Welcome, dear reader, to part five of our developer's diary; where we describe our toils in bringing you UFO: Aftermath. As is customary, I would like to thank you all for the words of encouragement coming our way; and again ask your forgiveness if we cannot reply to your letters quickly enough. But keep them coming, they help us to go on.
This diary is going to deviate from the pattern set by the previous installments, where the Memoirs and Diary section were entwined like poisonous ivy and sweet pea; there will be only a sort of Diary here. The reason for this irregularity is twofold: firstly, the Memoirs part, which was intended to slowly catch up with the Diary part, now approaches a period I still cannot write freely about - our protracted negotiations with the new publisher are not over yet, I regret to inform you - and secondly there was an interesting event taking place last week I would like to dwell on in more detail.
Diary: Our first chat
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There was a first public chat about UFO: Aftermath this past Thursday (Sep 19, 2002). For the details of the chat you can go the excellent Pete's page www.ufoaftermath.co.uk (which is well worth visiting in any case, if you haven't been there yet) or you can find the links in the Press section of our official page (www.ufo-aftermath.com). You can find there both full and edited logs of the chat, so I won't quote it here excessively. However there are couple of things I would like to say about the chat as such, and then there were some questions I wish I had answered differently or more broadly and, contrary to usual situation, I can actually put forward this esprit de l'escalier.
So, firstly my thanks go to Olav and Kahnn who organized the chat and brought up the idea in the first place, to all the voices on the chat, and also to everybody who was here, regardless of the number of questions he asked.
The chat itself, though attended by relatively small number of people, was an exciting affair for both myself and J.R., our one-man PR army, who also participated. And I do not mean only the understandable elation that is a direct result of relatively large number of people you have never seen or heard from before taking interest in your work and actually listening to your answers. Nor am I speaking about a pleasant surprise at the reasonability, pertinence and positive spirit of the questions being asked.
Even though these two emotions were foremost at first, on reflection I realized something more profound: though not yet finished, our game already exists in the minds of the people who care about it and from this point of view - the point of view of the game itself, if you will - the roles of the developers and future players are equal and interchangeable.
But enough would-be philosophical musings. I promised to get back to some of the questions and answer them more broadly, so let's get to the point.
One question that crops up over and over again runs along the following lines: "Aren't you daunted by the legacy of the game whose 'intellectual lineage' you are a part of?" where, of course, the 'intellectual lineage' is meant to include games such as X-COM: Enemy Unknown and other games set in the X-COM universe. (For the record: UFO: Aftermath is not an X-COM game. It does not use X-COM trademark, or any distinct art, characters, designs or features of the X-COM series of games.)
In the chat I said that we could only hope that the people will still compare us favorably with these popular games once people have actually had a chance to play UFO: Aftermath. Even though this answer nicely sums up our attitude about this question, to some it may feel like we are dodging the issue.
So what do we actually think about it? We are lucky enough to get a lot of support from our fans, or rather from the fans of those older games. Thanks to that, even though UFO: Aftermath certainly is not the most eagerly awaited game of the next year, it is an eagerly awaited game. And to us, our responsibility to the people who are waiting for UFO: Aftermath far outweighs the responsibility to any old game. We do not want to compete, we do not want the players to say: "Aftermath is better than Apocalypse because of …" or "Unlike in TFTD, in Aftermath you can…" We simply want the players to say: "Aftermath is a good game." Period.
Another question we encounter frequently (one we also heard in the chat) is about the amount of freedom you are going to have in the game. In the chat it was phrased as follows: "How linear will the game be? Can you play for an unlimited amount of years or do you have to get rid of the aliens by a certain date?"
The simple and true answer is: "The former. You can take your time and finish the game when you see fit." However, if we want to be honest, we also have to point out the other side of coin. By giving more freedom to the players, we, as designers, forsake the ability to twist the plot any way we like. While in Original War we had tightly scripted missions, a very strong story, many characters, personal likes and dislikes, love, hate and betrayal, in UFO: Aftermath we will not be able to go into this level of detail. There will be story, there will be unexpected twists, but it will necessarily be more broadly sketched. You will not see the level of personal interaction you would be able to if we constrained the player's options more.
In this context I must mention Jagged Alliance. This game did an excellent job in giving almost total freedom to the player (in JA2) and at the same time had a lot of interpersonal interaction. But designers of JA2 had some advantages over us - they had a limited, albeit large, set of characters the player could choose from, and they had a relatively small number of places where important events happened. (And last but not least, they had about twice as much time on their hands.)
So in UFO: Aftermath, the stress is not on predefined events or scripted behaviors. The game relies more on the emergent situations - you are in command of your men and of all of the important resources left to humanity. Your enemies are many and, for most of the game, they are stronger than you. It will be up to you to outsmart them and to cleverly evolve your characters. We hope and believe that the events that will occur in this way will be no less interesting than pre-scripted ones, exactly because of their utter unexpectedness.
So this concludes this part of the developer's diary. Please forgive its more theoretical tone and see you at the next installment.
Martin Klíma
ALTAR interactive