14 DAY TRIAL // Dark Sector was released earlier this month and critics were divided over it. There were those that dismissed it as being a Gears of War clone with a unique innovation in the glaive weapon and a story full of holes. Others were won over by the dual wielding mechanics that paired the glaive with another ranged weapon.
At the ICE conference, James Schmalz, who is president and founder of Dark Sector creators Digital Extremes, talked about how the game had been initially envisioned and how it actually worked out in the end.
As Schmalz put it: "The initial seed of Dark Sector actually came from an after dinner sort-of cocktail hour, and somebody had this idea of doing a massively multiplayer game set in outer space. It was originally going to be an MMO action title on the PC." Apparently this idea emerged before broadband was plentiful and the cost of development versus projected earnings made the idea impossible to translate into a working MMO.
The second phase was to think of a story-driven first-person game, that could capitalize on the power of the game consoles of the time "so we shifted from an MMO game on the PC to a single player, story driven game on the consoles." The console move was to prove one of the biggest problems for the game, as developing a console engine from scratch was a very time-intensive task.
The focus was also on the story element of the game, a story that should take center stage in the gamer's experience. Schmalz thinks game writers should come from the game industry itself as simply taking some writers with film or TV background and expect them to do a good job in games is pretty foolish. In his words: "If you try to hire writers from outside it's so hard for them to understand that the nuances of storytelling that are popular in film are hard to bring across in games."
As for the future, the Digital Extremes president seems to believe in the impact of downloadable content for the console game, and that LittleBigPlanet will be the breakthrough game in that respect, because "it's completely user generated, and when that becomes a big success it's going to change everything. There is a lot of desire to see that happen and it's only beginning to flourish." He also expects the next few Digital Extremes games to target mostly current-gen consoles.