03/16/00

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Tucked away on a quiet road near the University of Illinois campus in Champaign, Illinois, is a rather ordinary building that happens to house some extraordinary game-development talent. Having released such games as FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2, Volition is well acquainted with the rigors of game development and what it takes to make a successful product. The company is now hard at work on Summoner, an original role-playing game based on a brand-new engine. It's an ambitious project, but one that seems well within the capabilities of the company that produced GameSpot's 1999 Science Fiction Simulation of the Year.

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Work on Summoner actually started in the summer of 1998, right after the release of FreeSpace. At that time, the entire company had a series of meetings that invited all employees to share their thoughts about what kind of project to do next. The choice of a role-playing game was perhaps surprising, as this was before the release of Baldur's Gate, which showed that there was still plenty of consumer interest in a genre some felt had begun to lose its appeal. Nevertheless, work started on Summoner and continued on during the development of FreeSpace 2. Now, Volition has two projects going simultaneously: Summoner and Descent 4, with Summoner slated for release on the PC in winter 2000/01. (The PlayStation2 version is supposed to ship this fall, in conjunction with the PS2's US debut.) Volition's director of product development, Philip Holt, and assistant producer Anoop Shekar were kind enough to take a recent Thursday afternoon to show off the role-playing game in development under their roof.

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During our visit to Volition, it became clear that the Summoner team has made tremendous progress with the game, although it is still months away from a projected ship date. The game is rapidly approaching the point where, Shekar says, "We can close the door to new content and concentrate on fleshing out and developing what we have." Through such development, the team hopes that Summoner will shine as one of the genre's revolutionary games. Doing that means realizing Volition's vision of a game that breaks new ground yet remains true to the basics of role-playing games. "Half-Life was a great game," says Holt by way of example. "But when you look at it, it's a first-person shooter based on a licensed engine." What Valve did was keep the essential elements of the action genre and change just enough of the right things, like plot and pacing, to make the game substantially different from its competitors. "The real challenge is figuring out what to keep and what to change, and how much to change the things that will be different." The Volition team hopes that when all is said and done, their efforts on Summoner will produce a similar result.

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