, so there are really cool CG elements in there. But the thing about squad gameplay is that we have a robust online component, so you can develop teams, there's voice chat, you can design your squad in a certain way and take it against other squads. So you might develop something like, say, you're the heavy mech, I'm the sniper, Saxs might be in the support role and then we can build strategies around that.

With the online play, does your squad stay intact as a whole through matchmaking and leaderboards?

LEE: There's both online matchmaking and leaderboards, there are ways to get your group together and customise them together so you can choose your colours together, there's clan support.

Does the plot tie into the previous games, or is it a complete revamp?

SAXS: It ties in, in terms of the lore of the story, and the factions that exist are what you would expect. It's like an evolution of the universe. It's not a case of taking things away and starting the universe again.

LEE: The Square-Enix team has the visionaries for the whole Front Mission series and they're really heavily involved in making a continuation of the universe and an expansion of the universe. So if you've played previous Front Mission games you'll get a lot of backstory.

How's it been working with Square-Enix?

LEE: It's been really good. Every publisher experience is different; this one is really collaborative and there's a lot of trust as far as there are things that we each say, like “Here's what we're really good at,” and we rely on each other to supply what we need.

SAXS: Square-Enix has a lot of experience in shipping very consistent titles. They support their franchises very heavily, they're very serious about characters and story, and that makes us very happy - they take good care of the product. This is a collaboration between us and Square-Enix. They solicited ideas, found out what we thought about the universe, and then they came to the table with the story and scenarios and CG, and we had an action game take on the writing.

LEE: It's important to mention for fans that what we don't want to do is to make an American game, but we also don't want to make a Japanese game. I don't know how many development teams have done this but it's really a blend of Eastern and Western cultures, and there's a lot of collaboration in terms of “How do we make a really good game?” So we're making something new that hopefully will be successful in multiple markets.

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