GameSpot speaks with Argonaut's Jez San

Microsoft showed off two games for the Xbox console at the early January CES show in Las Vegas. One of them was Oddworld: Munch's Odyssey from Oddworld Inhabitants, and the other was Malice: A Dark And Comic Fiery Tale from UK-based Argonaut. Argonaut has been deeply involved in the video game industry since it supplied the super FX chip for the SNES. Since that time, Argonaut has supported virtually every console with projects that range from the successful Croc series on the PlayStation and Red Dog on the Dreamcast to licensed games such as Alien Resurrection, Aladdin, and The Emperor's New Groove. With its Xbox game Malice, Argonaut hopes to further establish itself as one of the premier European development studios. The company is currently in negotiations with several publishers regarding Malice, and plans to have the game ready for the launch of the Xbox console.

Malice strings together massive environments within a gameplay system that involves platformer-style sequences, puzzles, and action. The game's lead character, Alice, will transform into four different characters through the course of the game. All the while, she will have access to such weapons as the mace of clubs, the clockwork hammer, and the quantum tuning fork. Additionally, Alice will be able to master the secrets of five elements and learn various magic spells, including giant root quake, rain cloud, tsunami, water walk decode, mimic, skeleton shield, and boulder wave. The missions in Malice are just as unique and diverse. In the game, players will have to save a tree god from assassination, fight elemental bosses, crack the codes to the so-called clock-worked elementOmeter, rescue the bird resistance from the murder-of-crows clan and their travelling mech army, and vanquish the nuclear menace of the fire god known as Malice Incarnate.

To find out more about Malice and Argonaut's next-generation plans, GameSpot sat down with Jez San for an in-depth discussion of the game, the pros and cons of the Xbox, and his views on the future state of the gaming market.

GameSpot: What are the core aspects of Malice?

Jez San: Malice: A Dark & Comic Fiery Tale was inspired by everything from Monty Python and Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas to dark comics like Batman and even darker fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood. Malice displays some deep, dark, and very warped fantasies combined with awesome visuals and novel gameplay. It involves surreal characters and plotlines.

GS: What was the biggest problem you faced when you started on Malice?

JS: Malice originally started over two years ago on an earlier--much less powerful--platform. So, luckily we had copious amounts of design work already done on the ideas, characters, storylines, novel gameplay concepts, and such. However, we were very constrained by what kinds of gameplay we could achieve on that original platform. So, when we heard about the Xbox specs, we decided it was worth the switch, and we started early in 2000 completely from scratch with a new engine. But we retained the creative concepts and gameplay ideas that we had invented so far, without being bogged down by what the previous hardware was able, and unable, to do. We did keep a small amount of legacy gameplay code that we had come up with. We've worked for many years on character-based game engines, starting with the Croc engine. So, with the Malice engine, we tried hard to retain the upward compatibility of the original gameplay concepts that we had developed so far but built this into completely a new rendering engine with new music, collisions, and such.

GS: And the biggest joy in developing Malice?

JS: The biggest joy was seeing it all come together, which happened quite recently, too. We had game designers building levels for over two years, together with artists and animators making characters move. And we had this new real-time lighting and rendering technology that hadn't been seen before in a game. All of a sudden, only a month or so ago, it all came together nicely. Those are the working levels that you have today, which were shown at the recent Xbox press launch.

GS: You've obviously worked on the project for quite some time now. What can you say about development on the Xbox console?

JS: Originally, it was quite challenging to develop on a machine that you do not own. Of course, we had high-end PC's, so we've been using those to emulate what we might be able to do on an Xbox. But we're still left feeling that we have barely scratched the surface, because the Xbox is much more powerful in the 3D graphics department than any PC or console you can buy today.

GS: Where are you currently standing in the development of Malice?

JS: We're developing Malice on a fast track so that it can ship as a launch game on the Xbox at Christmas 2001, but that depends a lot on when we get final development systems. These are expected sometime in mid-2001. We've got seven development teams at Argonaut, and all of them have between 15 and 25 top-notch people. Malice is currently the largest project in the building, and it may well get even larger to maintain the Christmas ship date.

GS: What would you say is the biggest strength of the Xbox console when you compare it with the competition?

JS: There's no question--there has never been a machine, let alone a game console, that has been this powerful. We've taken the task of completely using this power by building a brand-new engine designed from scratch to take advantage of the power in order to deliver a game experience (not just visuals) that people haven't played or seen before. This is unlike the strategy of many of the Xbox developers' games that we've seen so far. Most people think that if they just throw more polygons at the problem, it'll somehow make their Xbox game look and feel much better than their PS2 or PlayStation version of the game. How wrong they are.

If you compare it with a DC, architecturally, they were born from the same parents--both based on the PC architecture with PC graphics acceleration technology. However, since they are vastly different generations, there is probably a 10-times uplift in performance on the Xbox. If you compare it with the PS2, the CPU is much more powerful and the graphics chip is a few orders of magnitude more powerful.

Comparing it with a GameCube is hard because we don't know the final specs. But if I were to speculate, I'd have to say that the GameCube will be easier to program for, simply because it's less powerful and less programmable than the Xbox or PS2. This should mean that early GC games will be able to demonstrate the power of the system very well, but that later GC games won't progress much compared with PS2 and Xbox games. Both of those consoles have enormous latent power that will take years of experimenting to eke out. I'd say, in three years' time, when everyone knows how to program for the GameCube, the Xbox, and the PS2, the pecking order will be somewhat different than it is today or later this year.

GS: And the biggest weakness of the Xbox?

JS: The machine sets the bar so high for what it can do that we, as developers, are expected to attempt to use it well. This means that we have to deliver amazing gameplay and superb art and animation in the same amount of development time as we have done on previous machines. The enormous workload of creating art on a machine that can display good art means that instead of just designing new geometry and textures, you also have to design bump maps and specularity/gloss maps. Particularly with our new engine, you have to design lighting and set designs the way that movie and stage people do it. Our lights cast glorious shadows across the entire world from every object and character onto every other one, including self-shadowing.

GS: Do you have any plans to include online gaming options in Malice?

JS: Malice: A Dark & Comic Fiery Tale is not an online game. We want to do the best damn single-player game that we can. If we can achieve even an ounce of what made Zelda great, then we got close to what we wanted. There are other games being developed at Argonaut that are multiplayer games, but the penetration for broadband has not yet reached the installed base where we feel comfortable that we can develop a rich, story-based, visually compelling character game like Malice without more compromises than we'd like at this stage. However, I'm sure that we will get there in the near future--maybe for the sequel.

GS: Can you talk about your other upcoming Xbox games? Do you find the voice-recognition devices interesting for use in a Xbox game?

JS: We are already working on a game that incorporates voice recognition. I can't say more than that at this time.

GS: Can you say any more about other Xbox games you have in development?

JS: We have several. Some of the footage was intertwined on the Xbox demo reel that Microsoft released late last year. The closing shot of a girl with psychic powers stopping a missile and returning it to the sender was from another cool game we're working on, called Orchid.

GS: What do you think the most interesting part about the Xbox is from a technical point of view?

JS: How programmable it is--a programmable, fast Intel CPU with a parallel floating point vector unit, programmable vertex lighting, and programmable shaders. For the developers who are technically savvy enough to be able to make new hardware sing, this is an awesome machine.

GS: How do you see the video game market a year from now?

JS: A year from now, the PS2 will have shipped 10-15 million units and games will have started to come out that really take advantage of the machine--duh, like running at 60 frames per second. And the Xbox probably will just have shipped--if they stay on schedule, which no video game console company has ever done. So, I don't suppose that the Xbox will have sold enough to make a difference at that point in time. Ask me what the video game world will be like in 2 or 3 years and that's a much more interesting question.

By the way, I do not think it is likely that Nintendo will ship the GameCube by Christmas 2001, because they have a very strong policy of not releasing a new piece of hardware until Miyamoto-san has gotten his best games ready. And since he is very proud and incredibly talented, I expect he will need a little more time to show off his awesome new games on the new hardware. So, even if they could ship hardware by then, they will probably say--at the last minute, of course--that they have decided to wait until there are more great games at launch. Microsoft, on the other hand, has contracted with numerous third-party developers, of varying capabilities, to get launch games developed. Some games won't be the right quality in time for launch and will need more time, but some will make it. Of those, some will be great. I expect they will have a strong launch lineup. And of course we'll have Malice there, at launch, and we hope that we can show what can be done on the Xbox that can't be done easily on other consoles.

GS: Jez, with Malice, and your other Xbox projects keeping you busy, do you ever sleep?

JS: In the daytime, maybe? And I don't show up in pictures or reflections. (laughs)

GS: Thanks a lot for this extensive discussion. Good luck on Malice and your other upcoming projects.