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Interview by 'Exitwound'
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Soldier-of-Fortune.com
news staffer ExitWound pulled over Raven's Project Administrator, Kenn
Hoekstra, for speeding to answer a few questions about the future of
Soldier of Fortune and RavenSoft.
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ExitWound: What's in store for the future of Soldier of Fortune?
Are we going to see the source code for SOF GOLD any time soon? Patches?
Revisions? Are we going to see a Soldier of Fortune sequel?
Kenn: I don’t foresee the release of the Soldier of Fortune Gold
source code any time soon. There are still Quake II engine games in
development and other aspects of such a code release are against our
best interests right now. The final SoF Gold patch is at Activision
right now for inspection and QA, but the process is slow because of
all the games Activision has released lately. They’re quite busy.
A full QA sweep on this patch has been bumped down on the priority
list as a result, but we expect them to get to it soon. No word on
a sequel yet. Raven has a lot of offers on its table right now and
we’re going to make sure we make the best decision possible for us
before moving forward.
ExitWound: Soldier Of Fortune has received many warnings, bannings
and such around the world due to its graphic violence. Did you anticipate
this in advance? Because of this, do you think the following for SOF
is smaller than it could have been or do you feel the violence attracted
more players?
Kenn: We didn’t expect there to be such a negative reaction to
Soldier of Fortune. The political and social climate when the game
was released was much different than when we started the game. It
was just an unfortunate set of circumstances for the game to be released
in such turbulence. As far as the violence goes, I don’t think that
it ultimately impacted the number of players one way or the other.
Gamers and reviewers are praising Soldier of Fortune’s story, characters,
enemies and game play more than they are talking about the violence.
The fact that SoF is a quality game is what’s making it sell...not
the violence. I guess one could make the argument that the game’s
mature rating from the ESRB kept it out of Wal-Mart (a huge percentage
of the game sales market), thus sales might not be what they could
have been. But who knows? It’s all speculation...
ExitWound: How about RavenSoft? Can you provide any hints as
to what we'll be seeing soon? Maybe a Heretic III?
Kenn: Raven is hammering out a slate of games that will keep us
in active production for the next three to five years. We’re trying
to get all of our ducks in a row, so to speak, to avoid any lulls
in production over that period of time. However...committing a company
and its resources over such an extensive period of time takes a lot
of planning, which is why we haven’t made any final decisions and
none of our upcoming games have been announced. We expect to continue
to develop games for the PC as well as a PlayStation 2 title over
the next few years. Other games, platforms and console systems are
all being considered, which is what all this strategic planning is
about. I can’t imagine we’ll stay silent too much longer, though.
Stay tuned... We’ll have a lot more to say soon.
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