NEW - 6/24/2010:
Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich joins GOG for $5.99.OLD:
Huge SEVEN Page article from IGN here on Freedom Force with the following people from Irrational / 2K Boston...
*drumroll*
Ken Levine, the executive producer and writer for both games;
Rob Waters, lead concept artist and art director for both games;
Dorian Hart, co-lead designer on The Third Reich and voice actor for the games;
Alex Kay, co-lead designer on The Third Reich and voice actor for the games;
and Joe McDonagh, 2K Boston's director of operations.
They discuss the Past, Present, and Future of this series.There's A LOT here, to say the least.
I'm gonna break it down in sections and note what each page talks about.
Page 1 - FF3 and Ultimate FF discussion; sales of FF and FF vs. Third Reich.Page 2 - FF broke the "No superhero games are good" curse; their love of comic books; some of the voice actors were Irrational employees.Page 3 - Characters that got scrapped and didn't make it into the first two FF games.Page 4 - Storylines they had planned for future FF games; the mod community going crazy with character-making.Page 5 - 2K Australia worked on a lot of FF; 50-50 b/t 2K Boston and Australia on FF vs. Third Reich; Multiplayer for FF games.Page 6 - More on FF's Multiplayer; more on voice-acting in FF games; their FF games on Steam; Episodic gaming.Page 7 - Conclusion of the article.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I could be quoting all day, but here's a few things worth pointing out, at least for now...
Freedom Force 3 and Ultimate Freedom Force
Ken Levine: One quick thing before we begin, can I give some description about what Freedom Force 3 and Ultimate Freedom Force were?
IGN: Sure!
Ken Levine: Basically, these are projects that we never ended up making, and I thought it might be interesting for the Freedom Force fans, because you see versions of the characters in different time periods from Freedom Force. We had a 70's Freedom Force we were going to do, we thought about doing a modern day Freedom Force, and they're all concepts of characters that were going to be in that game or updated versions of characters from the original game. So I thought it might be cool.
Chances of FF3 being made...
IGN: Definitely! So, that actually is a great segue to my first question. It's been more than seven years since the first Freedom Force and four years since the sequel, Vs. the Third Reich. Considering the sequel left open the possibility for a potential third installment, would you be willing to comment on a new installment or spiritual successor to Freedom Force?
Ken Levine: We're not currently working on anything like that. Freedom Force was sort of like the classic joy and pain experience in the sense that with the first game we did, we had such a great time on it. Rob and I, being comic book nerds: the job description was, 'go create a comic book universe.' So we got to be mini-Stan Lee/Jack Kirby there, go off it and coming up with this whole world and all of these origins and all these characters and just had a great time working with Rob on that. After that first game we ended up having some run-ins with the publisher in terms of the rights of the franchise. We ended up working that out, but that sort of delayed the second game for a long time and kept the second game from coming out until after City of Heroes came out, which I think may have eaten our lunch a bit by the time we got the second game out.
We ended up self-publishing the second game; we were a private company at the time. That meant it was a complete a labor of love and a labor of financial love as well, because John and I, the owners of the company, paid for the development and publishing of that title out of our own pocket, basically. That cost us a fair amount of money and when the game came out, it was probably a combination of -- I don't think we did enough different from the first game and it was just a little too late and too long for the sequel. It just didn't sell very well – it sold a fraction of what the first one sold. I thought it was a better game.
So, it was very tough, and I think getting enough future titles set up may be tough, but listen, we've made people give us money for stupider things before (laughs) – financially stupid, I don't think creatively stupid, but we love the franchise. It's the first franchise that we've ever created before BioShock out of whole cloth – System Shock 2 was somebody else's IP, and so it was always something that was very near and dear to us. A lot of us are hardcore comic book nerds, so I think we'd love to do it, but I don't see it happening in the very near future.
....
Joe McDonagh: But in many respects, it was a classic Irrational game at that point, wasn't it? It was very original, quixotic play to the fans. A huge critical success, but a commercial failure.
Ken Levine: Well, the first game was reasonably commercially successful: we sold around 400,000 units. For a PC game at the time it was reasonably successful. The second game sold around 40,000 units. I think the mistake we probably made, in retrospect, but I don't think that it was a mistake creatively, is that it was definitely a love letter to the 60's era Marvel comics. The Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko stuff. Sorry, probably Don Heck and Gene Colan as well. (Laughs) It was such a love letter, that for the modern audience, it may have been too weird and different, and not what they knew of comics than what Rob and I knew of comics growing up.
More on FF3 and Ultimate FF
IGN: So do you think that's the direction of the artwork and art style of Freedom Force 3 and Ultimate Freedom Force would have gone in, considering the images we're seeing of these two games? These look a bit harder edged in some ways.
Ken Levine: Yeah, the Ultimate Freedom Force, which was just a working title, was definitely that. The idea was definitely to make it more hard edged. We went back and forth – we had something that was very colorful and something that was very hard edged, but I think the idea was to make it much more modern feeling. That was a game actually that we had a buyer for, and we ended up deciding whether we were doing BioShock or that, and we ended up doing BioShock. But we actually found a buyer for it and got a good budget for it, and we just ended up not doing that game because we ended up doing something else instead. But I always wonder: would that have worked?
IGN: As a fan, can I say yes?
Ken Levine: (laughs) Well, as a fan, you tell me: Is that a story or a direction that you would have like to see the franchise have gone in?
IGN: I think that it's more in keeping with the realism of the characters, not only with the ending of Third Reich, but also what eventually happens with these character's lives. There would not only be some amount of resolution, but there's going to be some kind of changes that happen from the standard kinds of origin stories. It would seem like it could be similar to Watchmen in some ways, like the fact that they'd have to deal with the loss of allies or the weight of what they have to deal with, like losing prestige from destroying buildings while doing their job and saving people or anything else in their life.
