Ultimately it’s a ”fan-based game from a fan studio for fans” and explores the Jagged Alliance timeline as a prequel. It’s a great opportunity for the team to explore the backstory.
”Yeah. Kickstarter is the place to go for this type of games. Let’s just say we could hopefully get like a million dollars or one and a half million dollars to make this game,” said Thomas Hentschel Lund.
Lund is CEO of Full Control and is hopefully set to work on project of a Jagged Alliance prequel, as he’s already hard at work on a Space Hulk game. The studio is small with about a dozen or so people. Right now funding for a new Jagged Alliance rests with the fans. ”It’s impossible these days to find that kind of money loose in a publisher’s pocket for a turn-based strategy game,” he said. They hope stretch goals will entice more pledges to unlock more content.
”Yeah, so the ability to engage the fans in a Kickstarter and actually trying to make a fan-based game from a fan studio for fans instead of something that’s purely commercial driven by a marketing department – that’s a perfect chance and we hope that it gets support. But no guarantees. That’s the other side of the coin.”
Full Control doesn’t have anyone from the original team directly giving input. ”We had some of the original team contact us – primarily smaller things like translations and similar that they really would like to do more work for us. But other than that no, we don’t have any of the original people involved yet. Let’s see what’s possible once we go ahead there.”
The project will explore the origins of Jagged Alliance.
”We are going for a prequel,” explained Lund. ”We’re going to tell the story of how AIM came around and how it was founded, and by whom and why it was founded in the first place. This allows us to both introduce the founders – never been done before – and it allows us to scope things in a way that we can introduce some of the old mercenaries and go into their back-stories and pull out – say, Ivan.”
”He was a colonel in the Red Army. Why did he suddenly turn mercenary? Something like that, we can take him and make a whole side story based on that. So when you meet Ivan the first time in the game, he’s just a regular colonel and somehow during this game and the story that progresses he will jump over to your side – turn mercenary, become one of the really iconic game mercenaries and yeah, suddenly you know why.”
”So we can scope this based on the stretch goals so we can add more and more side missions based on the game based on the pledges, so it’s both an interesting way of telling a story and it allows scaling based on the amount of money that we can get,” he continued. Stretch goals came about from projects getting flooded with pledges far beyond their goal. Now they’re more or less part of the standard package when it comes to video games on Kickstarter.
Flashback will use the hybrid of real-time and turn-based play from Jagged Alliance 2 as Lund and co. weren’t that impressed with the ‘plan and go’ system from BIA.
”Top down, we’re going back into the turn based hybrid system that was in there in JA II. That’s like the core mechanics that have to be there – that you’re moving around in real time and then the once you get into the line of sight of enemies it becomes a turn-based strategy game.”
”I think BIA made a big mistake in removing that and turning it into plan and go system I think they call it. Our main pitch is that we have to bring that back, because we believe that’s where JA has its core mechanic.” As of now the Jagged Alliance: Flashback project is in ”pre-pre production,” says Lund.
Check out the full interview between Thomas Hentschel Lund and PC Gamer.
