Saber Interactive Interview
At A Glance
- The CEO of the developer behind TimeShift talks about the new first-person shooter.
Matthew Karch, CEO of New York City-based Saber Interactive, took some time out of his schedule to talk about the latest offering from his studio, TimeShift. The first-person shooter for Xbox 360™ puts players in the combat boots of Michael Swift, a recently retired military man and a single parent.
Swift's been called back into active service to take part in a dangerous time travel experiment that will make him the world's first "Chrononaut." After he initially refuses the assignment, a personal tragedy strikes and Swift takes the mission because he has nothing left to lose.
Players can use slow, stop, or reverse for a
given obstacle and solve it differently each time.
"TimeShift's story can best be categorized as an alternate history," says Karch. "It explores what would happen if the ability to travel through time ended up in the wrong hands. While the concept itself has been dealt with in science fiction novels and films, it has never really been explored in interactive media."
Swift travels back to the year 1911 and then returns to the present. When he gets back, everything has changed. His peaceful world has been replaced by one that is dominated by tyranny, oppression, and war. He soon learns that the man behind the experiment itself plotted these changes and used Swift as a pawn to change the future.
Swift must now find a way to rebuild a time machine and make his way back to the past to prevent himself from changing the future. He searches out and enlists the help of people that he knew from his former life and together they set out to fix the past.
Karch says the driving force behind TimeShift was the actual time control mechanic that has been tightly integrated into the gameplay (more on that later). The story was crafted with this idea in mind and has been implemented to provide the player with motivation beyond the fast, frenetic gameplay. Saber did not make the story secondary to the gameplay. They made sure that the story fit in logically and seamlessly into the game and was not in any way an afterthought or add-on.
"I think that even independent of the gameplay the story is really very compelling," says Karch. "Our writer, Michael Hall, is pushing hard to have a movie made out of it. It is one of the few game stories that I know of that would translate almost directly into film."
Films that influenced the development team include 12 Monkeys, Back to the Future, and Mr. Destiny. Literary works from Ray Bradbury, including "The Yoynbee Convector" and "A Sound of Thunder," also helped the team get its creative juices flowing. On the gaming side, titles like Halo®, Call of Duty®, and Madden '92 all had a direct impact on TimeShift.
Not Your Typical Shooter
Karch believes that TimeShift, at its core, is a really well-implemented shooter. He says the artificial intelligence is as good as any he's seen, the story is really compelling, the gameplay is fast and intense, and the game has more diversity of environments and gameplay settings than any other shooter out there. He adds that the graphics are better than anything yet seen on Xbox 360.
"If that were all TimeShift had to offer it would be worth the price of admission," says Karch. "As the name of the game implies, however, we have added an entirely new dimension to standard FPS gameplay. We have taken the ability to control time and integrated it into the fabric of the game. In TimeShift the player can slow, stop, and reverse the flow of time while remaining totally unaffected by the use of the powers. This has tremendous implications not only for solving in-game challenges but also for battle situations where the powers can be used as a weapon."
Since it's designed with hardcore gamers in mind, Karch says this game is a real challenge and forces not only liberal use of the time powers in battle situations but also requires the player to use their mind to solve some of the challenges that require time powers. Karch says the game is by no means a platformer. It is fast-paced and has very smart and tough A.I., as well as an arsenal that is as over-the-top as they come. But there are gameplay elements that deviate from standard shooters.
"On multiple occasions you will be required to use your time powers to figure out how to get past a certain area or to detonate an explosive and get away on time," says Karch. "You will also be able to use your time powers to save squad mates by reversing them back to life or to freeze or reverse A.I. states to move around undetected. The time powers provide a new arsenal that allows for new gameplay scenarios. I think we are bringing something fresh to a genre that has grown stale with corridor-based horror games or World War II shoot-fests. As much as I like well-implemented shooters, I think that the time has come for something a little different (pun intended)."
If I Could Turn Back Time …
The primary improvement with the Xbox 360 version of TimeShift is the visuals. Karch says the game was designed to be a game for high-end machines. The game engine supports a host of features that the Xbox simply can't handle, including advanced parallax effects, very high-resolution texturing, distortion effects, and anti-aliasing solutions.
"When viewed in high definition, the Xbox 360 version will literally suck you into the game world,” says Karch. "The Xbox 360 version looks far better than the shooters currently available on the platform."
Karch explains that TimeShift offers built-in "replayability." This emerges from the whole time manipulation mechanic. There are multiple ways to solve in-game challenges. Players can use slow, stop, or reverse for a given obstacle and solve it differently each time. No two players will play TimeShift the same way. Karch thinks people will want to go back and play the game again to try to use different powers to progress through the game world.
A Crowded Genre
There are a lot of first-person shooters on the market today. Karch says the first reaction to TimeShift when they were seeking a publishing partner was that it was just "bullet time." It was only when the developer had a solid playable demo that really showed what they wanted to do with the time-shifting idea that they found success with Atari®.
"The biggest challenge is to focus on what makes a game fun and not to try and jam pack every idea under the sun into your game," says Karch. "Halo proved that a shooter with a few well-implemented elements (vehicles and A.I.) was enough to make a game a huge hit. Call of Duty focused on sounds and scripted events that really conveyed the illusion of war."
For Saber, that meant focusing on compelling A.I. that interacted well with the time control mechanic. Karch says it's important to not try to do too much. In a crowded market there are quite a few sub-standard games that get a lot of attention just because of the marketing dollars that are spent on them, he says.
"It's annoying when I see expensive commercials of pre-rendered scenes that look nothing like the actual game that are used to convince gamers to shell out their hard-earned cash," says Karch. "I think it not only treats gamers like they are idiots but it's also deceptive."
Karch believes gamers these days are a very sophisticated bunch and the best way to reach them is through interviews, screenshots, and videos of actual gameplay, and of course through demos of the game. Saber is looking forward to "surprising" the gaming world with its unique take on time travel and first-person shooting with TimeShift.
Article by John Gaudiosi
