Can you talk about the research you did for the settings in the game?
Undoubtedly, to understand Fuhrer we read, listened, watched records with his speeches, read «Mein Kampf» which has been officially forbidden in Russia for many years. We learned dozens of facts and materials about every person you can meet in the game. We’ve studied books written by fellow accomplices of Fuhrer, his adjutant, generals, etc. We even examined usual letters home written by soldiers, officers, their diaries and so on. We were interested in atmosphere of those years, and what people of that epoch lived with.
If to speak about the game environments, in addition to descriptions of interior in memoirs we also watched large number of chronicles to ensure deep immersion into the atmosphere of that tragic period of time.
The screenshots we've seen so far are very impressive, was graphical fidelity one of the goals of the project or did things just end up that way?
As mentioned before, the quality of the game was extremely important for us because we wanted all the players who tried SoF to remember it. Graphics is one of the features of our game. We knew that it’s not only about the common atmosphere, filling the game with the huge number of details, even small but very authentic ones – we wanted to add some original depths to the game.
For example let’s concern the interiors. You can imagine that chronicles usually have a bad quality. Therefore, we have noted there just exact models of furniture, and then we’ve designed the in-game models based on photos from the auctions’ catalogues with authentic examples of furniture of those years.
Pictures from auctions are colored, they come up with big resolution and usually show the furniture from different perspectives.
This approach has helped us to achieve the great refinement of picture from the artistic point of view. Regarding the historical accuracy, we’ve shown all the models to the experts, and they approved them.
We do not have our primary target to follow the details of symbolic and military rank signs. We’ve concentrated rather on reflecting the details of sewing and types of material of every kind of uniform. You know: the deeper and longer the war was, the cheaper the most part of uniform and additional equipment of the Third Reich became. In the beginning of the war the costs of the uniform producing have reduced one time per 2 years, but closer to the end it reduced almost every month.
So, these small items and details make our game small but still interesting encyclopedia.
How do you balance historical accuracy with coming up with an interesting plot? Were there things that you had to gloss over for plot reasons or not?
Yeah, from the beginning we have faced with a dilemma: where we should stop showing facts and start making the game and gameplay. But we’ve understood what to do quite fast – we’ve just realized that working with facts did not prevent us from making the gameplay.
During the whole game the gameplay process works like immersion into historical facts and reality without any conflicts with them. Of course, some episodes of the game are specially invented. I mean, they are not based on any real events, but they are still not crossing historical “borders”.
However, I have to point out the ending of the game. There we’ve allowed ourselves some more fantasy and intrigue comparing to the whole game. We think that first of all the game has to be a game :-).
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