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BWG: The Second Encounter Part 1

Our exclusive "Black Widow Games: The Second Encounter" feature begins right now.
By Planet Half-Life Staff | April 9, 2007

It seems like just yesterday, and yet forever. Planet Half-Life presented a major exclusive with the creators of "They Hunger" called Five Days of Fear. At that time we learned so much about the game - and the developers behind it - and we were sure we'd be playing it by the end of '06. Well, that time came and went with a long, pregnant pause from our friends at Black Widow Games. We could only wonder: "What happened to Lost Souls?" Starting today, we get the answers to our questions ... all of our questions, and all of your questions too. Your patience has been rewarded. Read on, fellow gamers.

Planet Half-Life: Before we start talking about They Hunger: Lost Souls, would you be so kind as to clarify the big news event "They Hunger for Nintendo DS" that PHL published on April 1st?

Black Widow Games: This April Fool's joke was originally planned by the Sven Coop team, but instead they decided to pretend World of Warcraft was buying part of their mod. So they gave us permission to use their idea refering to They Hunger instead, and everybody we asked thought an absurd but realistic fake news would be funny and wanted to participate. Pratt told us (PHL) still didn't have any joke planned for this year and really enjoyed the idea of publishing this. Our animator Nathan simply imported old They Hunger movies (provided by Kevin "Postal" and Frasierdog from Facepunch forums) into a Nintendo DS and the result was surprisingly convincing. Gooseman (creator of Counter-Strike) gave us permission to include a declaration from him to make the story a little more believable. Since it would be impossible to get a similar permission from Valve on a Saturday, the news text was careful enough to avoid saying explicitly that Valve had any participation on this, declaring instead "it seems someone at Valve ..."

Afterwards, some people in the PHL forums actually entered into the "mood" trying to find more arguments to validate the story, although they were obviously just doing it for fun. Even after Sven (from Sven Coop) posted a few messages "explaining" how the game controls work in They Hunger DS, it never seemed like anybody was really convinced.

Nintendo DS is a great device and it would be certainly nice to play They Hunger for real on it, but unfortunately this is technically impossible. The hardware simply cannot handle the degree of complexity required by the Goldsource engine, and there's not much Valve (or anybody else) can do about this. Besides, we would never sacrifice Lost Souls production even if we had other "safer" opportunities available. Players always appreciated the innovation in our game projects and this was the main reason they were successful in the past, so it makes no sense for us to stop taking risks now and loose one of our main appeals.

Planet Half-Life: Ok, then ... so what's really going on?

Black Widow Games: Although we have never announced an official release date for They Hunger: Lost Souls (TH:LS), the truth is that our internal schedule had originally planned its release for end of 2006, but then we decided to delay it to implement further improvements.

It's important to understand there's a key difference between the original They Hunger, produced as a mod, and this new commercial game. A successful mod needs to be imaginative, very entertaining and have a good quality overall, but nobody expects a free mod to be flawless. In comparison, when someone buys a commercial game, the expectations are much higher. Players demand it to be polished in nearly every detail, and game developers have an obligation to provide this since they are getting paid to do so.

However, it doesn't help either to keep working on a game forever until it's perfect. An amazing game by today's standards will look outdated if released a couple years too late, regardless of how much more work has been added to it. There's a fine line between not polishing a game enough or spending too much time to polish it. We are confident it was the right decision to postpone the release to this year to make it better, but at the same time we are fully aware we can't postpone it any longer otherwise additional improvements won't be worth it anymore. Because of all this, nobody is more interested on releasing the best game possible, as quickly as possible, as we are.

The bottom line is, Lost Souls release is close now and (hopefully) there will be no further delays this time!

Planet Half-Life: We were starting to wonder if your long silence was a good thing or a bad thing. So where would you guys say you are now in terms of the development cycle?

Black Widow Games: Development is going very well! For instance, Nathan Fearon (game animator) has just integrated motion capture animations into the game, which makes our zombies look much more convincing and thus scarier. This is one of the improvements we were talking about, the game could be released with a more limited set of hand-created animations but the improvement in realism makes it worth the extra effort.

The lack of news about this production is neither good nor bad. We have never revealed much about our free mods before release, and we are not comfortable about hyping this commercial production either. After all, we have a very small development team and so it's better if we focus all our time on finishing the game rather than doing a lot of advanced publicity. Another reason is that we want to keep the mystery of what happens in Lost Souls and not reveal too much beforehand. A multiplayer game can afford to show a lot of content in advance and still keep its appeal, but for a single player game like Lost Souls, it would spoil the surprises and thus diminish the playing experience. For all these reasons, we rarely concede interviews during the production phase, unless someone invades our secret underground lab and extracts our answers under torture, just like PHL special forces team is doing right now.

Planet Half-Life: Ha ha! All your base are belong to us!

Planet Half-Life: The gaming landscape has changed, as it usually does, quite considerably in the time since we last spoke. Being big fans ourselves of zombie-themed games, our ears naturally pricked up when late last year Turtle Rock Studios announced the development of their new game, Left4Dead (L4D). Apparently, this game will pit teams of cooperatively-playing human gamers against giant hordes of the undead. While not a whole lot of information has yet been released, what are your team's thoughts on this title? Do you feel that you will be in direct competition with them, and what do you feel will set your game apart from theirs?

Black Widow Games: We are actually glad to have Left4Dead arriving around the same time as Lost Souls, because these two major titles based on the same zombie survival theme will probably attract much more attention together than each individual release.

As a matter of fact, the zombie genre is about all these titles have in common. L4D is a fast paced, adrenaline driven, pure action game focused on cooperation, where players have to always stick together to protect each other. If a player runs low on ammo, gets lost from his friends and surrounded by zombies, it's game over for him... but that's when Lost Souls begins.

Just like the original They Hunger series, Lost Souls is a horror game, where the player is expected to feel lonely, defenseless, and completely surrounded by zombies. Of course there's also plenty of zombie killing as the player gradually finds out how to defend himself, but this is just part of the gameplay along with exploration, puzzle solving and story telling.

With L4D and Lost Souls based on opposite premises, there's no possible comparison between these titles. Real zombie fans will certainly want to have both!

Planet Half-Life: When PHL and BWG got together a little while ago to set up "The Second Encounter", you guys agreed to answer a bunch of questions directly from our readers, so let's get right down to it!

James: Will there be many friendly NPCs to meet and perhaps help (in Lost Souls)?

Black Widow Games: Yes! You will have the chance to meet quite a few NPCs, both good and evil, along the way. We were especially careful to design them as memorable as the characters from They Hunger series, although they are not the same ones.

In Lost Souls, NPCs rarely show up fighting along with you as Alyx often did in HL2 for instance. This is a horror game, thus it's important to enforce the idea that you are on your own, nobody else out there is capable of saving you. However, friendly NPCs encountered along the way will show up asking for your help or provide some important background for the main storyline.

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