BlackSite: Area 51 - Interview

What other titles in the genre would you say you've taken elements from?

Wood: We're all big fans of the genre in general - we play Half-Life, Halo and those games. I think there are certain things in terms of targeting and the way that the analog controls feel that are going to feel very familiar to you if you're a first-person shooter fan. Where we're spending our extra time is in the story, the fiction and the squad controls.

We've also introduced player morale where your squad actually gets affected by how you do as a player. So if you're in the middle of a fire fight and you're doing really well and you're really accurate with your targeting, then your team's going to feel really good, really supportive and they're going to do better. But if you start missing your target and playing badly, the squad is going to pin back, find more cover and maybe miss their targets here and there.

How much effort have you put into making the environments relatable and believable?

Wood: Oh very much - that's the key to our design, the key to the fiction. You start off in Iraq: you're actually on the battlefield in a war that's happening today. You and your squad mates are there fighting the war and you see some things that are kind of strange, which then ties you into the fiction that brings you back to the United States to investigate a strange town where some being has been found.

There are some parallel elements to what you saw in Iraq and what you see in America and that kind of ties those elements together. We were kind of toying with that idea of what it'd be like if there were alien elements involved in what we face today as a society. It's kind of fun to play with those ideas a bit.