E3 2009: VGC interviews The Saboteur's Lead Designer - News

by VGChartz Staff , posted on 09 June 2009 / 4,015 Views

If you have not seen the latest trailer, check it out here. Otherwise, the interview speaks for itself, so enjoy!

VGChartz: For our readers who don’t know much about the game, can you give us a brief overview?

Tom French: At it’s core it’s a big open world action/sandbox game. One of the big things we really wanted to deliver in this game is stuff that you don’t usually see in a sandbox game. One of the key pillars in the game is story. In addition, we have a lot of big set pieces and tons of scripting, stuff that you only see in a level-based type game.

So our main character, Sean Devlin, is inspired by a real racecar driver turned saboteur, William Grover-Williams, who drove for the Bugatti racing team. We started with that as inspiration and created Sean, who is Irish and races for the Morini team. The way the game starts is Sean goes to Germany for a race right before what would basically become the occupation of France and races in his first race as a driver (He was a mechanic before hand). And after the race, what starts off as an innocent prank against his rival team Doppelsieg goes horribly wrong and someone very close to him is killed. That sets him up on a vengeance quest. So he flees back to France and hides out in the cabaret brothels. From there, it’s really about finding vengeance and eventually he becomes a hero. He doesn’t start caring about the war initially, but everyone has his or her own motivations in the story and so eventually he starts to buy into caring.

We wanted to separate ourselves from the World War II genre and not make a World War II game, like Indiana Jones isn’t a World War II movie, but its got Nazis. And Nazis are awesome villains! Also, we are not historically accurate. We are historically inspired. So we take real events that happened like races and French occupation and use those things in the game. But we are never like it happened specifically at this date and time.

VGC: So it’s a World War II inspired game. How did this whole story come about? Because the World War II genre is popular in the game industry and this is definitely not your average World War II game. So what did you do to avoid those clichés?

Tom: A lot of things. First and foremost, we created a character that isn’t a soldier. Everybody does the soldier story. That is really where we started. Once again, it was inspired by a real person. And the whole racecar driver turned saboteur is another thing that makes it feel a little less World War II. The revenge story is a big point for us, as well. Its not about the war, just Nazis are our bad guys. Also, the color palette that we built in the game with the Will to Fight, which is the black and white selling the harsh occupation of the world. Inspiring an area with these big acts of sabotage and defiance against the Nazis will return the color back to the area and inspire the people. You’re not a lone wolf getting rid of the Nazis from the world completely. They are still there. They are in control of France. But you are inspiring the people and then basically, when you fight out in those areas, the resistance will join in and fight along side of you.

VGC: Does the color gradually return to each area as you complete objectives or does it return after you complete a number of missions all at once?

Tom: So you have a big mission with a big objective. In the Big Gun mission, when you blow up that big cannon that’s when the color bleeds out and inspires the area. There are big, huge pockets you need to inspire. We tried different concepts in the beginning. At one point, every city block had its own Will to Fight pocket and it ended up being kind of annoying because what would happen is you would get this leopard print world. Driving around you would go through black, then white, then color and it would keep repeating. It was kind of a headache. So we said let’s go bigger and it actually became more rewarding.

VGC: Did you decide on the color palette early on? And that it had to be a core feature?

Tom: It’s actually something that came up on paper even before we started building anything for the game. Originally the idea was almost like an area capturing idea, but we kind of changed it to make it bigger. Part of it was also just the idea of selling the occupation. Having this colorful vibrant beautiful Paris, which is what you see in your head of Paris. Just putting a bunch of Nazis in the world doesn’t make it feel occupied. It feels like Paris with Nazis in it. So we had the idea of doing the black and white or what we call sucking the life out of the world, making the people a little more miserable and hitting it over the head with the black and white look, inspired originally by the Sin City comic book that have the colors in there too. Having those big red flags pop out is really bold and we love using it for dramatic purposes and storytelling.

I love the shot of the Belle De Nuit. It’s the cabaret brothel that he hangs out at a lot in the early parts of the game and what I love about this, I don’t know if you’ve seen Casablanca, but there’s this place called Ricks Cafe in Casablanca. We wanted that. Because there was a resistance forming inside of Rick’s Café, but Nazis thought they had control of the area. So inside, you have Nazis hanging out, but there is an idea of resistance and hope forming around them. There are so many things we can do inside of the black and white that it’s really interesting to have that whole area change. It’s something kind of neat and different.

VGC: So does the attitude of the people in the areas change as the color comes back?

Tom: Yea, when everything is black and white, you’ll see people sauntering around a little bit sadder, they’ll walk slower. There are less people in the world, like vendors are not there. But once the color comes back to the world they will be there. You’ll see little farmers markets open up and people act happier.

VGC: You have told us the main character isn’t a soldier. Can you tell us a little more about Sean Devlin? He is obviously into women, among other things.

Tom: We wanted to create the action hero that we all want to be. So we looked at all the heroes that we all thought were cool. There is definitely a bit of Indiana Jones in him. There’s a lot of John McClane from Die Hard in his character. We did not want him to be broody and miserable. He’s got a very serious problem here, his vengeance story, but we didn’t want him to be miserable the whole game, so he’s kind of funny and he’ll make little wise cracks sometimes when he’s kicking ass. And we also wanted that classic cool hero, so there’s definitely a bit of Steve McQueen in his personality and swagger. Sean is just a cool guy. He’s the guy that we all want to be in our hearts. He’s fearless. He’s a daredevil. Back in the day, those racecar drivers were crazy! Those cars were so dangerous. They are not safe like the way they are now. They had no roll cages, huge engine, could do 200 mph, four wheels and the driver’s wore little leather caps. They were crazy, so we put a lot of that into Sean’s personality.

VGC: Who created the Sean character? Was it you?

Tom: It was a little bit of collaboration between a few of us. A writer, the director and myself. The director and I originally started trying to come up with this character. We didn’t want to make him very James Bond-like. We really put a lot of time into crafting him. But the idea for him came quickly. And from there we knew who he was and then what was his story was the next piece. And that came out pretty quickly too. Since the beginning, within a few months, we had the vengeance motif and the basis for what was going to happen in the game and who a bunch of the main characters were. And then from there we just iterated on that and massaged the storyline and made it have more impact here and there. It’s been a really interesting process, but he’s always kind of remained this staple in the game, it’s always been this beacon for us. Like “Do it for Sean!”

VGC: Most of the game is set in Paris?

Tom: I would say about 60% of the missions are set in Paris, but the game starts in Germany for the early set up of the game. Then we go into Paris and about 60% of the content is in there. Then up to La Have, which is a coastal town, as well. And then there is all the area in between because it’s a big open-world game. So there is countryside filled with real French chateaus and they all have Nazi occupation and things to do. There is a lot of content everywhere in the world.

VGC: Is there any loading between the different areas?

Tom: The only loading we ever do is sometimes when you go into an interior. And we do interiors for either our headquarters or often you do it when we are trying to do level based set piece moments. So you’ll go into a big set piece, like we have a zeppelin that you can get on. When you get into the interior of this gigantic zeppelin, there is a little load there. But the rest of the world is just a big screaming environment.

VGC: How big is the world? If you were to walk from one side to the other.

Tom: If you’d walk, it would probably take you a very long time, I can’t even tell you. I think it’s a little over 5.5 kilometers by 5.5 kilometers. We scale a lot of things. Like our Paris is 2.5 x 2.5 which is actually smaller than Paris. But what’s cool about that is we took Paris, squished it down to where we were like, ‘We can make that filled with content’. We always wanted every block to have something to do with the game. And so we put all the monuments down in their actual scale and then everything else kind of gets squished in between. Its still keeps the spirit of Paris, but it’s not a 1 to 1 scale world.

VGC: The music of the game. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Tom: We are still working out some of the final details of that, but some of the music is real period pieces. Also, just trying to find really cool tracks for the game, like that Nina Simone song. I love that song so much. There are also some songs that we use that are actually modern songs, but they just sound like they are of that era, so we can blend those in. Then there is a whole score to the game as well. So the action and the missions will have their own separate score.

VGC: What was the most difficult thing that you felt was the hardest to design? I mean was there anything that really caught you up in the process?

Tom: The idea of making an occupied world and also having it feel natural to the player was pretty tough. So we have this whole suspicion system in the game and fine-tuning that to get that to feel right has been one of the hardest things to do in the entire game because you want the Nazis to behave appropriately, but you don’t want them to be overly punishing. At one point we had it where you’d wear the guns on your back all the time and the problem was you couldn’t go anywhere with a weapon in the game. It was really frustrating, so we changed some of that so he kind of stows it all. There is a fine line between reality and fun and often it leads more towards fun than reality. Reality is actually a small overlap of what’s fun.

VGC: There is a love story in the game?

Tom: Yes. There is actually a bit of a love triangle. There are a couple key characters; the heroines of the game and they all have their own different stories and motivations. Something we’ve always been really keen on in our game is having a really fleshed out character set. So they all have their own motivations and why they are involved in this and why Sean is involved with this as well.

VGC: It’s a mature game?

Tom: Yes. Definitely.

VGC: So there is violence and nudity. It doesn’t look like you really held back in that aspect. But was there anything that you decided to not include in the game because it was too inappropriate?

Tom: We wanted to handle it with a bit of class. You wont have any interactive sex minigames. We wanted it to be about the story, the character and the world. Paris has this inherent sexuality about it as it is and we wanted to represent that in the game. Once again, that is something that separates us from the World War II genre. You don’t see a brothel in most World War II games. It’s just another stylish choice. It made the world feel a little more gritty and mature too.

VGC: I want to talk about the gameplay now. You have a lot of weapons in the game. How many weapons?

Tom: I wouldn’t say exact figures but there are a lot of different types of weapons. So there is different types of pistols, rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, then there are sabotage weapons like the RDX, dynamite, grenades, MG42’s, anti aircraft cannons, weapons on vehicles and tanks. There is also another set of weapons that we aren’t showing yet, but they are their own fictional set of weapons that come from a fictional set of Nazis that we created for the game. Because we aren’t historically accurate, we wanted to have the over the top action feeling. I love shooting zeppelins down. It’s such a great piece of fantasy and every time I still get a little giggle out of it. We are just going big and over the top and taking liberties where we feel it’ll make better gameplay.

VGC: While playing the game, there was something called perks at the top of the screen. There was a Freedom Fighter perk and a Gunslinger perk.

Tom: We aren’t talking about the specifics of the perks. Obviously we can’t deny that they exist, but we aren’t talking about them yet.

VGC: Are you able to interact with anything in the world? For example, can you drive all the cars?

Tom: You can take any car in the game. That’s something we really wanted. That’s kind of a sandbox standard. You have to be able to do it. Especially when you have so much land to traverse. If your car blows up, you need to be able to get a new one. There are other ways to get vehicles in the game as well. Its part of the fun of the game as well. Being in a sandbox and doing what you want.

VGC: Is there any multiplayer or co-op?

Tom: No, we didn’t do multiplayer or co-op. One thing we really wanted to do was focus on Sean. He is like a pillar of the game and so everything really revolves around him. We had some cool ideas, but Sean is what we put everything into.

VGC: We were talking about how you were thinking about having other people you could play with in the game. Maybe a sidekick or wingman for Sean. Do you think you would do that in a sequel? Are you looking to make this into a franchise?

Tom: We are definitely trying to build a franchise here. We’ve created a really rich world and we’ve created a really cool character that we’d love to see on other adventures. We aren’t really planning on talking about that or any ideas for that right now. We are so focused on this game and we want to make this game freaking awesome. All the content is there and we are just polishing it now.

VGC: Is there a branched storyline?

Tom: So there is the main vengeance story. Which is the backbone of our missions in the game. And every mission tells pieces of that story. There are little branches in there, but going back to the fact that every character have their own motivations in the game, you’ll meet side resistance people that have their own set of problems, so you can go branch off and help them if you want to (you don’t have to). Besides that, there is also the whole occupation layer that we have in the world. It’s just so much content to actually find and play.

VGC: Are there multiple endings to game?

Tom: There are not multiple endings, but there are multiple ways to get to the ending. It all kind of funnels back together and focuses on Sean. And some of those threads can get left. Like those side characters and their side problems. You don’t have to deal with those because we want the player to experience the story, not as fast as possible but in a seamless way or a flow. We don’t want to divert them unnecessarily. If they want to care about only what Sean cares about then they can just focus on that.

VGC: Sounds like you guys are really having a good time making this game!

Tom: It’s a labor of love sometimes. It’s hard, but we actually joke about it in the design department and say ‘Lets do it for Sean!’ I honest to God feel like I’ve had drinks with him, I know him so well. He’s a really good friend of mine. We’ve spent a lot of time together and I care dearly about him.

VGC: Do you have any personal sales expectations for the game?

Tom: I probably have some fantasy in back of my head. For me, I want everyone to meet Sean and fall in love with Sean like we all have. He means a lot to me, so I strangely feel almost emotional talking about him. I want as many people to experience him as possible because he’s cool and fun and he’s the action hero we all want to be and we want as many people to feel that same kind of emotion towards him.

VGC: Do you have anything left to say to our users?

Tom: We built a big game. Its got a huge scope and scale and its an epic story, but very personal at the same time. You’ll see things in this game that you don’t normally see in a sandbox game. Like those set pieces like the zeppelin and the big citadel.

Thank you to Tom French and the whole crew that worked on The Saboteur. We will keep you guys up to date on all news related to the game.

The Saboteur was developed by Pandemic Studios and published by Electronic Arts. The game will be released in Q3 2009 on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

5 Comments

Staude (on 13 June 2009)

wow that sounds great. A lot better than i was expecting actually.

yuna01 (on 10 June 2009)

Well this game just got a hell of a lot more interesting! The fact that the game doesn't just revolve around the same location and that you can drive any car like gta. That trailer was sweet as also.

Brian did a good job with this interview :)