Last May, during E3, I saw kill.switch and almost immediately kept walking towards Soul Calibur 2. As much as I love a good third person shooter, I was already at third person overload, with games like SOCOM II, Syphon Filter 4, and Rogue Ops all around me. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to atone for my sins by giving the game a go later on in the show, and I'm glad to have done so. Showing us the game was Namco's Alvin Muolic, the creative mind behind the game, and as if that wasn't enough, a member of our The Next Level community. I recently had the chance to hold him at gunpoint and ask him a series of questions regarding the game. I call it a "Question and Answer Session," but you may call it "...At Gunpoint, By AFX."

Who are you and what are you doing here? And by that I mean, “Mind telling us a bit about you and what you do?”

Not at all. My name is Alvin Muolic. I’m one of the people behind kill.switch. My official title at Namco Hometek is Associate Producer. Depending on whom you ask, I apparently don’t do a lot of much…

Seriously, I do indeed do a lot of something. To summarize what my role is here, I’ll just state that I’m involved with anything and everything having to do with the kill.switch IP. This includes developing the fiction/story, the characters, and the setting that the game takes place in.

It’s a pretty exciting and rewarding job. We get to wear a lot of hats here. In the past few months, I’ve written the screenplay/recording script, hired out some of our very talented external contractors to visualize and animate the story, and worked with a talent agency to cast the actors. Recently, I was down in Hollywood doing voice directing. At this moment, I’m currently doing audio editing and putting most of that VO material together. Soon, I’ll be writing the manual. I also make sure that the team gets fed.

That a good enough description for you?

What other games have you worked on and in what capacity?

Before joining the kill.switch team, I was the associate producer on Dead to Rights, another Namco Hometek title. However, in comparison to what I do now, my focus was a lot more on the management side of things than the creative. DTR was an excellent learning experience for me on both the management and creative end.

I won’t mention what projects I worked on before that, but I’ve done quite a few. All I can say is that I was young and needed the money. I’ve been in the industry for about over 10 years now, with 8 of them in R&D. I started in consumer service, moved into QA, and finally entered R&D as a level designer.

It’s been quite the ride.

We'd like to know about your first gaming experience. What moment started you down this road?

For me, it was a combo Atari Breakout/Video Pinball console my parents brought home back in the early 70’s. I remember playing more of Breakout than I did Video Pinball, trying to beat Mom’s high score. This was a little before the VCS/2600 came out, which they got for me as well. I also can’t forget to mention the quarters spent in many an arcade, Round Table Pizza, or movie theatre.

Other than the games you've worked on, what's the last game to really suck you in?

I’ll have to confess that I can’t really answer this one that well. The last few months have been a blur to me in regards to everything. I do purchase and play a lot of games (you should see the collection), but the past few months have been pretty busy as we’ve been trying to wrap up kill.switch over here. To that end, I can’t say that if I can recall any recent game really sucking me in. The only game that sticks out with that type of effect in my life at all is Street Fighter II.

If you really want to know, here is a list of random games that I spent more than two hours playing in the past few months: Dynasty Warriors 4, Splinter Cell, NBA Street Vol. 2, DOAXBV, Burnout 2, Soul Calibur II, Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh! (GBA), Frodo (a C64 emulator for the GP32), Ultimate Muscle, and Culdcept II (PS2/DC). Did I mention beach volleyball?

I’m current playing Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic, for those of you keeping score.

Do you like Shenmue? Please say yes.

Um, sorry, no. I appreciate what Yu Suzuki and his team have done, but I just couldn’t get into the game. I do dig VF4, though. (ed. I like this guy. A lot.)

Anyway, on to business. kill.switch was definitely one of my favorite games of the show this year at E3. What do you feel sets it apart from other third-person action games, such as SOCOM or Syphon Filter?

We’re glad you liked it!

Simply put, kill.switch offers a different type of game play experience. The game play mechanics, the story… basically the entire game is unlike any other third-person action game out there. We do believe that we’ve definitely done something that stands out from the rest in a number of different categories, such as game play and story.

Further, kill.switch is more immediate than similar titles. We didn’t set out to create a hardcore military simulation, nor did we create an all-out action arcade game. What we’ve done is make a game that delivers its own unique type of combat game play experience. Something that we feel is just the right balance between hardcore sim and pure action game. If you’re into either, you’ll enjoy it.

The ability to hold your gun around a corner and shoot blindly is certainly a nice twist. Tell us a bit about where that came from, and what you feel it adds to the experience.

Matt Sentell and Chris Esaki, the senior producer and producer of the game respectively, wanted to create a new action game that captured what they saw as being the essence of modern warfare. The Offensive Cover System and Blindfire mechanics were created during that development period as they were determining what would eventually become the game we have today. Though the game concepts might have changed over the months, those particular game play features have remained a constant.

As for how they add to the experience:

As a player of this type of game, you now have that many more options available to you that have not have been done or even presented in this manner before. The Offensive Cover System and Blindfire mechanic definitely add something new, perhaps even innovative, to the third-person military action genre. Neither has really been executed in such a satisfying way before. Taking out the enemy from behind makeshift environmental cover without exposing yourself to fire can be quite the rush in the heat of battle. After all, not only have you just outwitted and eliminated a hostile enemy, you’ve kept yourself alive to take on the next one. The Offensive Cover System and Blindfire have been the focus of our game design, and everything from the AI and all of the missions have been built to best showcase them.

Your environment makes up a huge part of the game. In the portion of the game that I saw, there were a lot of areas, such as behind cars, where you could find cover from enemy fire. How do you feel that the duck-and-cover aspect changes the dynamic of the game?

To borrow from one of our taglines: cover is your only ally. Cover is a very important aspect of the game and using it wisely or poorly can dramatically shift the momentum of any given firefight. Just so everyone knows, run and gun is not a recommend tactic in this game, though it can be attempted (just expect to be a highly inaccurate shot). The character is not superhuman and cannot soak up bullets like in other action games.

Using cover is not only recommended, it’s necessary to survive in kill.switch.

The bit of the game that we saw took place in a Middle Eastern setting. Where else can we expect to go in the game?

Other locations you’ll see in the game are an oil rig somewhere in the Caspian Sea region, and an underground submarine base in North Korea. There are a few more levels that we’re keeping under wraps. The types of missions you’ll perform within the missions vary.

How about the main character? We know that he's bioengeneered, but what else can you fill us in on?

Here’s an exclusive news item for you: the character is definitely not bioengineered!

I wonder where that idea came from.

Like the game play, we set out trying to do something a little different with the story. We’ve been very guarded about it mainly because we’d like people to jump into the game without any pre-knowledge or spoilers that might potentially change their initial game play experience. As a player myself, there have been many times when I appreciate not knowing anything about a game, except for maybe the overall concept, and of course how the game plays.

Your own enjoyment of the story will be much more rewarding if you pay very close attention to your missions, all of the in-game dialogue, and of course the cinematics. Meaning, don’t get impatient and hit the start button to skip through everything.

There are a number of subtleties in the story that one might not see or hear the first time through. However, after finishing the game and going through it again, everything that’s been said and done in the story will have a different meaning, because by that point, you know everything. Using films as an analogy, I’ll point out to The Usual Suspects, Memento, and The Sixth Sense as having stories that can play out to the viewer differently once they know the twists. Not that I’m comparing our story to those films! It’s just an easier way to describe the route we’ve chosen. I do hope that everyone will go into and come away pleasantly surprised by what we’re trying to do.

With that said, I’m going to tell you what everyone supposedly knows already:

In kill.switch, you will take on the role of a highly skilled military operative with a dark agenda. Your initial missions will take you to global ‘hotspots’ such as the Middle East, the Caspian Sea region, and North Korea. As the story unfolds, more will be revealed about who you are, and exactly why you are undertaking the types of missions assigned to you.

During E3, we saw that the enemy will use the environment for cover as much as you do. What are some of your other big focuses for the AI?

Our AI is doing its best to act like you might, given the situation. The environments were all built around a core set of game play mechanics. As you observed, not only will the player have the ability to use the environment to your advantage, but the enemy will as well! The AI is attempting to not only take you out, but to stay alive in the process of doing so. To that extent, the enemy will come at you aggressively, but intelligently, using the exact same methods and tactics that you might employ yourself (even if you’re a run-and-gun type of guy, because the enemy’s got some of those crazy soldiers on their side as well).

The enemy will react to your actions in many different ways. Here are some examples:

Are you taking cover? The enemy will try to outflank your position and flush you out, or continue to chip away at you from their cover point. Are you using Blindfire? The enemy will scatter, run to find cover, or maybe keep on charging at you. Is a grenade coming? They’ll run away from it or dive for cover. Have you just killed someone’s buddy? He might gun for you or run away and call for more help. Are you in a courtyard with no cover? That sniper overhead just took you down because he was waiting for his once chance to avenge his friends. Are you exposing yourself and charging the enemy soldiers head on? If you’re close enough to one, you might get a rifle butt to the face, but otherwise expect to go down hard in a lethal hail of bullets.

As you can see, there are many different, dynamic choices the enemy AI might make depending on the situation it finds itself in. Combine that with the player’s style of playing, and you’ll find that going through the same level in kill.switch will prove to be a different experience for everybody.

Aside from kill.switch (obviously), which games during E3 left the biggest impression on you?

Half-Life 2 and Halo 2, for the same reasons that everyone else has stated everywhere else: those two games not only look absolutely amazing, but are technically impressive as well. I can’t wait to play them when they come out.

Some of the other games I’m looking forward to picking up this year are: Dead or Alive Online, Culdcept II (in English, finally), Tony Hawk’s Underground, and Ninja Gaiden.

And kill.switch, obviously.

Mind leaving us with a summation of what we should, or can, know about kill.switch so far?

We want gamers everywhere to know that kill.switch is a very fun, different, and unique game play experience. Everything, from the game play to the story, was designed and crafted to stand apart from what’s already out there or even coming out. We wanted to offer something innovative and new to the game player. You really do have to pick up the controller and play the game to see why.

kill.switch is set for a late October release on the PS2 and XBOX. Everyone pre-order now!

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