2004 was a stellar year for first-person shooters, with cutting-edge games such as Far Cry, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2. Now in 2005, we're turning our eyes toward a new generation of games, including TimeShift, which was first revealed earlier this year. In addition to having beautiful graphics, the intriguing feature of TimeShift is that your character will have the ability to control the flow of time. Clad in a special time suit, you can freeze time, make time flow in reverse, and slow down time. Of course, this will have all sorts of applications in and out of combat. For more details, we caught up with Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch, the developer of TimeShift.

Get your gun, it's time to play around with time.

GameSpot: Tell us about where the idea for TimeShift came from. Why make a game where you can slow, pause, and rewind time? And why was the decision made to design the time powers the way they are--such as how rewinding time won't affect the players' character (that is, how it won't prevent injuries from enemy fire or relocate your character back to where you were previously to save yourself from falling, for instance)?

Matthew Karch: When we first sat down to design a new game, we knew we wanted to keep it in the first-person shooter genre. As a young team without the established reputation of some of the other FPS studios, we knew we had to come up with something that would distinguish our game from the highly anticipated shooters that were on the release schedule. We felt that great visuals, a unique art style, and a unique story weren't really going to be enough to set us apart. We brainstormed on different types of gameplay mechanics that would work well with gunplay. In a pretty short period of time we came up with time shifting.

One of our primary inspirations came from a game in a totally different genre. When I was a college student, my roommate and I were totally addicted to Madden Football. We would often sit down at 6 pm on a Friday or Saturday before going out and would end up staying home all night battling it out on the virtual gridiron. The most fun we had was using the instant-replay feature. There was nothing better than using slow motion, pause, and rewind to torture each other after a cool play. While the instant-replay feature wasn't a "time control" feature per se, the mechanic of controlling the flow of time even in a replay setting was a lot of fun. We thought that it would make a great mechanic in an action setting and would open up some pretty unique gameplay possibilities. When we started to experiment with the time-shift mechanic early on in our prototyping phase, we discovered that it was not only fun to just play around with the time-shift powers, but that they could really impact gameplay to create a pretty unique experience in the FPS genre.

Our decision to isolate the player from the effects of time control was based on our desire to let the player effectively take advantage of situations in the game that required time manipulation. We have always viewed the time-shifting abilities as superpower-like ability. If the player were affected by applying his own powers, the mechanic would not be nearly as compelling. For example, if the player needs to cross a bridge that is detonated before he has a chance to reach it, he can use reversal to rebuild the bridge and get across it or use time suspend to freeze the pieces in midair and hop across them. If the player's motion were reversed or paused when applying either of those powers, then he would never be able to cross that bridge. Most of the in-game challenges that require time shifting just wouldn't work if the player were affected by his own powers.

A logical consequence of isolating the player from the effects of the time power is that the player cannot take advantage of the power to reverse damage done to him before applying the power. If the player has taken damage but is immune from the effects of reversing time, he shouldn't logically be able to undo the damage.

GS: We understand that the team intends to make the game's challenges very open-ended so that players can solve them in multiple ways. Tell us more about how the time-based powers can be used not only to slow time to dodge bullets, but also to solve specific puzzles.

MK: The challenges that the player will face in the course of the game will generally have multiple solutions. We wanted to give the player the opportunity to think creatively about the time-shifting powers and to apply them in unique (and sometimes unforeseen) ways. Having said that, there will be certain areas of the game that require the player to apply a particular power at a particular time or face certain doom. These areas occur later in the game when the player has likely mastered the time-shifting mechanic. They also occur only when the player is certain to have the requisite energy to complete the challenge.

You will revisit certain areas, but at different moments in time.

The time powers will have applications outside of bullet dodging. We have designed opponents, weapons, and in-game obstacles that all require use of the time-shifting abilities. The player can use the time-shifting abilities, for example, to defy gravity. By jumping on falling objects and reversing them, the player can "fly" on them to the point from which they began to fall. He can also use time suspend to make otherwise fragile or unstable objects solid. For example, a wooden walkway that would certainly collapse were the player to walk on it during normal time flow freezes in time and becomes a solid object during time suspend. Even time slow has uses other than projectile avoidance. The player can use the power to slow down rapidly moving objects that he needs to pass by or through. Like I mentioned above, we have also designed opponents and weapons that work well with the time-shifting mechanic. The idea was to make the mechanic a tightly integrated element and not an add-on or gimmick. I think we have really achieved that objective with TimeShift.