Half-Life Inside: всё о вселенной Half-Life

It's now a couple of days since the demo of strongly anticipated multiplayer mod Dystopia has been released and we can already say that Dystopia has extremely interesting gameplay, is created on highly professional level and received great response from the community.

One of the project co-leaders, Robert "Fuzzy" Crouch, was so kind to answer some of our questions about Dystopia and we at Half-Life Inside are proud to present this interview to you:

HL Inside: Dystopia demo is now out to public. Did community reaction meet your expectations?

Fuzzy: The response to the demo release has exceeded our expectations. While we're obviously quite proud of all the work we've done, we also knew that Dystopia was more complex than most other multiplayer FPS games.

We were nervous that people would find it too difficult to get into and not give it enough playtime to really see what we were aiming for. As it turns out, we've seen a lot of comments from people saying that while it did confuse them at first, they enjoyed it so much they stuck with it until they came to understand everything.

HL Inside: By the second day of release Dystopia reached popularity of HL2DM in terms of number of people playing (based on Valve's stats). How do you feel about that?

Fuzzy: Extremely happy. Honestly we didn't even hazzard a guess at the number of players our demo would draw in, when we saw that we had more players than HL2DM we realised that there was a lot of interest in Dystopia. Even more incredible was that this 2200 concurrent player peak was limited by the number of servers which were up. To see every single server full with players was incredible.

HL Inside: Simply put, the gameplay in Dystopia rocks. It pretty much combines UT's Assault with TFC classes and the cyberspace it something unique. Was this gameplay model planned from the very concept or it changed throughtout development process?

Fuzzy: All members of the development team are hardcore gamers who have in played top level clans in many previous games, including TFC, Q3F, Action Quake2 and RTCW to list a few. Right from the beginning our goal was to draw on all our favourite things from these previous games while injecting unique ideas of our own. We began the project by listing out a collection of high level aims, things like; rewards aggressive play, deep team play, wide range of skills, fast paced action, tense situations. Then through out development we dug deeper and deeper into the details, always ensuring that everything fit with these high level aims.

HL Inside: Previously you told that full release will include driveable vehicles. Can you confirm that?

Fuzzy: Yes. We have working vehicles in our development builds. The vehicles will only be available in specific phases of a map, generally during the initial "insertion phase". Players on both teams will be driving vehicles to the entry point to a Corp fascility or building. Once the Punks have captured a spawn inside the building, play will progress to the next phase and the vehicles will be out of play. We have prototypes for a whide range of vehicles, including cars, trucks and motocycles.

HL Inside: Are you going to be adding more classes/weapons/implants or what we see now is pretty much final picture?

Fuzzy: Nothing is totally locked in. We'll be gathering feedback from players to see what things people would like to see added. Two months ago we froze our feature set so we could focus on getting the demo out to the public. Now that it's out, the team is back to brain storming new ideas for weapons and implants. We'll continue to prototype up the best of these ideas and test out how they fit with the current gameplay. The ones which are great will stay, the ones that suck won't.

HL Inside: Will there be new maps before the final release?

Fuzzy: Most definitely. Our two biggest priorities right now are to squish the couple of bugs which have been found in the demo and to update the demo with more maps. We have another 5 maps in progress internal to the team and we'll also be helping community mappers create their own maps for the Dystopia demo. We will be releasing many updates to the demo while we continue to work on the full version of Dystopia.

HL Inside: Did Valve contact you after the release? What do they think about Dystopia?

Fuzzy: We've had good contact with Valve pretty much right through our development. This relationship was really solidified by the week we spent in their offices back in Feburary. Since then they continued to play test our beta every couple of months. Post release they congratulated us on the size of the player base we'd picked up, and also on the high level of quality for an initial public release.

HL Inside: Are you planning to make a final game free or going to charge for it? In latter case, does it comply with Valve's MOD license?

Fuzzy: Our plan is to simply make a great game and make the most of any opportunity which presents it's self to us. This means that if nothing else pops up, Dystopia will continue to be a free mod for HL2. Obviously if Valve offered us the chance to turn Dystopia into a full stand alone title we'd love to take our game to the next level. We will never charge people for Dystopia while it requires HL2 to play, but as a stand alone game we'd obviously like to get some monetry reward for the huge amount of effort which would go into producing a professional quality title.

HL Inside: The last one and I think I already know the answer :) Any ETA on final release?

Fuzzy: When it's done. Currently all work on Dystopia is done in our spare time. Everyone in Team Dystopia is a normal human who has to go into a real life job from 9 to 5 every weekday and contribute to the project as much as they can. Due to this, any changes in someone's real life situation impacts on the project. Therefore, it's virtually impossible for us to give an estimate of how long something will take. Much like the demo release, we'll announce the release date of the full version the second we know ourselves. This would be a week out from release.

HL Inside: Thanks for the interview and another bunch of thanks for the great mod you gave us!

Fuzzy: An utter pleasure. Thanks for playing and enjoying our game!