Late Sunday night, FiringSquad got a chance to chat via phone with Tom Mustaine, the newly named head of the Cyberathlete Professional League's plans to develop their own multiplayer first person shooter entitled Severity that would be made especially for pro gaming tournaments. Mustaine himself has had long standing ties to the CPL and was one of the first people that CPL founder Angel Munoz consulted with when Munoz first started forming the CPL over 10 years ago. Munoz and Mustaine had discussed creating a game made especially for tournaments for some time but after Mustaine departed from Ritual Entertainment he and Munoz decided to move with their plans for the game that they decided to call Severity.

Mustaine told us that he already a group of about 10 team members working on Severity and plans to expand that team to about 20 members in total. The game development studio for Severity will be based in the CPL's home base on Dallas (the studio itself does not yet have a name pending trademark searches and approvals). He also told us that the game will use id Software's Quake 3 Arena's networking system as its basis and a mix of id Software based Quake 3 graphical rendering along with refinements and improvements on their own. Mustaine said that Severity will be able to run on older PCs yet still support high end graphical features for people who have higher performance PCs. The game will also be coming to consoles and Mustaine told us he is interesting in talking to Microsoft to have Severity support Live Anywhere with the idea of having PC and Xbox 360 Severity gamers play each other.

Mustaine isn't revealing much about the game itself at this stage but he did tell us that the game will be a mix of modern day and futuristic themes in terms of weapons and level settings. While the game will not have a lenghty single player experience except maybe for tutorial levels, he did say they did plan for AI bot play for people to practice offline. Mustaine said they have already spoken with a number of publishing partners for Severity but that nothing has been signed yet. One thing they are looking for in terms of a publishing partner is a way to support a game with new features and content well past the game's release to stores.

Of course, creating a game for pro gaming tournaments means of adding more features that will make the game better not just for the players but also for the spectators. In addition to support for tournament ladders and detailed stats for players, Mustaine told us that Severity has plans to expand its options for spectators, including in-game cameras that can be controlled by commentators and finding ways to display important stats to the spectators in order to get them more fully involved in the matches. Mustaine compared what they wanted to do to how professional poker matches became a huge draw among the general public thanks in part to how TV had commentators and stats for the poker matches. As far as Severity's game modes, Mustaine told us that they are planning to have modes with different player speeds, different game physics and different weapon load outs.

Mustaine was quite animated while talking with us about their plans for Severity and while it's still in its earliest stages of development he told FiringSquad that this project is his dream game. Currently plans are to release a public PC demo of Severity in time for the CPL's Winter Championships in December 2007 with the full game launching in mid 2008. The CPL will use Severity for tournaments but it will not be its exclusive game. The CPL also won't prevent other gaming tournaments from using the game if they choose. We hope to get more info on the plans for Severity in the months to come.

Blog + Share: Digg • Del.icio.us • Reddit • SU • furl • More: