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03/17/05 >> Pariah

Genre: First-person Shooter

James Schmalz, founder and creative director of Digital Extremes, took time from his busy life to answer our questions regarding Pariah, Digital Extremes' upcoming first-person shooter built on Unreal technology.

Tell us a bit about Pariah and what you hope to accomplish with the game.

You play Jack Mason, a military doctor in the year 2520 who has been called down on a routine transfer mission to escort a prisoner who you have been told has a virus. You are supposed to take her off planet to a medical facility. All routine and simple.

Except that as you are transferring her off, you get shot out of the sky and go crashing down into the wastelands around the prison. So, your first goal is to try to survive and get Karina, the prisoner, and yourself back to safety. As things unfold, you begin to find out more about her, the virus and what is really going on at the prison.

Recently, games such as Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and Doom 3 have raised the bar not only in terms of graphics, but also in storytelling and immersion. What's being done to Pariah to ensure this is a cutting edge game?

Digital Extremes has always been known for great looking games. We constantly strive to push the graphics envelope and we're really pleased with how great Pariah looks. But there's more than just graphics and we've worked hard to make Pariah a full package game. It's got an in-depth storyline driven single-player campaign along with a really robust multiplayer component that includes for the first time on a console system, an online map editor. We're really excited to see what console players come up with on the map editor. We expect it to add quite a bit of longevity to the game and a lot of value to the gamers.

What feature are you most proud of?

I have to pick two, the upgradeable weapons and the map editor. We worked really hard to make cool upgrades to all the weapons. They are really fun and exciting. Plus the map editor is so simple and easy to use, we wish our tools were this easy and could produce such cool results.

Something that's becoming more the case recently is creating an emotional attachment with the characters (Half-Life 2 comes to mind). Was that something important to the development team during development?

Definitely. We think moving forward the future of not only the FPS genre but of games in general that developers are going to have to push for more immersion in their designs. With the next-gen consoles on the horizon this is only going to grow.

What did you learn from previous experience that is being implemented in Pariah?

We've been making FPS games for about 9 years now so we brought a lot of experience to the table when starting Pariah. This may seem obvious but ultimately the most important thing in an FPS is the weapons. People want to see and feel like they're using really kick-ass weapons so we spent a lot of time not only on the look of the weapons but also the feel and the weapon system with the upgrades.

How many weapons will there be? And what kind of variety?

There are 7 weapons, the core of them are the old favorites: Rocket Launcher, Grenade launcher, Assault Rifle, etc. But as cool as they are, it would be boring to just have another rocket launcher in an FPS game, so our twist on our weapon system is upgrades. Every weapon can be upgraded as you play in both single player and multiplayer. Each upgrade is more difficult to get than the last.

In addition to that, we have a few really cool and unique weapons that tie into the story. One we showed off recently is called Titans Fist. As to the nature of the weapon and what it does, you will just have to play the game and find out.

Pariah will ship with your M.A.P editor. How important is the mod community to Digital Extremes? What steps are being taken to help the mod community thrive?

The mod community has been a huge part of our history. It's been a great learning experience for a lot of people out there and it's been interesting to see what creations come out of it. We're always interested to see what people can come up with and we kept that in mind when designing the MAP Editor. We wanted to give people who might be intimidated to use the pro tools that we've handed out in our past games, an easy to use, low-learning curve alternative. Once the game ships we are planning on providing free downloadable content for both the PC and Xbox versions in the form of new maps as well as new pre-fabs and goodies to add to the MAP Editor.

Tell us a bit about Pariah's multiplayer features.

Almost all of our multiplayer levels have been created in an outdoor environment, not only to make them different than games we have worked on before, but also to take advantage of the vehicles and some of the very fast outdoor environment drawing technology we have added to the Unreal Engine. We have tried to make the multiplayer experience quite different and refreshing. We have a cool new game type called Front Line Assault which tries to mimic the fight over the frontline in a war between two armies, so it is objective based. Overall the multiplayer focuses very heavily on team and team play. A number of the vehicles are multi-person vehicles that are more effective when used as a team. Also, the upgradeable weapons really give a different feel to multiplayer overall as compared to products we've played lately. Finally, it's just damn cool to sit down, quickly modify a map in the editor and jump in and play it within minutes in split screen with a buddy. Or hop on Xbox Live and share it with friends.

What kinds of gameplay elements are you adding to make Pariah unique?

I touched on this in some of the other questions but the main gameplay element will be the upgradeable weapons. In addition to this we wanted to offer a variety of gameplay and we did that through adding destructible physics objects in the game that players will need to be strategic about using them as well as varied missions and environments.

Will a demo be released before Pariah ships?

We're working on demos for both versions of the game right now. We don't have release dates on them however.

After finishing the game, what do you hope fans come away with?

We hope they enjoy themselves and feel like they got their money's worth.
Pariah is a whole lotta game!

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Thanks for the interview :)

Interview by Alex Hammond