JR: The "real" Violette Szabo on who the heroine is based was executed in a concentration camp - will this be addressed or will the game take a different path? Can we expect a very dark story? How closely does the game hew to history?
IM: We always emphasize that the concept of our heroine was only inspired by the “real” Violette but the whole story still remains fictional. But indeed, we will not forget to mention that this is a story on war, and not any war, but WWII, which means that enormously cruel things took place and we do not want to miss mentioning that. So, there will be many dark aspects in the story: you will see how civilians were executed in Warsaw ghetto, though we don’t cross the borders of good taste and never show those scenes.
JR: How was the visual look of the game decided upon? Is there a sort of look or way the game is trying to distinguish itself?
IM: It was our goal to create a game with intense atmosphere and expressive images. Images and music can communicate abstract concepts straight to the subconscious much more immediate then words might do. They can simplify complex coherency by providing emotional clarity. When playing the game you can tell that our team put a lot of effort into lighting and the results are very emotive.
JR: How will Velvet Assassin differentiate itself from other stealth action games? For example, say the Hitman series?
IM: First, the outline of the story and the period of its setting (WWII) are completely different. Of course, there are aspects we have in common as they are all stealth games. But at a second glance, there are more things separating us from the rest of those games, for example the composition of our game play, the design and also the purpose of Velvet Assassin: we don’t have a million different weapons with another million functions – because that is not what you need in a World War II scenario. We want to be close to reality in terms of locations and historical course of events to show people how cruel war can be and especially in this case has been. We want to give insight into all kind of soldiers’ souls and provide the gamer with empathy for all the happenings. Velvet Assassin is meant to be authentic and the gamer can easily feel this as soon as he starts the game: the composition of sound and surreal atmosphere in a realistic surrounding, the way we play with dynamic lighting and the morphine mode – all this makes the game incomparable to what already exists.
Another innovation is that we want to go back to the basics-keep it simple to be able to focus on the tactics and the strategy instead of having two billion different features for which you first have to take a special course using them. Another thing very special in Velvet Assassin is its style; there are locations and the atmosphere which look really special so that the game differs by its look extremely from other stealth-games.
If you ask our team, everybody will give you a different answer of what makes the game special: the art guys will tell you that it is the surreal atmosphere and the dynamic lighting, while the designers believe in the specialty of the character, the construction of the story itself and its historical approach. The QA prefers the huge variety of 50 different silence-kills and I myself, I love the funny and interesting dialogues and the disguise outfit with which you can sneak among the German enemies without being detected.
JR: You don’t see too many real strong female heroines in video games. Why this woman rather than a male character? How have you tried to flesh her out to make her someone the player wants to play as and guide throughout the game?
IM: As we did not want to have another standard shooter or stealth-game but wanted to do something creative, true to historical inspiration we found out about the existence of female secret agents during the time and liked the idea of having a female spy in the game because women act very differently in comparison to men and this supports our genre and our conception of the game a lot. So, in opposition to a male protagonist, Violette’s being turns out to be more subtle and stealth, more secretly, mysterious and cautious – and that is perfect for us! Moreover, the female character contributes to the topic much more than a male one, because she brings the sensitivity one needs to handle the WWII genre adequately.
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