Without Warning

You said earlier that you only spend 10 minute chunks playing each character. Is that to keep the pace up?
Absolutely. You play the delta guys for maybe half an hour. The real action guys will give you more time, then we'll flip you to the civilians and you'll play them for less time. Tanya's really cool but there's only so much you can do. After a while it gets a bit boring. But don't forget this: you start the game with six characters; doesn't mean you end the game with six characters.

"We ran our course with Tomb Raider," is something you mentioned earlier. Where do you think it all went wrong and how has you experience from that influenced your approach to this game?
It went wrong because we tried to develop our own technology. We spent the best part of three years trying to do that and about 10 minutes trying to write the game. It went wrong because we spent too long listening to too many marketing and sales people saying you need a huge change or the press will annihilate you. And what we should have really done, and what we originally wanted to do, was to do Tomb Raider 1 on the next-generation. We wanted to go back to the fantasy, the dinosaurs.

We tried to be too clever. We went from a team of 20 to 70 with no time to prepare. Another example in Tomb Raider was we spent a lot of time on the animation but the controls sucked. This time round we've got a great control system, it's a third-person control system with the character following the cursor.

You took some technology from Core - how much of it did you use?
We took it all and used none of it. We were using and we just didn't like it. I said there's not a chance you're going to see RenderWare in this building and, of course, a few weeks later, RenderWare started turning up. So we got into the heart of it and really reworked it from the code up. I eat my hat now and admit RenderWare is great.

Given that you've got a lot of time left to finish the game, what are the main things you're going to be doing with it?
The game will be finished in a relatively short amount of time. So we are going to be tweaking it and making sure that we're not playing stealth too long, making sure we've got enough health around, that sort of thing. The game for us is 10 to 15 hours gameplay max. If I get my way, it'll be 10 max. I want you to play this game and finish it. So it's balancing that. It's very difficult for you to only watch one episode of 24. We want you to continue playing to the end, to find out what happens.

Do you think you're bringing a popular sensibility to Capcom?
Of course. They've been around for 25 years and never signed up a European developer before and here we are. And we get on really well and they respect us and we have a really great mutual respect for them. At the moment it's working really well. They've got their European side, the US side. This game is not for Japan. I mean, they'll release it in Japan but it's not a Japanese game - they'll hate it.

What can you tell us about the other game you're working on at the moment?
We've got another team up-and-running and one of the great things about using middleware is that we can get a demo up-and-running really quickly. And, yeah, we've got something, again going into a pretty chunky genre, but it's something we think we've got a nice twist for. Is there a bird in it? Not a chance.

If you could send a message to the guys at Crystal Dynamics, what would you say?
Oh, good luck. Crystal are a quality development studio, they've done some good games over the years. They're going to do what they're going to do and I hear good things about it. I can actually say that it's a chapter of our lives which we've actually closed. And it's been great to be part of Tomb Raider, to tell my kids and my friends and to name my boat after it. But I've moved on.

Without Warning will be released in September for PS2 and Xbox