BM: - BondMovies.com
CP: - Chris Plummer, Senior Producer, Electronic Arts

(Beginning of interview)

CP: My name's Chris Plummer, and I'm the senior producer on GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.

BM: First question. Obviously the GoldenEye name has a lot of sway in the video game industry. Do you think that it will be more of a help or a hindrance towards this game, in terms of getting it across, because of the high standing it's held in?
CP: I think it makes it more difficult for us because I think people are gonna have really really high expectations, which is a good thing. I mean we want people to have really high expectations, but, it's one of those things that is held so sacred that a lot of people have an issue with that. And that is what it is. So, I think it's a help for us because it clearly communicates what's unique about our villain. On the other hand, it has this connotation, which is what it is, and I'm aware of it. What can we do? We're not gonna change the name of the game because some people are so passionate about the original game. We're in that category. We're super passionate about the original GoldenEye, but we're not upset that our game's got the same name, ya know? (laughs)

BM: What can we expect in terms of the voice cast and actual people showing up, because we've seen the E3 trailer has Judi Dench in there with her voice. Is there anybody else of note that you could reveal?
CP: We haven't disclosed the entire cast, although you're probably familiar with a lot of the characters that are gonna be in the game. From Dr. No and Oddjob, Pussy Galore. Pretty much the whole suite of classic Bond villains. What we are announcing now is that Christopher Lee will be playing his role as The Man With The Golden Gun, Francisco Scaramanga. And he is your contact that has procured the golden eye, and he actually supplies you with the upgrades. So just as he was able to acquire technology like the Solex Agitator, he's sort of your resource in the game. Basically, he can get anything, and that's his role in this game.

BM: I think we've heard you say that the game was gonna be about 20 levels. How long do you expect it in terms of gameplay?
CP: Since we're pre-alpha, the game's not tuned yet, obviously, so we won't know the final length of play until it's better tuned. But right now, I can give you some metrics. We have eight missions split up into roughly twenty levels. The Hong Kong mission, which is one of our longer missions, and I'd say about half our missions are that long, and the other half are shorter than that. That one can take 45 minutes for someone to get through the first quarter of it. So that's...Think about extrapolating that out...I would say the whole mission maybe isn't that same pace.

It's probably gonna take someone maybe two hours to get through that mission if they're new to the game. And of course expert players are gonna have an easier time. We have easy game modes and stuff like that so people will be able to use those game modes as well. So it's gonna depend on a combination of what difficulty level, what kind of control scheme you're using, and that sort of thing. We're targeting a minimum of twelve to fifteen hours of gameplay for a skilled player. And of course people who are, I guess, aren't familiar with first person shooters, or that sort of thing, will take longer to play. And that's just the campaign.

BM: Obviously a lot of people are excited because now it's gonna have XBox Live support so you can play it online. Will it strictly be the Multiplayer Deathmatch Mode online or will there be additional online modes?
CP: Online play will support Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, but it will also support our other game modes, the team game modes. So we have specific sort of war game modes that are objective based, and we will be supporting those online as well.

BM: One of the more popular things about the original GoldenEye was some of the cheat modes they had in there, like the Paintball mode, the DK mode. Will there be anything like that in the game that you are working on that might leads towards that?
CP: I wouldn't say that we're spending a lot of time on the cheat modes and that kind of stuff. We do have a lot of unlockable content. A lot of things that you will not be able to get until you've played certain components of the game, beat them in certain skill levels, that sort of thing. Specifically, the modes you talked about are not something we're gonna be planning on doing. Obviously, things like the man with the golden gun and those sorts of mutators or modifiers to games are supported.

BM: One thing that you guys have gotten really good at is, like in Nightfire, Agent Under Fire, and Everything Or Nothing, you make the flow of the game like a Bond movie where there's a pre-title sequence, a big title song. Can we expect the same with this game?
CP: Yes. Although we're doing it with sort of a villainous twist, so you'll get the same sort of cadence you would expect from a Bond adventure, but because we're going as the villain, it's gonna sound different. It's gonna look different. We also have more to explain. If you think about it, we're introducing a brand new villain character that's the elite character in the game. So we're gonna be spending a lot of the effort on the title sequence and that sort of thing - setting up the character and making sure people are very familiar with our take on the Bond universe.

BM: About how many multiplayer levels can we expect? Because I know we've heard that there will be specific ones for one-on-one matches. Will there be specific ones for those and online? And also, for XBox, which has four system linking, will that be supported? Will there be any exclusive content for that set up?
CP: So there's several questions in there...(laughs) So, number of maps was the first one. Right now we're planning to have around 16 multiplayer maps. And the number will really be close to that. It's dependent on when we finally finish testing them all - are they all really, really fun? And that could mean we have more than that, or that we have a few less than that. Right now we have about a dozen really solid multiplayer maps. And those cross the gamut of two player, four player and eight player online maps. So that was to address the first point of your question.

We are supporting system link on XBox and Playstation 2. You'll be able to play the online maps on the system link. We're playing around the idea of sort of platform-specific multiplayer maps, but I want to make sure we have a really, really robust set of just really fundamental maps that everyone has access to and at least can unlock first, and the rest would be sort of bonus.

BM: We've seen the GoldenEye Satellite Uplink multiplayer map and I believe you've also mentioned that there will be a Golden Gate Bridge map, that sort of is in the works. Are there any other interesting multiplayer maps in the works, like Scaramanga's funhouse, or Atlantis?
CP: Well you said some things that I'm not gonna respond to, but you're basically on the same page in sort of what we want to do, we'll just say it that way. But what I can say is some of the other multiplayer maps, speaking about the duels you mentioned the Golden Gate Bridge and Uplink, along with the Pyramids from The Spy Who Loved Me, where Jaws and Bond had a big duel at the pyramids. That's a mpa that we're...Actually it's a really fun two player and four player map - there are two different modes of that map, so there's a two player duel version and there's a different version of it that's geared for four players.

We also have GoldenEye's Retreat, which is almost like a villain's ski lodge retreat up in the mountains.(here, Chris might have meant Goldfinger's retreat, but we aren't sure...) It's not really a ski lodge but it's up in like this snowy mountain top which is really cool. It's got lots of neat death traps, like if you had your own villainous lair that you have, you know, to trap people. Like if they get down by your rip-roaring fireplace where there's lots of cool pickups and stuff and you get by the bar and hit the button and just WHOOSH, ya know, fireplace flames up and burns everybody. Just fun stuff like that. Over by the hot tub there's a button where the paintings will slide open and machine guns will shoot out. So there's a lot of fun stuff in that one.

But that's just scratching the surface. I mean we showed, at E3, we were giving a sneak peek of some of the Moonraker multiplayer content as well, that is more geared towards online play. So, that's a little taste of it, and we have other maps that we haven't disclosed details on yet. I think Atlantis is one that we have talked about already, so that one's a pretty cool one geared for team play. So you'll be able to have four player team play in Atlantis.

(End of interview)