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Is Squadron turning out how you expected it to in 2012?

TL;DRNo, it is turning out much bigger and better than first imagined, with seamless in-engine play and emotionally engaging character arcs that he hopes will affect players strongly.

Cloud Imperium

No, I mean, it's so much bigger and cooler and better. I mean, I had some ideas about how to sort of up the emotional attachment and the story aspects of it, and I wanted to put you sort of first person, and I felt like the technology moved a lot so we could have better looking characters, and so it didn't need to be sort of the old wing command, like wing three or wing four. We filmed actors because we didn't feel like we could get performance into the rudimentary animation for the characters aboard the ship, which is why we had a wing one and two. But it's, yeah, it's, I mean, it's way, I mean, in terms of scope, scale, what we can do, because there's a lot of technology, you know, like the procedural planet stuff we saw we went down to Gainey, which is this moon, we used to be a moon of Odin 1, which is, Odin 1 is now really the coil. And so the opportunity, like when I was first conceiving it, we were, you know, even when we were writing the script for it, we were thinking we were gonna have to sort of hide basically level loads behind cinematics and stuff that you would stream when we're doing it. This is all, you know, gonna, all plays live in the engine seamlessly, and I think in terms of like emotional attachment and story that you're gonna have in the game, it's going to be, I think it's gonna, I think it's going to have an effect on people that they're not gonna expect. So I, we spend so much time creating, you know, sort of arcs and stories for all the characters you come across. So you see a little bit, like, so for instance, you know, one of the scenes in the holiday livestream I really like is the moment where you talk to, you know, Liam Cunningham's character, you know, Captain White, and he's asked you how you're doing and it gets to on his son and you can see the performance. I mean, that's a great actor and he's there and you can sort of see, you know, there's some, you know, there's something on, there's not- Something happened. Yeah, and it's like, you know, there's a regret and there's a sadness and there's, you know, it makes him feel real. He's not just the captain that gives you a mission. And we have that across the board for the crew of the Stanton and a lot of other characters that you'll meet through the course of the story. And you don't necessarily have to engage in these. So the concept is, as a player, you play the game and you sort of interact with people that you want to interact with, you know. Then maybe certain players will prefer to interact with certain characters than another player would want to interact with. And that's actually kind of interesting because that was the Wing Commander one thing. I was always interested that, you know, some people loved Maniac and some people hated him, right? It was like, it was very valorizing. But you know, that was player agency and choice and they just, because they made the choice, there was this extra attachment to it. And for, in Squadron, you know, we've really, you know, everybody has, you know, there's these personal stories and character arcs that aren't necessarily related to the actual story itself that you're going to go on. But as you spend time and interact with these characters, I really feel like you're, they're not going to just feel like, oh, this is an AI character. You're going to sort of see them as people. And then, of course, you know, the story of Squadron, you know, it wouldn't be very interesting unless stuff happened. So there's some pretty, you know, momentous or tragic stuff that would happen. And it obviously will have effect on characters that you've met and hopefully built an affinity for a relationship with. And so I actually think your emotional attachment as you go through the story, you know, is going to be of a level that maybe, you know, has not happened yet in games or has happened very rarely in games. And that will just mean that what you're doing and what the action will mean that much more. So I'm, and I can feel little bits of it now and I can see it and I know all our scenes and stories and, you know, when we finish off at the level that we're doing, I think it's going to be really cool. And it's sort of a subtle thing, but I'm really interested to see how that ends up affecting people.

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Published on this date.27 Jan 2018