Space Siege - Preview @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer  has posted a lengthy preview of Gas Powered Games forthcoming space-themed action rpg, Space Seige, delving into Chris Taylor's philosophy on his new game, as well as some of the differences from his past Dungeon Seige series:

 Fresh from developing real-time strategy love-fest Supreme Commander, Gas Powered Games and its charismatic boss, Chris Taylor, are dragging the Siege series into a science fiction setting - and taking the opportunity to rewrite the rule-book in the process...

...Space Siege, then, is less like Lord of the Rings and more like Aliens - indeed, the whole feel of the game is that of an action movie. Lead character Seth Walker is a quintessential action hero, a warrior who sets out to save humanity from an alien menace... And unlike Dungeon Siege's characters, Walker will be doing all his saviour stuff alone.

This, to some extent, is an even bigger departure than the move to a science fiction environment. Space Siege is a single-character action RPG, a complete reversal of Gas Powered's multi-character approach to Dungeon Siege - which, at the time, was considered to be one of the most unusual and innovative aspects of the series...

...Other aspects of the action RPG genre fall by the wayside like confetti as Taylor explains Space Siege to us. The game eschews the concept of experience points in favour of the aforementioned cybernetic upgrades; Taylor dismisses the experience system as "old school".

In fact, he dismisses a lot of things as being old school; the original design, he says, called for many different types of parts to be pieced together to make cybernetic upgrades. This, too, was "old school", and the team decided that people don't want that level of detail to stand between them and the fun combat sections. Instead, the game now sports one generic resource, "parts".

Game Over screens, too, are "old school". Instead, the game will sport regular health stations scattered throughout the levels, and when you die, you respawn at the last station you visited. Sound familiar? Taylor makes no bones about the similarity with Bioshock's Vita Chambers - a lot of Gas Powered's decisions, he says, were confirmed by Bioshock's popularity....

Indeed, there's a feeling that Taylor has had something of a Road to Damascus experience - and Space Siege is the result. He's open and honest about his belief that the hardcore market for games is diminishing, and believes that what consumers want now is a fun "interactive entertainment" experience, rather than a traditional "videogame"...

...Part of Taylor's new approach, then, is putting more action into the action RPG. Players in Space Siege can mix and match tactics from traditional RPGs and tactics more familiar to players of action games ... Systems like clever enemy AI, fully 3D environments...and realistic physics are being imported en masse from the FPS genre into Space Siege.