03.12.06

Leading THQ and Relic Entertainment's first Xbox 360 endeavor, Adrian Crook set out to help develop the title that would set the Xbox 360 standard for both companies. Relic Entertainment is no stranger to creating great titles, throwing both Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War titles and the Homeworld series into the ring. To say the least, they know what they are doing.

With high scores across the board, you can say that The Outfit is a huge success. Here to talk about his recently finished project is Adrian Crook:

First things first, admit it, how great is it being a video game producer?
I've been in the industry since I started at EA Canada when I was 19. So for a long time, I didn't realize how cool it was to be a game producer. Then about 4 years ago I did a stint at McCann-Erickson (world's largest advertising agency) producing advertising, just to see what I'd missed.

Let's just say I appreciate my videogame producer job now more than ever! It's a great left brain/right brain mix and you get to work with cool people on fun projects. What more could you want?

Was it pretty exciting working on your first Xbox 360 title?
Definitely exciting. The Outfit is THQ's first Xbox 360 project and as a result, we were the trailblazers internally on a lot of fronts. And just being along for the ride as Microsoft launches a new platform - E3, X05, Zero Hour, etc - was very exciting for me and the team as well. This was my first (near) launch title and like I said to the team at one point, you don't get very many chances to work on projects like this.

We're pretty stoked about the release of "The Outfit". How did the team go about creating the list of achievements for this game?
We have some fantastic console designers at Relic. Jeff Brown, our Design Director, was the lead designer at Oddworld for a lot of years, so he has a great sense of player reward and how to expose it across the breadth of a game. Before diving into creating individual achievements, we first developed our strategy for how they'd be allocated across the game, what type of activities would reveal them, etc.

Are there any online achievements, or will they all be attainable through the campaign?
Absolutely! There are 25 achievements in single player (2 per mission and 1 game completion award) and 16 achievements in multiplayer.

Will attaining achievements unlock any special content for players (we've heard there's a weapons upgrade system tied in with attaining achievements)?
Yes, your weapons upgrade and cheats are unlocked, both according to how many medals (our term for achievements) you've acquired.

What achievement do you think will be the toughest to attain?
Probably "Victories Keep Piling Up" - that's the medal for winning 500 ranked quickmatch games. That's our least creative achievement, but you have to have a few achievements for the hardcores.

On average, how hard would you say it is to obtain all of The Outfit's achievements?
We've seen a lot of 360 games that seemed to have just ignored the achievement system - Gamespot has a "how to get 6000 gamer points easily" feature up right now that pretty much highlights all the games I think failed at achievements. I own NHL 2K6 and there are only 5 achievements in that entire game, some of which are ridiculously easy to attain. It's too bad because those titles tarnish the gamer point "economy" for the rest of us. On The Outfit, we embraced the achievement system because we knew how cool they'd be and how hard people would play to get them. Aside from a couple achievements, you really should be able to get everything just by playing and enjoying the single player and multiplayer games - we don't have any ridiculously hard "host 1000 multiplayer games" achievements, nor do we have any stupidly easy "Score in under 1 minute" achievements. ;)

How did you determine which achievements you would make secret and which not?
Generally we wanted all the single player achievements to be secret. In the game, you encounter them somewhat by accident. For example, (spoiler) you'll shoot a search light in one level, and the "Medal Opportunity" popup will appear. Now if you can destroy them all, you'll earn the achievement. So we didn't want to spell everything out beforehand - the medals are earned for going beyond your stated mission, and it's up to you to show that initiative. Multiplayer medals, however, are mostly described for you ahead of time. We wanted people to have something to aim for in multiplayer.

Can you explain the Destruction on Demand(tm) feature and how you think this will affect gameplay?
Destruction on Demand is a simple radial menu that you can bring up any time during single or multiplayer gameplay. You use it to order in everything from air strikes, to tanks to half-tracks to extra squadmates, machine gun nests, anti-tank emplacements and more. Destruction on Demand is a huge source of strategic depth and should be used accordingly. I know some people who played The Outfit demo like it was Halo and they were annihilated because of it. The Outfit is far more strategic than that. You really need to think on your feet and learn to use Destruction on Demand wisely.

What was your favorite thing about working on this game?
With only a few months to go before the end of the project, we finally saw multiplayer emerge and become as fun as we all thought it could be. From then on, we had everyone playing it daily: our General Manager, the test team, our balance team, production, programmers, etc. It got a lot of love. We've had some absolutely epic multiplayer battles during development and it made it even more fun to work on this project and brought the team closer together. That had to be my favorite part.

What's the multiplayer like for The Outfit?
The Outfit is a squad-based game, so every time you re-spawn, you start with the hero you control and 4 squadmates. That said, the 4 squadmates you left behind on the map somewhere when you died are still fighting for you. Add that to the fact that you've probably laid down a ton of emplacements, ordered a couple vehicles, and air-striked someone's base and you can imagine the level of frenetic chaos multiplayer is. I've seen some forum threads talking about "The Outfit is only 8 players over Live - waaah" and nonsense like that. Hopefully now that the demo is out people will realize that 8 players means 8 HUMAN players... As well as all the stuff you can call in and your AI squadmates that fight alongside you as well. So each one of those 8 players can have a small army of 40 or more units fighting with him/her. That's a unit count way beyond anything you'll see in current 360 multiplayer games and our programmers had to pull plenty of late nights to make that happen.

The Outfit just netted a score of 8.5 in The Official XBox Magazine. That is a pretty high score, but do you think it should have been higher?
We also scored a 4.5/5 (Editor's Choice) in GamePro and a 4/5 in Maxim! Do I think those scores should be higher? Of course!

What was it like working with Robert Patrick and Ron Perlman (Hellboy!)?
Robert Patrick was awesome. He came to his voice recording sessions so pumped and willing to help out. In one scene, he found out his character was chomping on a cigar. So he said, "Hold on! I've got a cigar in my truck! I'll be right back." When you hear him in the cinematics talking while smoking a cigar, he was actually smoking that cigar in the recording studio while doing his lines. He's a real pro and I'd love to work with him again.

What kind of downloadable content will players be able to expect after the game's release?
We've already got some stuff lined up... Downloadable multiplayer maps, at first. Also look for downloadable player insignias (a limited number ship with the game). I'm not able to discuss specifics just yet, but we've got some dates in mind for when the first wave of downloadable content will come out, and it's not too far in the future.

What is the next game Relic is developing for the 360 (if any)?
We've got a lot of stuff underway right now, absolutely none of which I'm able to talk about! But it's safe to say that you will see Relic on the 360 in the future as well.

Thanks for the interview, Mr. Crook! We hope your new game sells well. Hit us back when you have another game in the creation process! :)