Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Interviews

A trio of interviews dealing with Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine have emerged this weekend, but since they’re all courtesy of the game’s recent press event, a lot of the same ground is covered.

NowGamer chats with marketing manager James McDermott:

What was it like, going from a strategy game to a third-person shooter as a studio?

We’ve made RTSs for a number of years and we have a really good talent pool who work on those titles who are either really intimate with the IP and are great at doing sound design for it, casting or the visuals. We’ve had guys who’ve come from EA and from sports games who do animation really well, we have people who come from Gears Of War who are very good at combat and controls.

Also we’ve got people who have done Hollywood cinema, action set-piece and storytelling for games and movies. Probably about 40 percent of the team is people who worked at Relic and the rest is new bloods. Actually there are some guys who were at Relic ten years ago and have come on board just to work on Space Marine.

IncGamers quizzes creative manager Daniel McGuffey:

IG: Your ‘˜catchphrase’ for Space Marine is ‘˜visible violent death’. Why does death and violence translate so well to gameplay?

DM: When you attack something, or shot something, there’s something really positive about seeing such an immediate response. Life is about persuing goals without any immediate indication of whether or not you’re achieving or failing. When you’re attacking, pulling a trigger or experiencing action in a game you’re getting immediate feedback that you’ve vanquished your foe or completed your objective whether it involves violence or not.

Violence to me is just a great feedback loop that quickly signifies whether or not you’ve been successful. In Space Marine, that’s exactly what it does it indicates success and a feeling of unstoppable power. It’s rewarding because it indicates that what the player is doing is having an impact in the world and that their presence is being felt.

And CVG sits down with :

You’re traditionally a PC studio, how are you managing multi-platform development?

Right, Relic is traditionally a PC studio, for Space Marine we stocked up on a lot of talent that has experience with multi-platform console games. Certainly the Space Marine team is comprised of a lot of talent that has worked on other 40K games in the RTS real but also a lot of new people over the last few years that have joined the company specifically for Space Marine because they have console development experience. So we’ve added a lot of new talent over the years specifically to build this game.

In addition it’s been a huge technology challenge for us, early on in development, a couple of years ago we took a drop of the Darksiders engine from Vigil, who shared the technology with us so that we would have a foundation to work with, that’s how we started the multi-platform engine and on top of that we built a huge amount of proprietary Relic tech. So things like rendering tech in Space Marine is completely unique that has been created by us, all the game’s AI systems are Relic’s, the effects tech is sort of the fifth generation effects engine, our RTS games are known for having the best looking graphics and effects of the games out there in that genre. We’ve taken that technology, improved it and adapted it to console to take advantage of the things they can do. That’s an example of a new layer of tech that we’ve built on top of that foundation.

We’re also using middleware where it makes sense so we’ve got Havoc physics and whatnot so we’ve done our due diligence on the technology, we’ve got a lot fo smart people working on it and like I said the game is running very well on all platforms right now, it’s smooth at 30 frames per second and we’re even going to be able to take it above 30 for most of the game. I think it’s going to feel really smooth and from a tech standpoint it feels solid.