At THQ's Summer Games' Day held here in So Cal recently, I got the opportunity to speak with the games Lead Designer.

What is you name and position at Relic?

My name is Jeff Brown and I am the Lead Designer of The Outfit.

What is the basic story line?

The Outfit takes place during WWII and centers on the internal conflict between the two factions of the German Military. On one side, you have the regular German Army or Wehrmacht, made up of citizen recruits and career officers and on the other side; you have the Nazi SS, Hitler's handpicked Storm Troopers. It's September 1944 and a group within the Wehrmacht has attempted to assassinate Adolph Hitler.

Now flash back two weeks, you and your squad are dropped behind enemy lines to kill an escaping German General who is massacring civilians on his way out on Normandy. As the game progresses, you find out that this General is involved in this plot to kill Hitler. You are now faced with a moral dilemma. Do you help him knowing he is a bad guy or do you kill him as you were ordered to do?

Wow, that a very interesting set-up.

Yeah, I am really in love with our story, we spent a long time on it. We hired a really good Hollywood writer. He wrote the "Tuskegee Airmen", he has written for "Law & Order", "CSI", "Lois & Clark", tons of high profile TV shows.

The game is squad based shooter where you control 1 of 3 different characters and is played from the third-person view.

Right, you control a squad of 5 total, including your character, which you are able to change while in the game. JD Tyler (Sniper/Shotgun), Deuce Williams (Bazookas/Colt 44) and Tommy Mac (Machine Gun/Flame thrower) make up the three Hero characters that you can control. You are able to issue some basic commands to you squad like Assault and Suppress. In addition, each of the 3 main heroes has their own special Play's. JD has a tear gas grenade Play, Tommy has an anti-tank Play where the guys will run up on a tank with sticky bombs, ala "Saving Private Ryan" and Deuce has a melee Play.

Besides their weapons, what are the differences between the 3 main Heroes?

They differ in almost every way imaginable. Their stats are different, different armor, speeds, health.

Are the weapons set from the load-outs or can you pick-up or purchase new ones?

You do not collect them, they are given to you as you earn them and you always have the option to go back to a previous weapon.

How many can you carry at a time?

Two, you have your primary weapon which upgrades throughout the game and you have you secondary which stays the same.

The right trigger fires your weapon and the left throws grenades.

Yes, our grenades include Molotov Cocktails, Sticky Bombs, all kinds of cool stuff.

Now all the weapons and grenades are WWII based. Were not going to see laser guns and such?

Right, even though we are a fictional WWII game and were a little over the top and our Hero’s are bigger than life, it is still based in history, you are going to recognize the weapons your going to recognize the vehicles. It is a fun take on the WWII genre; it is not a history lesson.

Now you just zoomed in with the sniper rifle but you are still in third-person, it did not go into first.

Correct, we do not do first-person. We wanted to keep in that perspective. We felt it was jarring to go into first then back to third when you zoomed back out. Plus the guys look cool up close.

One of the first things I noticed when you fired up the game is that the HUD is quite clean or minimalist.

We want to give the player the most immersive experience, so most things are hidden until you need or use them. Things like your Health Meter will come up when it is low; your Re-Heat meter for your weapon, your Field Units (money) will come up when you want to buy things. You can choose to toggle on/off your mini radar and can also bring up a map.

Therefore, the game is story driven and you do have to complete missions.

Yes, the game is story driven and you do need to complete the main missions. There are at least 2 secondary objectives per mission. Completing these secondary missions, this will earn you gamer credits, which will increase your over all score on Microsoft's ranking system. Microsoft has a ranking system that shows how good of an X360 player you are. We also have Metal Opportunities, which are not spelled out for the player but are available on every level. There are 2-3 opportunities to earn metals in each level. If you run across them and solve them, you earn a Metal.

For example in the "Assault on the shoe factory" level, you come across some German traders being lined up and shot by the German SS. If you rescue them from their apparent fate, they will reward you with a Metal. Now situations like this are present in every level so you need to keep your eye out and pay attention to what is going on. There are 35 Metal Opportunities in single player and about 20 in multiplayer.

How many missions are there?

There are 12 single player missions and each one can take anywhere between 90 minutes to 3 hours depending on how good of player you are.

Are any of the missions Time Based?

No, we just do not think that is fun for single player.

Our design philosophy is that you are paying money for an entertainment experience not to get your ass kicked or loose or get yelled at. There is no way to loose our missions, it is physically impossible to loose. You can keep respawning as many times as you want to. If you want to take 60 hours to solve a mission that is fine. You paid your money for the game why should I tell you, you only get 3 lives, I am not trying to get quarters out of you. We are well beyond that.

How does the save system work?

You can save as you go, save anytime.

Tell me about Destruction on Demand?

Sure, how about I show you. So you play a game like Battlefield or Halo, pick your shooter.

Ok, the game that comes to my mind is Mercenaries. That game you choose between 1 of 3 characters and everything is destructible.

Or is it? In Mercenaries the first thing I did in that game was grab a jeep, rammed into a gate, and stopped.

Yeah, all trees are indestructible objects too. I guess Mercenaries is an Al Gore approved game. (heehee)

In The Outfit, everything is truly destructible, and we mean everything. So Destruction on Demand in our game means I decide where I want my gun emplacements, I decide when I want my vehicles, I decided when I want reinforcements and when I want a air strike to come in. As a designer, I am not telling you what area to defend or how to defend it. I am leaving it up to you.

Now you just had a gun emplacements dropped, do I need to operate it?

Nope, every emplacement comes with a guy, or you can operate if you wish.

The items that are available for these drops, do you earn or unlock more as the game progresses?

Yes, in the beginning you only able to purchase some basic vehicles like a jeep and half-track. You are not able to purchase the basic tank. As you progress through the game, you are able to purchase 9 allied vehicles and of course, you can always hijack Axis vehicles. In addition, you can drive about a half dozen civilian vehicles like tractors. Everything in our game is interactive, if it looks like you can do something with it, you can.

In multiplayer, you can man the Gunner, Driver or Passenger positions. In single player, unlike games like Halo where you can drive or shoot but not both, you choose the Gunner and if an AI squad mate jumps in the Driver spot you will then be able to both drive and shoot, using the left stick to steer and the right stick to aim.

Do you have any vehicle-based missions?

Well yes, we even have some missions that are train based. We have a full Train System, with armored train cars, artillery and troop cars. In some missions, you have to steal a train and get in that way. We have designed our game so that there is no right way to play, so in theory all our missions are vehicle based

What about Air Strikes?

(Jeff brings up an icon of a plane and positions it over a church where a number of Axis troops are hold up. A few seconds later, a huge highly detailed bomber fly's over and drops its payload causing the church to crumble into large chunks of debris)

Or I could have called in artillery strike.

The explosions are very impressive, lot's of layers to all the effects.

Yes, our effects artist Cynthia is fantastic.

So what kind of multiplayer modes will be available for live?

We have co-op through the single player campaign. 2 players can each control a hero and their own squad. 8 players, head-to-head multiplayer, its team based Allied vs. Axis. There is a defend your base capture the flag variant, deathmatch and a destruction mode in which you are cooperating to destroy the most stuff. Actually, we will be talking more about all of our multiplayer modes in the coming months. We will have lots of cool stuff.

One reasons we pushed the game from a launch title to a Q1 '06 it that we really wanted to polish the UI, user interface, so things like making it easier to control, making it easier to repair, making it easier to get out of things.

When did you begin work on The Outfit?

January 9th 2003.

How many people are currently working on the game?

That is tuff to say, I believe its 72 in-house plus some external contractors who are working on the art assets.

Being one of the first to work on new hardware is always a challenge, what has it been like working on the X360 platform?

Number one is that it has freed us up to design games we could have not done before. It is not as if you start off knowing exactly what you want to do, so you certainly have a design challenge and our gameplay has evolved a lot over the last few years. The biggest technical challenge has been with the multi-threading. Anybody that tells you its easy is lying.

No developer has told me it has been easy.

Yeah, I talk to other developers too and everybody has had the same problems we have. We do have multi-threading up and running as of this week, so we are moving a lot of the physics stuff off onto another processor. We are now seeing some major frame rate increases.

With these next gen games, it has become quite apparent that a lot more artists are need because you are able to put in so much more detail.

Yeah, before you would have one or two passes on each character, now you are having to do up to ten passes. Normal mapping, bump mapping, specular and you have dirt maps, you have all theses levels of detail that we did not have before. It has defiantly upped the art bar.

Interiors of houses and such all have to be done; it is the challenge of doing destruction like we have done it. Everything has to have an interior. (Editors note: When buildings are destroyed, they break or crumble in a realistic fashion so you actually see the interior textures etc.)

Gameplay wise it has enabled us to do some things we were not able to do before. For instance, we can have a hundred units on screen at a time at that detail level, which is unheard of on any current gen system. Look at all the nice reflections; even his watch is reflecting the sun. Not only does our hero’s cigar have fine puffs of smoke but it has small heat shimmers too.

So what other things does X360 allow you to pull off in regards to gameplay?

The Destruction on Demand feature, where you can call in vehicles, gun emplacements call in reinforcements, none of these would be possible on the current gen machines because the memory requirements are so strict. Now we can let the player do what they want when they want rather than strictly limiting when they can have things.

Not to put you on the spot but I would like to talk a little about the hard drive. A while back Microsoft asked a number of developers, which was more important to them, a HD or more, RAM. Ram one out by a large margin.

Yes, as you may know, originally, it was 256 Megs, they now have doubled that.

Well Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to answer all my questions. I thoroughly enjoyed the demo.