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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