Introduction

Developed by: Bioware
Published by: Interplay
MDK2 Official Page: http://www.interplay.com/mdk2/
Estimated Release: Late 1999

Time to get Hectic again

Editor's note: There's a lot of hoopla over MDK2 - they've got a hot developer in Bioware, who are better known for their work on Baldur's Gate than they are for 3D games. Are they up to the task? All preliminary indications show the answer is a resounding yes. Our man on the spot, Jakub Wojnarowicz, has scored a massive interview with Bioware's Greg Zeschuk, who's been very forthcoming with the answers to our game of ten million questions. Firingsquad's questions are in bold, while Greg's answers are in normal text. On with the interview!

Tentacles or wires?

Firingsquad: Bioware is not known as a 3D action game developer - what sorts of fresh insights can you bring to the genre?

Greg: One of our greatest strengths at BioWare is the development of stories and characters. We've also got quite a few nutty individuals at BioWare who want to make an entertaining and humorous game. The end result is that we're not approaching MDK2 as a traditional action game but instead making a humorous, action adventure game with lots of story and character development. We feel these qualities are lacking from most action titles.

Firingsquad: Is autoaim still in, or will mouselook be in the game?

Greg: MDK2 still features autoaim. Kurt's sniper mode does not feature autoaim since the player has to carefully direct Kurt's aim. We're also exploring a couple of other twists with directional weapons (e.g. flame-throwers) for the characters that would not use autoaim.

Looks spooky

Firingsquad: If it's mouselook, how will it be done on Dreamcast?

Greg: At the current time we're using the analog hat/stick to do mouselook on the Dreamcast. We're fairly happy with the result but we still have to do some significant tweaking. We're considering giving the player a variety of controller options on Dreamcast. Controls will be fully configurable on the PC.

Firingsquad: Tell us about the graphics engine - hardware (OpenGL) only? Have you reconsidered Glide, Direct3D?

Greg: We're using OpenGL as our primary development API ­ we've been using it for years. We're likely going to do some additional API support a little later in the development cycle depending on card support issues. Our graphics code is very well localized so it's not hard to change APIs. We had a Glide version working a while back, mainly for kicks and to prove it was pretty easy to port the code.