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SHOOTING FROM THE HIP
Project Offset brings its maverick approach to MMO's
When Project Offset and Red 5 announced their upcoming plans to collaborate in developing MMO's, the buzz and excitement within in the gaming community was barely containable. Everyone wondered, could this be the dream team everyone has been hoping for? The folks at Offset, originally the brains behind S2 Games' critically acclaimed Savage, and Red 5, a team of developers who helped foster the success of Blizzard's ubiquitous World of Warcraft, could be the crew that leads gamers into the next generation of MMO's.
While Red 5 have garnered much of the attention lately, LQGaming Services: wanted to take a closer look at the people behind Project Offset, the team who, by sheer ingenuity, have enhanced the quality and efficiency of game-design tenfold with their Offset Engine.
We spoke with Project Offset's Technical Art Director and spokesperson Rod Green about the Offset Engine, their coming collaboration with Red 5, and their vision of game development in an exclusive interview:
LQGaming Services:: Let's start from the beginning. Why did Sam McGrath, Travis and Trevor Stringer, who received such acclaim for developing Savage at S2 Games, leave to start Offset?
Rod Green: It's pretty simple really; they just wanted to start a company to make a kick arse game. Being just employees they were limited to how much influence they could have so they decided to break off and make it the dream happen.
"It's pretty simple really; they just wanted to start a company to make a kick arse game."
LQGaming Services:: Understood. Sometimes to really get things done you have to throw off the shackles of "The Man." But, was your goal to create a new game with "Project Offset," or was the original plan to create a development tool to license to companies such as Red 5?
Rod Green: The goal has always been to create an epic FPS game. We developed the engine in such a way that it will allow us to develop quickly and expand the features as needed. As it turned out there are a lot of other companies who are interested in an engine that has these traits, so we, quite unexpectedly, received a lot of interest to license the engine externally.
LQGaming Services:: Necessity, the mother of invention, really seems to have paid off. So, what were some of the limitations of earlier MMO development engines that you worked to overcome with the Offset Engine?
Rod Green: Every part of the engine was developed with the idea to support the creation of a huge amount of content and to render these assets with the highest cinematic quality utilizing the most efficient real time techniques possible.
MMOs are massive in nature and so our engine and tools facilitate this development. As the game development industry progresses, these large team sizes we are seeing will give way to more efficient tools and methods and thus reducing the burden of overstaffing. This is where smaller independent teams can adapt to these techniques and deliver the content needed to succeed.
LQGaming Services:: Was streamlining the development process something Offset had to do because they had limited resources at the start, or was this the plan from the beginning?
Rod Green: It's always been the plan - we don't believe that you need 80 man teams to create next-gen games as long as your art tools and your pipeline are efficient to allow fast iteration on the content.
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