Jagged Alliance: Flashback - Interview @ RPS

Rock Paper Shotgun interviewed CEO Thomas Hentschel Lund and team-mate Andreas about the new Jagged Alliance game that was recently announced by Full Control who acquired a license from BitComposer.

This is the first part of the interview about things like the Jagged Alliance lincense and their presence on Kickstarter next week to acquire $350K.

RPS: This new Jagged Alliance won’t be a reboot but a sort of restart, set during the Cold War and telling the story of the founding of A.I.M. What drove that decision?

Andreas: This is the area of prequels – we’ve seen lots of movies looking to tell origin stories. We thought this was a unique opportunity for us to look at the beginning of A.I.M. and to bring back some of the cool mercenaries and tell their early stories, looking at how they became who they are.

Lund: We want to look at why they became mercenaries, where they came from, why they joined this organisation. Why was all this founded? At least for me, if we were just going in and doing yet another dictator on an island story, we would instantly be trying to copy Jagged Alliance 2. Being put on the same shelf, even though that’s not what we really want to do. Being just a copy of what has been isn’t what we want to do. We want to bring something unique and a little different into the mix. And that’s the story part, where we can twiddle around and change things. Because on the other side, the mechanics and the turn-based part obviously, we’re going to see how much of JA2 we can bring back.

RPS: Presumably the Cold War setting gives you some interesting angles on some of the mercenaries in the other games. So many of them are clearly culturally and ideologically opposed, at least on paper, at that time.

Andreas: It’s also important to note that everything isn’t set in stone yet. We’re going to build on everything in the original games, but we’re also going to be listening to the fans and the modding community from Jagged Alliance2. We’re going to listen to everything that comes to us.

Lund: At the end of the day, it’s going to be about how successful can we make Kickstarter and how many features can we add, so we’ve tried to come up with stretch goals that will demonstrate that. More mercenaries, destructible environments, that sort of thing. We have to look at what we can do for the amount of money we’re asking for as a minimum – we can make a cool game but we can’t make a replacement for JA2, that has been modded for so many years. It’s impossible. But depending on success, we can add more and more, so hopefully that’s possible.