Amid a busy first morning of Game Developers Conference, we got a chance to sit down with a few of the team members driving Midway's upcoming sandbox title This is Vegas. Surreal Software is no stranger to hit games, having worked on 2004's The Suffering. The team's been hard at work since on the upcoming game, an open-ended spoof of sin city's excessive decadence. What happens in Vegas certainly won't stay there, as studio head Alan Patmore, creative director Andre Maguire, and senior producer Chris Klimecky were quick to point out.



GameSpy: What's under the hood of This is Vegas? Considering that it's a Midway title, it's safe to assume that we'll be seeing visuals that utilize the Unreal 3 engine, but what else is there?

Alan Patmore: It's what we've called "an open-world version of Unreal 3." The big advances that we've made on the engine are the ability to stream a lot of data at once: we support a very large, open environment. We have a tech-sharing program at Midway that gives us a great advantage; it's allowed us to create a great deal of new techniques with Unreal. We're using Havok for all of our physics: cars, breakables and destructibles, as well as ragdoll physics for when characters fall down, that sort of thing. But it's really with Unreal that we can shine and create an even higher level of fidelity for open-world games. The level of detail that we can show off, especially in outdoor areas, is incredible. Another thing that differentiates us from other open-world games is the way that visuals transfer from exteriors to interiors, which Unreal does incredibly well. We're really happy with the Unreal toolset at this point.

GameSpy: How many iterations have you gone through before reaching this stage of the product?
Patmore: It depends on the mechanic. Making an open-world game like this is deeply challenging. With any game in this genre, you've got specialized types of challenges. One of them was Unreal, so we had to build the engine that would support this sort of open-ended world, as we just discussed, and have been iterating on for two-and-a-half years. It's stuff such as how to get information and data off the DVD faster. In terms of the pillars of the game, which are "Fight, Gamble, Drive, and Party," we've gone through probably four or five iterations of those mechanics.

An example would be the cheating and advantage play. On its own, the main idea probably doesn't seem that appealing in an open-world game, so we wanted to put our slant on it. Fighting was a little more known, thanks to our experience in games like The Suffering and even back to Drakan, but we needed a few iterations to those mechanics. The world, overall, is something that we're constantly taking a look at and tweaking and improving throughout the production process. The team has done a really good job with sticking to their guns and nailing lots of features the first time around.
GameSpy: How many trips has the team taken to Las Vegas for the sake of authenticity?

Patmore: I went down four or five times with a few different groups. The environments team went there on three or four research expeditions, and myself and some senior people on the team went there specifically to talk to casino management. We wanted to know what Vegas is really like; it's an interesting perspective. Their perception of Vegas is different than what the public perceives of it. It's really becoming the party playground of America. They're moving away from gaming and more toward entertainment. They're supporting more of the party lifestyle, which generates more revenue through bars and clubs. Their concept is more about getting people in the door with gaming, getting them to eat dinner and go clubbing in the resort, and they never leave. It's a completely bookended experience, and it's a direction we're trying to take with the game. You really have the ability to do whatever you want to do within that casino experience.