It made it far more tactical and we couldn’t do that in the IC engine. The big thing, for me gameplay wise, one of the biggest decisions in Essence was directional cover and flanking, and that really changed the way the game worked. We had the line of sight stuff in IC, we had Squads in IC, we had some of the combat intent that we wanted in terms of battle lengths and a little bit of the flavour, but not that level of presentation that we ended up with in Essence. We had area cover, which was more like Dawn of War. It had cover, but I don’t think we had directional cover in IC. QD: If you played the later version of the Impossible Creatures prototypes you’d recognise the intent, if you kind of squinted and had somebody explain it to you. PCG: What kind of things were present in the prototype that made it through and what kind of things got cut? Did the vision for the game change during that transition? I’ve done a few games here where it’s IP & engine and they always take extra long, and they’re always extra hard because you’re trying to generate the world and how you build it at the same time. The engine gives us the ability to do all of this extra animation so we can take out stupid things like stances. You start to realise that maybe we don’t need that piece any more. And so when you get the new engine, you’re starting from scratch.īut as you’re rebuilding, it’s a little bit organic. So nothing you tuned, none of the combat, none of the feel, nothing translates. Nothing technical would translate over to Essence. QD: Yeah, prototyping in the IC engine was-there was at least nine or ten months of doing that, and then very little of what you’ve done translates. And so when you get the new engine, you’re starting from scratch. Nothing you tuned, none of the combat, none of the feel. We had Band of Brothers, we had Saving Private Ryan before that and so it had a real presence in the marketplace, and it was big in shooters, and I thought that there was an opportunity to do something really spectacular and take a maybe different approach to RTS and to World War 2, to do some of the high production value stuff.īut also we were sitting down and doing a bit of dreaming in terms of-we’re looking around at what other games are doing and cherry-picking and stealing, really-and we were like “oh wow, lighting looks good over here, there’s a thing called Normal Maps!” and “Things use physics now! Let’s actually bring some of those things in.” And also additionally in terms of animation technology: “Well lets have something that allows us to make better decisions about what animations we’re using and blending between them.” And all those things tying together really create a a more realistic character motion in what they’re doing instead of just wiggly legs and arms.Īnd so Quinn-the programmers pretty much said “well, have two programmers, work on this prototype using some of our old engine technology and the rest of us are going to go away and make something new and fancy for you.”-So yeah, we kind of disappeared for about a year, which I think was quite infuriating for Quinn, because he kept wondering when he was going to get actually finally start making this game. World War 2 was popular-it was maybe just at its zenith in popularity. We knew RTS-we had a kind of engine to build games within and some people were ready.
THQ was publishing Dawn of War at the time so we had a relationship with them and we were casting around for another project. Quinn Duffy, game director: We finished Impossible Creatures with Microsoft and we did the Insect Invasion expansion pack and so it was a small team kind of ready to go.
PC Gamer: Let's start at the beginning, the very first moment you guys decided to do a World War 2 game after coming off I believe it was Impossible Creatures, is that right? Was it an idea that had been hanging around the studio for a long time? How did it start?