ay 1 Studios has a strong pedigree in the shooter space, and established itself early on with the MechAssault franchise on the Xbox. Branching away from their roots in Mechs, the Chicago-based studio is taking a crack at a very crowded genre - the shooter. By utilizing highly deformable landscapes, and weaponry that change the environments quickly, Fracture could change the way people look at the dynamics of the shooter forever.  In our continuing exclusive Road To E3 07 coverage we take a moment to chat with Day 1 Studios President Denny Thorley and Producer Jon Kimmich to talk about their history with the MechAssault franchise, and look to the future with their upcoming LucasArts shooter - Fracture.

Game Informer: Day 1 Studios was a strong partner with Microsoft Games Studios. Could you guys explain what the cause of the departure was?

Denny Thorley: Yes, actually I still consider us a strong partner for Microsoft Games Studios. We’re just not doing development with them right now. They have kind of made a portfolio shift and the details I’d prefer them to discuss with you. But we’re still friends, there’s no animosity or anything like that. We’re still big believers in their platform, and believe me with Fracture we’re pushing that platform to its knees. Just candidly, they had a lot of games in that genre that we play in – it really was a portfolio move for them.

GI: In retrospect, what are your thoughts in how MechAssault 2 turned out?

Thorley: Obviously, I think we’re disappointed with the results. It did not perform as well as MechAssault 1 did. We tried to push the boundaries in a couple of areas that the consumers did not respond to. With the persistence that we did with conquest we put a fair amount of resources in that and I don’t think the market was made aware of some of the features in the way we wish they were. But, nonetheless, they didn’t really get into it and as a result a lot of our effort probably just appealed to a minority set of the people. We also made some changes to the game that weren’t received too well in terms of people being able to select their mech going into multiplayer opposed to selecting it on the battlefield. That wasn’t received quite as positively and we have to also recognize that Microsoft elected to ship that on [December] the 28th, was the street date on that product and that was something that we were not enamored with. However, it is what it is. I think we were still in the blast range from Halo 2 and there’s a number of companies let their really big guns move into the first quarter to get out of Halo’s blast range, and so we were caught in a very competitive environment and it was all those things contributing to the product performing under what we hoped it would. 

GI: Do you think the game would have performed better if you were a little further out from that Halo blast radius? 

Thorley: I don’t think there’s any question about that, that it would have. I think that the December 28th date was very very tough. You know what? We’re not shirking our responsibilities. We made some strategic decisions in the game that consumers did not respond to, and that’s our responsibility with respect to when the product ended up shipping and what it shipped against. Those are market decisions that the publisher makes decisions on. They also decide how to defend that with their advertising spend and those are things that are beyond our control.  

GI: Now as you probably know, the MechAssault fanbase is quite rabid. Any time I would do interviews with Microsoft and asking about MechAssault 3 or what’s going on with Day 1, any answers I’d get from them, my inbox would be full from questions or people sending me to forum threads that were about the interviews. What’s it like having a community like that?

Thorley: Well, it’s exceptional. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve lived that with going back to the BattleTech on the Genesis and then the Mech Commander days and certainly MechAssault. It’s very, very passionate, and it’s interesting seeing Web sites grow and prosper off of that passion – it’s pretty exciting. One thing personally I have been fortunate to work on products where one of the emphasizes to expand that market and we certainly did that with making a tactical RTS with MechCommander and certainly with BattleTech on the Genesis and one of the things that you’ll see when you get familiar with Fracture is some of the stuff we had done with MechAssault that really resonated with the players – the fact that it was pretty accessible – it wasn’t incredibly complex game from that standpoint, and people at all levels could enjoy it and have a great experience and that’s one of the things we’re focusing on with LucasArts is to kind of expand that market and keep these games accessible but still very deep with a rich story and rich character development. Which from our standpoint were real excited about because it’s pretty tough to bring that into the large walking robot arena. With Fracture we’re able to take that accessibility stuff we did on Live and bring that into new intellectual property that’s got a pretty interesting back story and really interesting character development. Believe me, we’re bringing all that power that that the mechs have – the exaggerated power and things like that – we’re bringing some of that feeling with the games we’re doing now with LucasArts. 

GI: I interviewed Shane Kim at the Halo 3 beta event in San Francisco a couple months ago and I asked him what the chances are for a MechAssault 3 and he said you should ask Day 1, so I’m asking…Is there possibilities of a MechAssault 3? 

Thorley: (laughs) I’m speechless that Shane said that.  

Jon Kimmich: (laughs) Because we would have told you to go back and talk to them. 

Thorley: I think that obviously we always kick around ideas on what we do next with that series, if it was up to us. But I think today what I’d rather focus on is what we’re doing with LucasArts. There’s no specific plans, yet that we’re aware of. 

GI: How big is Day 1 right now? 

Thorley: We’re about 125 people. 

 GI: Is that one big team or is that multiple teams? 

Thorley: We have multiple teams. We generally don’t comment about how many people are working on various projects but the overall size of the company is 125, and Fracture is a good percentage of that. 

GI: Fracture is kind of a departure for you guys, you’ve done MechAssault and the ports of F.E.A.R. – where did the idea for this game come from? 

Thorley: We – kind of in our DNA – a couple things would stand out. First off would be the technology base, and the second would be the early multiplayer stuff we had done as a studio. We came up with the idea for Fracture, candidly the top people of our company wandered around E3 a number of years ago and there was so much same old, same old. So we took a number of afternoons and we said, “where are games going?” I had come up with this idea to take the mesh and mangle it and the engineers cringed. They said, “please don’t do that.” (laughs)  Our intent was to rely on middleware – Havoc – and things like that and it was technically going to be very very challenging. We were looking for new relationships and we had met with LucasArts and were very impressed with their staff. I have this rule of thumb when I meet people that, would I ever want to share Thanksgiving dinner with them, and LucasArts were definitely people I would share Thanksgiving dinner with. They’re really great people. Initially we didn’t have anything that really fit well with their ideas, but we went away and thought about – John, myself, and some other people sat down and started crafting ideas and the engineers just said, “Don’t do it – that stuff with the terrain.” So we pitched it and they really liked it. It was really cool – they just thought it was missing something. So we decided to put the terrain deformation back in and they loved it. That kind of what started out with Fracture, and we’ve got this really interesting backstory, that’s kind of the genesis where Fracture came from.

Kimmich: In terms of the backstory, where that came from, we sort of took a look at what was going on in the real world today, and tried to project what would people be in conflict about in the future. The whole notion of what does it mean to be human when you have genetic engineering and what technology can provide. 

GI: Talking about the storyline, could you explain the storyline and who players will take control of when they play Fracture? 

Thorley: You’ll take control of a character named Mason Briggs. He is a soldier in the Alliance Army in the future – 150 years from now. The United States has been on the verge of a fundamental cultural and social rift or fracture over how technology is going to be used to advance the betterment of mankind. “Will we use genetic engineering to improve humanities condition or will we use technology?” Themes that are familiar with conflicts that are going on in the real world today. The alliance has drifted more close to Europe that has disavowed the use of genetic engineering while Pacifica – the western half of the United States – has moved more closely to Asia which is using genetic engineering to improve the condition of humanity. The character that you play starts out as a member of the Alliance Army just on the verge of the succession of Pacifica from the United States – where the United States literally fractures in two. That’s where the game will begin.