Cartel is the New Syndicate

RPS: So you were inspired by Syndicate not actually being remade?

Jorjani: You could say that, but Cartel is a little different than that.

RPS: So tell us a bit about the setting and the game itself.

Jorjani: Well it does take place within a futuristic world, and in that world the cartels do have the power to control entire nations. The cartels are more or less megacorporations, and the main goal of the game, of course, is to ensure that your cartel ends up on top. The “feel” of the game is based in that 1980s concept of the mega-corps: OmniCorp in Robocop, for example. The giant corporation that is all-encompassing and evil, but thinks it is doing humanity a favour. We were a little worried that the name had some drug connotations, but it is still actually about the conflict of big corporations.

So yes, you eliminate the other cartels by doing missions, for which you can decide on your strategies. The game is therefore structured in two parts. You have the action mission part and then the part that takes place between missions. On missions you control a squad of elite soldiers and specialists who are controlled RTS-style. There are a lot of different mission types you can send these guys on, such recon and exploration missions, sabotage missions, retrieval missions, assassinations missions, and so on. These are the kinds of things we are currently experimenting with in terms of making the variety of missions interesting.

Of course you don’t just send your agents in blind, either. You have kit them out, customise them and their weapons, and it’s all about giving you control of your gang. You are responsible for making sure the teams are suited to their mission.

What I should also mention at this point is that although events in the missions will be scripted as part of a campaign, we are also expecting to make the missions themselves dynamic. So if you are sent to assassinate someone he might take his car on one run through, or go to the public transport terminal on another. Our missions will always have parameters that change. A large part of the game will about planning ahead, but also adapting to changes in the mission. You’ll need contingencies.

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RPS: So what are you guys up to?

Jorjani: Well we’re making PC games! That’s what we do, right? And we watch the rest of the industry very closely while we’re doing that. We’ve of course noticed that there’s a trend that’s going on with AAA publishers (and actually the industry as a whole), where some companies are moving towards bigger and bigger AAA games, and others are going more and more casual in the Farmville direction. It definitely feels like a polarisation of where the companies in our industry are going. We feel, though, that the middle road, what Cliff Bleszinski says is the “dead” middle class of gaming, is where we are and have always been – cerebral games for smart gamers – and that is where the PC shines. We can make whatever we want, without restrictions.

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