The bare plot details we know suggest Broken Sword-style exploration, but the action screams God of War intensity - how are you balancing the two extremes?
Hennig: As in any good adventure story, there are moments of exploration and suspense, and moments of high-intensity action.Just like a movie, the game would quickly become either boring or relentless without these changes in tempo.
To really capture the spirit of the adventure genre, we knew we’d not only need fast-paced gunplay and two-fisted hand-to-hand combat, but plenty of action stunts and physical exploration, as well as problem-solving and discovery.Our challenge has been to make sure our story and level layout exploit and balance all these critical elements.
What we've seen and read so far indicates a high-tempo game, but without being just a series of shootouts - there's Pitfall, Tomb Raider,Gears of War aspects in there. What were your main inspirations for both the action and the adventure?
Hennig: When we set out to design the game, we wanted to embrace and exploit all the tried-and-true conventions of the action/adventure genre.So we studied and deconstructed all the source material- adventure pulps; old movie serials; comics; classic adventure movies; contemporary historical-mystery thrillers- and tried to distill the common elements into a feature set for our game.
There are certain themes and conventions that come up again and again, which formed the structure which we knew our story and gameplay had to be built around- a tenacious and resourceful but fallible hero, wild gunplay and brawling combat, allies who play a critical role in the adventure, precarious action stunts, intense chase sequences, riddles and mysteries, etc. After doing this research, we had a huge list of ideas and features that formed the backbone of the design.
