Singularity Interview

Extensive tongue-wag with Activision Producer Kekoa Lee-Creel on Raven Software’s upcoming dual-timezone shooter.

FPS Gamer: Do you worry you’ve been infiltrated?!

Lee-Creel: Yeah, there’s a spy among us! [laughs] So it definitely has those same themes but it’s not our fault.

FPS Gamer: Going back to the Time Manipulation Device. Is its usage restricted to certain puzzles?

Lee-Creel: The game world has lots of objects which are manipulatable by the TMD. So there’s a fiction behind that, right – when the singularity happened in the 1950s the reactor exploded, and the Element 99 which they were using to make these things manipulable got everywhere, but what it got on is what’s actually TMD-able. So that indicates to you what you can and cannot manipulate. It’s most prominent in puzzles.

The puzzle functionality is its strongest bit, and it’s where you would use it in a couple of different ways. You can make objects new or old, you can also go through these little rifts that allow you to move backward and forward at will between 1950 and 2010 in more complex puzzles using the TMD to pull pieces from each era and combining them to make your way through.

And then outside of puzzle-solving in the slower moments when you go into a heavy combat scenario and you’re dealing with the intense stuff, that’s when you actually see the TMD as a variable you can or cannot use. So Raven’s really big on giving the player choice. There are conventional weapons that the player can use, they can run and gun through the entire game and ignore the TMD functionality, but there’s a big pay-off if you use the TMD in combat, we’ve set up all these scripts and different things where you can age cover away from a guy or break down a piece of environment to smash some guys, and save yourself all the ammo.

So there it becomes – I don’t want to say optional, but there’s a choice you can make. You can either play with a TMD, or you can play it like a straight shooter.

FPS Gamer: Which story themes or devices do you think are the strongest?

Lee-Creel: Well, I’d say that the story we’re drawing has been in flux quite a bit, so if I had to pick one overarching theme it’s sort of overcoming one’s fears and challenges to step into a role that doesn’t necessarily seem like a role one belongs in.

So Renko, the main character for this game – he’s pitched as the Everyman. He’s not a Top Gun pilot, he’s a navigator. He’s a smart one – he looks at his surroundings and he thinks about where he is and he’s crashed down in this odd place and he’s looking for his pilot, and they’re going to get out of there. And as the story unfolds he transforms from this guy who just wants to get off this island and get home to a guy who is effectively going to save the world by preventing something kind of catastrophic. And it’s a role that he wasn’t crafted for.

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