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New Screens and Info for Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter

by Louis Bedigian

 

GameZone interviews Producer Paul Chapman about one of the hottest first-person shooters of the summer.  Exciting new screenshots and new info inside!

 

At GameZone Online, we really like to get "inside" of the game.  That's why we risk our lives time and time again in order to bring you the latest and greatest gaming coverage on the planet.

 

Today we traveled to a galaxy farther away than we had ever traveled before.  Hotly anticipating the release of Warthog's upcoming first-person shooter, Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter, we couldn't resist the chance to visit one of the greatest bounty hunters of all time: Jango Fett.

 

We met with Jango around noon.  He told us that we owed him money, which wasn't possible, since we had never even met before.  That didn't matter to him though.

Hundreds of Clonetroopers surrounded us.  There was nothing we could do to fight back!  Before we knew it, we were inside of a coliseum on Geonosian, waiting to be eaten alive by three vicious creatures!

 

Somehow, GameZone managed to escape Geonosian and flew to beautiful Naboo, where we sipped Jawa juice with some Gungans and talked nuts and bolts with C-3PO.  Shortly afterwards, Paul Chapman arrived in a Jedi Starfighter.  When not fighting against the inevitable rise of the Sith, Paul spends his days and nights producing Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter.

 

Paul challenged us to a lightsaber duel.  Knowing we'd get our heads cut off, we decided to offer him a few Republic Credits in exchange for new screens and info of Warthog's exciting first-person shooter. 

 

Warthog's previous releases included games like Starlancer and Star Trek: Invasion.  What inspired the change from the flight/action genre to a first-person shooter?

 

Paul Chapman: The decision to do a game with FPS in it was both creative and commercial. Many of the core team had worked on space combat sims before and were eager to work on an FPS as we had been playing that genre heavily and had a few ideas for a game. We also wanted to do a game that would potentially reach more players, and obviously the FPS market is a lot bigger than the space combat sim market.

 

Hints of Warthog’s past is found in the cool

space levels featured in Mace Griffin.

 

 

With so many different kinds of first-person shooters out there, it's hard to imagine what one will be like just by looking at screenshots.  Could you describe the gameplay to help us understand what it's like to be in Mace Griffin's shoes?

 

PC: Variety is the keyword. Lots of different types of big levels, lot's of different characters, lots of objectives and quite a lot of surprises. There is plenty of combat in the game but again the type and pace of it varies depending on where you are, who you are up against and what weapons are available. Parts of the game demand full-on brute force, and other parts require stealth. There is also a lot of mixing of space and ground sections within missions.

 

Are there advantages to being in the first person as opposed to having a third-person view?

 

PC: Because of the seamless transition, it would be a shame to have to cut between a view behind a character to a view behind a ship, it would break the continuity. The only other option would be to have the space view from behind the player character's head, but I doubt if that would work well. So first person view it is.

 

What is Mace Griffin's story about?  Why is he a bounty hunter?

 

PC: The game is set in a futuristic frontier system which is being rapidly colonized by both human and alien settlers. The player will assume the role of a Special-Ops officer known as a 'Ranger.' Against a backdrop of corporate, political and religious intrigue, Ranger is framed for being involved in the deaths of his comrades. After a stretch in prison he becomes a Bounty Hunter, a vocation which gives him access to classified information and a means to aggressively pursue his search for the people who framed him. Through meeting individuals and witnessing events during his Bounty Hunting assignments, the player will realize that they are part of a much larger and sinister plot, but the true nature of this will not be revealed until the game's finale.

 

 

You’ll have to use your environments to your

advantage if you want to survive a gunfight.

 

 

While a PC version is on the way, it would appear that Mace Griffin is primarily a console FPS.  Has this changed the way you designed the controls?

 

PC: We set out from the beginning with the intention of making the game as accessible and uncomplicated as possible, whilst still including a lot of interesting objectives and puzzles to work out. What affected the control layout the most was keeping the space and ground controls consistent, which we achieved very successfully. I'm always pleased when I see someone who has never played a flight sim before run around on the ground, take off, then discover how easy it is to fly a ship. I suspect that the seamless transition almost makes them forget they have moved from one mode of movement to another.

 

Speaking of which, how do the controls work on the consoles compared to the PC?

 

PC: On the consoles we provide a number of configs for the player to mix and match on their control pads. On the PC the controls can be configured across the mouse and keyboard, along with joypads and joysticks. 

 

Mace Griffin's visuals are looking great.  Does the game use an all-new engine, or is it borrowing one from a previous FPS?

 

PC: Everything has been written from the ground up by the Bounty Hunter team.

 

 

Amazing, cinematic effects like these were created entirely by Warthog.

 

 

Gives us some details about the weapons featured in the game.

 

PC: There are old favorites like the sniper rifle and shotgun, which is quad barreled (just to make sure), then there are a bunch of original designs like the plasma machine gun and the sonic shock cannon. Every weapon has a secondary function and some of them will have a different effect depending one what environment you are in or shoot at. 

 

Working with three consoles at the same time must be tough.  Did they interfere with the game's development at all?  I love PlayStation 2 and GameCube, but from the technical side of things, Xbox is much more expansive.  Did this limit your ideas to things that could only be done on all three consoles?

 

We only set out to do Xbox and PC at the start of the project, then half way through the (old) publisher asked us to do PS2 and GameCube as well! We assumed that we may have to scale down the levels for these platforms, but Bill, Paul and Keith did a wicked job on these consoles and managed to squeeze the whole game on, so the missions are identical across all four platforms. It was probably good that it happened that way as we may have been less ambitious from the start had we known about all the consoles.

 

Will all four versions of the game be released simultaneously?

 

PC: Xbox and PS2 will ship in June and GameCube and PC will hopefully ship a couple of months later.

 

With a version headed to every game console,

everyone will get the chance to become a bounty hunter.

 

 

How did Henry Rollins become the voice of Mace Griffin?  What was it about him that made him the perfect man for the job?

 

PC: It was a decision made by the publisher's marketing and production team. I was surprised and pleased that they got him to do it, he was someone I was aware of years ago for his poetry and music stuff, but recently his profile has risen (he even presents a show on UK television), and apparently he has a big following all over the place.

 

Obviously his voice is perfect for the part and he delivered the lines very well. His voice has the quality of someone dignified and honorable, but you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of him. That's Mace Griffin in a nutshell. The strange thing about it is that the artist who modelled Mace had Henry in mind when he built him, months before it was announced that he would be doing the voice.

 

Are there any other celebrities doing voices for the game?

 

PC: Not well-known ones, but a few of the voice actors had supporting roles in movies like the Patriot and Saving Private Ryan.

 

How far along was the game's development before voices were recorded?

 

PC: The final voices were recorded in August of last year, then Henry did his a few months ago. I actually had to do all the placeholder speech myself, which was delivered in my limited range of bad accents. Mace had a Yorkshire accent and Conner was a Cockney, it was truly appalling. I was relieved when the proper speech arrived.

 

Even in simpler screenshots like this, the lighting and textures are incredible.

 

 

Do you feel that Mace Griffin is strictly an offline single-player experience, or would you like to bring the series online someday?

 

PC: I think the game would translate well to multi-player and imagine that if we do a sequel it's something we are likely to include. We actually have a few new ideas for how multi-player could work, but I'm not going into any detail in case any other developers are reading this.

 

Smart move.

Thank you Paul for an excellent interview.  Maybe you can privately fill me in on the details on our next trip to Naboo :)

 

Click here for all the new Screenshots