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Rogue
Spear: Black Thorn has now been out in stores for almost three
weeks. We've had ample time to check it out and we're glad to report that
the Black Thorn development team at Ubi Soft Montreal has successfully
created a very high-quality expansion pack, especially since this is the
first time a complete Rainbow
Six series product has been produced outside of Red Storm. (Parts
of Covert
Ops Essentials were done by Zombie and Magic Lantern Playware, but
the whole COE product was produced by Red Storm nonetheless.)
Ubi Soft has granted us an opportunity to get some "behind the scenes" information about Black Thorn's development. Thanks to Patrick Naud, Associate Producer of Black Thorn, for generously taking the time to answer our questions in this exclusive interview.
Patrick
Naud: This title wasn't originally planned. We all thought that Covert
Ops would have been the last game released on the Rogue Spear engine but
from what we had seen in forums and fansites, players still wanted more
Rogue Spear! With its whole studio working on Ghost Recon, Red Storm didn't
have the resources. However, here in Montreal, we were between projects
and had available resources. Also, since Rogue Spear is still played around
the office, there were a lot of people interested in working on this project!
Ubi Soft Montreal was founded in 1997. We now have more than 400 staff
including administration and marketing. Since 1997, we've finished more
than 15 games. The latest are Batman Vengeance on PlayStation 2, GameCube,
XBox and Game Boy Advance, Disney's Tarzan Untamed on PS2 and GC, Disney's
Jungle Book on PC and PS2, Disney's Donald Goin' Quackers on PS2 and Speed
Devils and Speed Devils Online on Dreamcast. We also have a few games
in production, which still haven't been announced but will be very interesting!
As for the team, the "permanent" team (we had a few part-time people)
was made of 8 level designers, 5 artists and 2 programmers.
I started building the team in December 2000 and we had our Gold Master
around October 15, 2001, so it was roughly 10 months from the beginning
to the end.
We had help from the guys at Red Storm so we could start the project;
we received condensed training on the tools and on level designing for
the Rogue Spear engine. They also collaborated on the script, helped with
the code and answered all of our technical questions. They were quite
useful!
Travis Getz was our International Content Manager; his role was to make sure that this game was true to the R6 series. John Sonedecker, Gary Stelmack, Eric Terry and Tim Alexander were our "consultants", they gave us our Rogue Spear training and Gary and John answered our many questions concerning the level editing and level editors issues. Todd Lewis helped with the code, Deke Waters was our main contact at Red Storm, and Kevin Perry worked on the script.
The draft of the briefings was written in Montreal. Beside Travis Getz,
who helped us with the story, the whole storyline was completely reviewed
by Kevin Perry, who was one of the writers on Rogue Spear.
We chose the historical scenarios so that we could have some different
maps than what we had in Rogue Spear, Urban Ops, and Covert Ops. We also
chose new locales (there hadn't been a mission in Africa since the original
Rainbow Six) and tried to find missions that were graphically different
one from another.
The level design team was made up of Rogue Spear players, so when each
of them decided to build a level, they first had to design it on paper
and explain why it would be fun for the whole team. Then, everyone gave
their opinion and debated on the different elements of the maps (graphics,
realism and gameplay). When we got out of the conference room, we had
a level that everyone wanted to play!
I love them all equally! Some are best for single player while others
are better in multiplayer but overall, they all offer great gameplay!
As for hidden surprises, level designers all added some little personal elements in each level, ranging from pictures of team members to little funny textures ...
This title brings more of the same gameplay that made Rogue Spear so popular.
What we did is to give Rogue Spear players 15 new maps, 9 new single player
missions, 14 new weapons and a new multiplayer mode so they can continue
to play Rogue Spear! The 6 new multiplayer maps have been designed especially
for quick 6-10 player multiplayer Survival and Team Survival matches which
are the more common type of matches played online.
The executable was mainly modified for the new Lone Wolf mode. We've also
added the team kit restriction option, the Ubi.com support, and we've
also fixed a few minor bugs.
We used Red Storm's formulas that are based on the real weapons specs.
A big list of available weapons has been established with every spec that
they should have in the game. We picked the ones we wanted and tested
them thoroughly so that they all have their advantages and disadvantages
on the battlefield.
The original US version of Black Thorn was gold by September 11th. The
decision to delay the game was announced a week later and we started working
on some modifications. Because of some major graphic modifications (modifying
an airport terminal into a bus station), we had to rework the whole storyline,
call back the actors and redo the whole QA process. It took us roughly
two weeks to have a master candidate (integrate all the changes) and we
spent 10 days testing the game to make sure every modification was done
and there weren't any new bugs.
The copycat angle of the plot was also changed following September 11th. The changes that had to be done to the missions wouldn't have worked with this scenario. It could have been worse but we didn't have to change any of the missions gameplay-wise. That's why the game was only delayed three weeks.
A big thanks once again to Patrick Naud for answering all our questions!
A special thanks also goes out to Marcus Beer, PR Manager at Ubi Soft,
for coordinating this interview for us.
Interview conducted by: CR6 |
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