Exclusive: The Suffering Q&A Feature

Great things are being said of The Suffering and most folk whoâ??ve seen code of the game have been captivated by the gameâ??s look, ambience and collection of ideas. Midway has a host of goodies lined up for 2004 with The Suffering the next one up! Derek dela Fuente, our resident psycho and ardâ?? man, spoke in depth to Richard Rouse III, Lead Designer and Writer on The Suffering.

TVG: Please summarise the story and the overall plot/objective for the player and how the game begins?

The game begins as Torque, the player-character, is led to death row in Abbott State Penitentiary, a decrepit and decaying maximum security prison located on Carnate Island off the coast of Maryland. Torque has been sentenced to die for the murder of his ex-wife and two boys, but Torque is unsure whether he is actually guilty of the crime or not. Shortly after arriving in prison, a strange earthquake rocks the island, and the power goes out. When the power comes back on, Torqueâ??s cell door has been cut open and all the other death row inmates have been viciously killed. The player is left to navigate their way through the prison, stumbling on the dead bodies of corrections officers and other inmates at every turn. In order to survive, the player must fight off the horrific creatures, which have unleashed this carnage.

TVG: Ensuring and getting the audienceâ??s interest in the Suffering is about redefining fear. Being a gritty game set in a maximum-security prison you have to have some mature and possibly extreme events â?“ but by the same token not offending. How is this done? Perhaps you can highlight a couple of â??in gameâ?? events that are both near the knuckle but also innovative to give a good mood of the game?

From the moment we decided to set the game in a prison in modern day United States, we knew we were going to have a tone that was more intense and edgy than any horror games that had come before. A prison is a brutal and horrific location to start with, one that people generally don't like to think about, let alone visit themselves. Setting a horror game there is a logical conclusion, since the tone of the game benefits from the intense setting, making the experience all the more terrifying for the player. At the same time, by using such a bleak and often misunderstood setting we realized that we would have to go the extra distance to make the experience as authentic as we could manage. It was important to be true to our very serious subject matter. To avoid making the game offensive, we would have to make every effort to keep it as authentic as possible. This meant a lot of research to make sure we weren't exploiting our setting for a cheap thrill. Instead, I think we use it to show gamers a dark glimpse of reality, despite the addition of supernatural creatures. One example of this was in trying to accurately represent the various execution methods that the game deals with. For example, the lethal injection room that the player finds looks approximately like it does in real life. We didn't always succeed in our efforts to make the prison realistic (some concessions have to be made to the limitations of our technology and the requirements of our gameplay), but we always tried, and I think that comes across in the final product.

TVG: There is lots of fighting and shooting on offer so how detailed and gory are injuries (deformation of a character)? Do characters have a number of detection points and is the whole environment fully detectable?

We put quite a bit of time into representing blood and mutilation in the game. This was done not to titillate, but to give the player a sense of the true savageness that has been wrought at the hands of the supernatural creatures that the player must fight. Each creature is themed after a different method of execution, which helps to tie them back into the harsh reality of the prison itself. When killed by creatures, the player will do various â??custom deathsâ?? that associate them back to the creature's execution methods. For example, when killed by a Slayer, the creature designed around beheading, the player's head may be chopped off. When killed by the Burrower, the creature associated with being burried alive, the player himself will be sucked beneath the ground, never to be seen again. The hope is that by including this level of violence and gore, we are reminding the player of the savagery of these various execution methods.

TVG: Tell us about the main character you assume â?“ what makes him interesting and some of the neat tricks he can do?

For me, what makes the main character interesting is that the player gets to play a big role in defining who he is. First and foremost, this is done through our â??reputationâ?? system, which keeps track of how the player plays the game. Do they try to help the friendly human characters they encounter, or do they simply kill them? Saving all of the humans you encounter isn't possible because of the intense chaos going on all around you, but there are various actions the player can do to try to make things better for the survivors. This, in turn, determines whether the player is guilty of the crime he was sentenced to die for at the beginning of the game. The player can't change the fact that Torque is a street-tough individual who is able to wield a wide arsenal of weaponry with great facility, but they can determine whether he's a just man or an evil one.

TVG: There are a number of puzzles to complete â?“ and we have been told they are not mindless - â?“ give us a small insight into one and what is the mix of action and thinking/seeking out?

We wanted to include some amount of puzzle solving in the game to make sure the play experience wasn't too dominated by action. Puzzles are quite handy for creating choke-points for the player and making sure the pacing doesn't become too monotonous. One particularly interesting puzzle, that's a number of hours into the game, involves a fire and a sprinkler system. Of course, putting a fire out with sprinklers doesnâ??t require a large amount of creativity, but in this particular case half of the pipes have broken and the water won't make it onto all of the fire, so the player has to figure out some way to re-direct the water. Then there's the added complication of the Mainliner creatures who like to spawn out of pools of water and then attack whatever they can find. So, while trying to figure out this puzzle, the player has to deal with this intermittent threat created by these lethal creatures. It keeps players on their toes.

TVG: The Suffering moves the player through a variety of different locations â?“ how specific are the locations to the kind of action and events that unfold and perhaps you can expand on your fav location in terms of its detail and ideas incorporated?

As the player moves through the game-world of The Suffering, they'll discover that a lot of the hideous creatures they encounter are tied to Carnate Island's dark history. For example, the player first starts encountering the Burrower creature, who tunnels underneath the ground, outside the rock quarry. Fifty years ago, prisoners were sentenced to hard labour and built much of the prison out of the rock from that quarry. At one point, a cave-in occurred, and the corrections officers simply abandoned the trapped inmates, assuming them dead instead of trying to save them. The Burrower, who is themed after being buried alive, is evocative of this particularly disturbing event in Carnateâ??s past. The player will also learn that, in retribution for the death of these inmates, a gang of surviving inmates lynched a number of corrections officers and, to make matters worse, skinned them alive. This is the genesis of the Nooseman, a creature who is based on hanging and appears to be skinless. One of our great aspirations with the game was to make all the parts of the game â??fitâ?? together, to have the creatures to be tied to the environments, and then to have the creatures and the environments closely tied into the story.

TVG: Stan Winston, renowned creature designer who has worked on films, has been working with the team. Can you tell us his exact input and how his expertise is manifestly obvious to gamers? (Is it more than a PR and marketing spin?)

Stan Winston served as a consultant with us on the project, and it was great to have such an experienced creature effects specialist collaborating with us, looking over our work and throwing in his ideas. We had very specific ideas as to the direction we wanted the creatures to go, and we have a number of talented character artists here at Surreal who did the initial design work. Stan and his team were an invaluable resource for bouncing ideas off and for making suggestions about what we could do to make the creatures more disturbing.

TVG: The screenshots are looking fabulous, so how have you managed to create such quality graphics? Is the game engine newly created?

The game engine is an evolution of what Surreal has used on our previous projects, but has had so many improvements that it can be considered new for this project. The technology has its roots in what players saw in Drakan: The Ancients' Gates, but has had a number of significant updates since then. We created a new portal-based rendering system that allows us to render our highly detailed indoor environments in addition to our more expansive outdoor environments. We also implemented a sophisticated material system, which allows us to have specularity and bump mapping on the PS2, something we felt was necessary for implementing believable man-made structures. And then, of course, thereâ??s all the work we had to put into getting our blood effects and other components necessary for making a great horror game, all of which are unique to this project.

TVG: How are you pulled through the game? What kind of incentive are you given? Being in prison can be very mundane!

All action-adventure games, no matter how open-ended they claim to be, guide the player through the game. Some have to use various contrivances for preventing the player from running out of the game-world. Fortunately, a prison is an environment designed to confine its inhabitants, and we found that actually worked to our advantage from a development standpoint, allowing us to force the player to go down certain paths and open certain control gates and so forth. From a conceptual standpoint, we also found that a prison was a good setting for a game. All inmates in a prison have the same objective, whether or not they are actively pursuing it - escape. In The Suffering, the drive to get free of the prison is made more intense by the hideous creatures that have turned the island into a savage battlefield. So simply surviving and getting away is the playerâ??s most obvious objective. But on a more metaphysical level, the playerâ??s goal is to find out the truth about himself. From the very start of the game, the player is driven to determine whether or not he is truly guilty of the heinous crime for which he has been sentenced to die.

TVG: Sum up the suffering in a single sentence!

Summing up two years of your work in one sentence is certainly a challenge, but how about: â??The Suffering is the most intensely disturbing fifteen hours of gameplay you are ever likely to experienceâ??. Alternately, if you like your sentences shorter, I submit this for your approval: â??The Suffering: all hope abandon, ye who enter hereâ??!

Thank you.

We canâ??t wait to get our greasy hands on the final code and if it looks and sounds as good as we are made to believe, then this could be something special!