Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Interview

GameZone offers an interview with producer Raphael van Lierop on Relic’s upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. It’s one of the rare looks at the game where RPG elements are even mentioned, albeit as “RPG-lite”.

GZ: Relic’s very RTS-heavy, and The Outfit had some hybrid elements from the RTS genre. But I didn’t really see anything like that in Space Marine. You said that you liked The Outfit and were proud of it, but you weren’t quite satisfied. When I started the demo, I was kind of expecting an evolution of The Outfit. Are there elements of that in Space Marine, or is it more something else?

RVL: I think the strategy in Space Marine is more tactics, really. It’s much more second-to-second decision-making, which is a little bit different from what you see in RTS and a lot of other shooters out there. The original inception of it, back in 2006 when it was Carnage, was to take the ideas of The Outfit and wrap 40K around them and create a game like that. Space Marine isn’t that game. Space Marine is something that’s evolved differently. And like a lot of projects, we may have started with a certain goal in mind and kind of ended up where we are right now through iteration a lot of decision-making that goes into it along the way. Sometimes games find their way as you develop them. They take on a life of their own.

When we started the project, we had a lot of other ideas things that we wanted to integrate, some more progression, some more RPG-lite elements. And as we continued to develop it, there’s a winnowing process that allows you to focus the game on what it needs to be. We realized that a lot of those things were distracting our attention and the player’s attention from what we wanted them to be doing. As we kept tuning the focus, we realized that the heart of what made Space Marine feel like a really unique game was the combat system. So the strategy, if you can call it that, is how you’re using the tools that we give you within each combat encounter. It’s a very different way of thinking than how you employ your strategy and your thinking process in an RTS game. We’re completely comfortable with those things being separate. We’re not trying to take key RTS learning and adapt it to the console action genre. We’re trying to make a blockbuster action experience that’s true to … what is the core fantasy of being a Space Marine? That’s a very specific character, even though it sounds like a generic name. In the IP, a Space Marine is a very specific thing: this huge, towering superhuman hero. So what is the experience that you get to? Who is that guy? What do you get to do when you’re that guy? That’s what we focused on creating for people.