Soldier Of Fortune's GHOUL system and the flexibility it offered when it came to blowing off limbs and playing special case death animations led to the game attracting a great deal of controversy, up to and including being rated as porn by the British Columbia Film Classification Office. Obviously, there were some people who didn't think it was quite so cool." We knew that people were going to find it different, we hoped cool. I remember spending quite a bit of time on some of the special case deaths, like the groin shots, obviously, the real crowd-pleaser. I would spend just hours playing around with what we could do with it and talking to the animators about what kind of animations we could make. So there was a whole lot of stuff that I don't think other shooters had to deal with at that time." "With being able to shoot limbs off we had to come up with a system that detected, 'OK, well if I'm going to blow a leg off, then I'm going to have to turn off the leg and then put on a cap or something to cover up the hole in the model, and maybe attach a bit of bone, and then also spawn in another copy of the character except with everything but the leg turned off next to it.' Then there were animation concerns. "All of our artists had to designate which triangles on the model belonged to which zone, so we had to come up with a whole scheme of how many zones are we going to have." "I can tell you from the perspective of using it we definitely had to do things that I don't think had ever been done on the art side of things," Dan says on the complexity of implementing the new system.
#Soldier of fortune 1 box mod#
"The closest at the time that I was aware of was a Quake mod called Action Quake II and that was nothing like we were able to do where we were able to say whether you hit someone in the head, or the knee, or the foot." "He had come up with the GHOUL system where he would take a model and break in down into sub-locations, which to my knowledge, had never been done before in a shooter," says Dan. The other headline feature of Soldier Of Fortune was the technology that could read which part of an enemy's body you were hitting and have them react accordingly, an innovation that is attributed to Gil Gribb. I think he might have had something to do with that." Shoot to kill We might have asked him for ideas for weapons.
Whether we actually consulted him about where to place cover or anything like that, no. "We were pushing so-called realism at the time, so there were conversations about how this would actually work in the real world. "He certainly was a marketing thing, but he did come out to the office a couple of times," Dan replies. John and the credibility he lent to the game as a result of his real-life experience as a soldier was front and centre of the game's marketing, so it would be fair to question to what extent he actually had an impact on the game's development and to what extent that was all just marketing fluff. "Once we had that person to focus on, it kind of built a character that we could say 'OK we can make a game around that,'" says Dan. It was incredible to be able to sit down and just listen to him speak." "He came to Raven and spent a good deal of time with the team discussing his career, and sharing how people react in combat situations, how they trained, the best way to approach a situation – you name it. "It was the Soldier Of Fortune magazine team who recommended John as a consultant," Soldier Of Fortune project coordinator Eric Biessman says on how Mullins became involved. We wanted to make something we were proud of." We were keenly aware of that, but Raven has a lot of pride in the work it does and so we were not about to just, I'll say 'shit in a box', because that was the expression we used, and then send that out to the stores. "You make a crappy game and then slap a licence on it and hope it sells, was how they were viewed. "Licensed games had a bad reputation," Dan recalls. Nevertheless, the team was determined to make it work. A print magazine? We're like 'How does that even translate into games?' It was a surprise."
If any of us had even heard of it, all we had heard was it was a magazine. Quite honestly, I don't think any of us really knew what to do at first. One day, Brian Raffel came in and told us that Activision had acquired the Soldier Of Fortune licence and that we were going to make a game. "If I recall, Raven were wrapping up Heretic II and were looking at what they were going to do next. Dan Kramer, who worked on Soldier Of Fortune as assistant programming director, reveals that he and many of his colleagues were bemused when they found out they would be making a game based on a mercenary magazine.
0 kommentar(er)
