White Gold Interview (con't)

FiringSquad: What kinds of weapons and vehicles will the player have to use in the game?

Deep Shadows: There will be more than 20 different types of carried weapons, from knife and pistol to grenade launcher and portable SAM. But you’ll find also some heavy-duty military stuff like gun emplacements, tanks, attack choppers and so on. Taking into consideration the wishes of many players, we've decided to make new types of weapons and equipment, including exotic arms and modern armor.
You can upgrade most weapons - improve accuracy, clip size, rate of fire, reloading time. Also, you may fit some of your guns with silencers, optic and laser sights and the like. All this costs money or requires various skills, of course. Many upgrades will be visible to you when you carry the weapons.

There will be a multitude of items, from simple food and drinks, and to mystical Indian artifacts and some high-tech gizmos. Most of them will be either entertaining or useful.

You can control different kinds of vehicles, starting with compact cars and to big planes and ships. Naturally a significant part of the game takes place on the sea. All types of vehicles, furniture, objects, piles and some types of buildings work with the physics engine. So all of them can be destroyed, and moreover, usually they have a zonal damage system.

FiringSquad: What sort of enemies will the player encounter in White Gold?

Deep Shadows: More often than not, these will be the troops and members of different factions, from communist guerrillas to mafia hitmen. But all of them will be very intelligent and extremely difficult to subdue. They will have a lot of reactions like straight attack, outflanking, tactical retreat, suppressive fire. They can throw grenades and request reinforcements, they can also encircle you to attack from the back.

Clearly opponents from different factions will have varying weapons, equipment and clothing. By the way, it will be possible to take these as trophies after winning the fight. But it won’t be too easy to achieve. The enemies can attack alone or in groups, they will use military vehicles and heavy guns. Some of them are masters of hand weapons. Probably it would be a clever idea to keep good relations with at least some factions, then you’d be able to get help from them too. Really smart players could go through a bigger part of the game without any bloodletting at all.

Besides humans, there will be a lot of hungry fauna specimens preying around. You may find them problematic, and not only for your mountain hikes or jungle trips, but also in sea and for underwater missions. There will be some secret opponents, but we’d rather not tell anything about them just yet. But we can promise they will be quite unusual for a modern setting.

FiringSquad: How does the game's RPG elements work and how do they influence gameplay?

Deep Shadows: The main elements of RPG in the game are perks which help the player to do the quests and progress through the plot. The system for developing the character is based on them. When you get to another level, you’ll have an opportunity to receive a new one, or you can upgrade the ones that you’ve taken already. In White Gold, you will see various perks that touch almost all aspects of in-game activity. Focusing on a set of them, different players will improve their characters in a certain direction much more than in other ones. They will be able to create a hero that is a master of weaponry and nothing else, or they will have one that is good in running, jumping, diving and so on, but won’t be able to do anything against a machine gun nest. The main part of the character stats is quite typical for any RPG - life points, armor, weapon damage, encumbrance, etc.

Accomplishment of quests and communication with NPCs are two other RPG elements that have a lot of influence on the gameplay.