Can you please give us a update to where you are in the development circle of the game today?
Sascha Jungnickel, Creative director, Replay Studios, Hamburg/Germany:
We’re currently working on an early beta version that is planned to be finished at the End of October.
The game had a very good response at the GC Show in Leipzig in August, were you pleased with that?
Yes. Sabotage is a very ambitious project – and the version we presented at the GC showed that it will be a great game. So it’s now up to players all over the world to track the process of Sabotage.
Can you please give us some background on the team working on the game, such as what games they have worked on before?
REPLAY STUDIOS team members have worked on blockbuster titles like Hitman Contracts and Hitman Blood Money (Eidos), Gothic (Atari), Total Club Manager (EA), Spellforce 1 and 2, Legend of Kay (Jowood), the classic Realms of Arkania series (DSA, Sirtech), for Rockstar Vienna as well as on several ambitious independent titles. The team has experience with PC, XBox and PS2 development. So far Replay Studios has created two games (Crashday, Sabotage) with the in-house „Mirror“ engine and is currently evaluating multiplatform next-gen technologies.
You’re are going for a very stylish look to this game, what has been your influences, and what have you done to develop those influences in the game?
Visually we are influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies. Besides from that, we are trying to establish unique, illustrative visuals…
It’s our mission to give players a unique playing experience. In our opinion, this also should include an audiovisual world that illustrates the game distinctively.
Historically games that use a female as there main character tend to scare off gamers as they prefer to play as men, is this why artwork that you have released so far your character is has a very distinctive look, very dark and very gothic
On the one hand, players are also attracted by playing unique women. On the other hand, Violette is much more like “just a woman”. She’s a very tough special agent, going through missions that – let’s be honest – even men don’t want to go through.
The game’s main character is inspired by the true story of a real female resistance fighter female MI6 agent and heroine of WW2. How did you hear about her? And why a game based on her role in the war?
The game’s not based on anybody – it’s been inspired by a real resistance fighter. We’ve been very impressed by what she did, but we wanted to tell our own story, imagining a character we designed in a situation like that.
So we are using a tough woman as the basis, putting her in authentic locations and tell a fictional story with fictional missions.
Are any of the missions based on real missions? And which ones?
There are certain elements in these missions that are based on real incidents. For example, Violette will have to eliminate a high-ranked SS general. Therefore, she travels to Paris to track down the general at the famous Notre Dame cathedral.
At the cathedral, the general is commanding the looting of the church – dozens of soldiers are carrying out pictures, paintings and everything precious they can find to load it on trucks.
These lootings really happened, but of course we are using them as an element to tell our story without being accurate on the time and places we are using.
Violette was killed in the end of the war by the Nazis, does you your character die in the end?
We’re going to leave the end open at this point of time…=)