Republic: The Revolution Preview

Being a politician isn't a simple task and surely not something everyone can do at the drop of a hat. Eidos Interactive recently shipped Republic: The Revolution - a game that gives you an opportunity to take a step into the world of politics and see how well you handle yourself as a ruler. After spending spent some hands-on time with the latest beta build of the game, we went straight to the source and asked Elixir Studios if they could offer our readers more info on a few particulars. We found out various details about the story, RPG elements, and how Elixir is handling the development process in general.

Hm, no one in sight. This is what severe hangovers can do to a population.

What do you mean "there's no ice," you mean I gotta drink this coffee hot!?!

Action Trip: Let's kick things off with a basic question. Tell us about the underlying plot in Republic: The Revolution.

Elixir Studios: 'You are a powerful faction leader and you must oust the president by any means'.

The game is about the pursuit of absolute power in a real world. It's the 1990s and the mighty Soviet Union has just broken up. Dozens of autonomous countries spring from the crumbling remnants. It is into one of these, the Republic of Novistrana, that you enter the fray as a small time faction leader. Starting with a single loyal supporter, a tiny secret HQ, and a very small base of local support, you must build up a nationwide faction powerful enough to oust the President and rule the Republic of Novistrana.

AT: What exactly is the player's goal in this game?

ES: To win Republic by ousting the President and taking his place, that is the goal of the game. However you lose if another competing faction takes out the President first. Whilst trying to achieve this goal there will be many smaller short-term objectives you must accomplish for your faction to grow powerful enough to attempt to seize power.

AT: This question may sound silly, but will there be classic RTS elements (fighting) in Republic? Just to set the record straight for our readers...

ES: No, the player can never directly control a character in the same manner that they might in an RTS game. Characters will of course follow the player's orders, but it is on a far more strategic scale.

AT: What role does time and day/night cycles play in the game?

ES: The day/night cycle lasts 12 minutes. Some actions are better off when performed under cover of darkness ;)

AT: How do the role-playing elements work in Republic?

ES: Characters in the player's faction and the faction leader can be shaped, molded, and improved during the course of the game. A character earns Experience Points (XP) for successfully completing actions. Once enough XP is earned the character advances a level and may spend points increasing their stats, and learning new actions or improving their abilities at existing ones.

There are different classes of characters to choose from, such as Business, Criminals, Media, Police, and so on. Each of these classes has access to differing types of actions; meaning that getting the correct spread of characters classes and actions, to create a balanced faction, adds many role-playing elements to the gameplay.

This is my kind of neighborhood.

I'm gonna have to search you, mam!

AT: As far as I know, the game has been in development for three years now. What ideas have evolved the most from their original form?

ES: The game structure and the fact that we found that we couldn't just leave the player with a whole country and just say 'here is the nation - now take it over'. After early testing it became clear that we needed to give some form of guidance to the player. We did this by providing shorter-term goals whilst still retaining the freeform nature of the original vision by allowing the player to freely choose not only which goal to go for next but also how to achieve that goal.

AT: Have you done some "last-minute" tweaks to the game engine, in terms of its visual appearance?

ES: We have spent the last few months optimizing Republic to make it as efficient as possible and move the maximum amount of objects around at once.

AT: What has been the biggest design challenge during the development of Republic: The Revolution?

ES: There were many big design challenges that we needed to overcome during the course of Republic's development. Some of the major ones included: realistically portraying the complex world of politics and power struggles whilst still keeping the game systems simple and understandable; boiling down such a vast vision and premise into something that could be modeled in a game in a fun way; designing an interface that could cope with a lot of information but still remain intuitive.

AT: How many hours of gameplay should we expect from the game?

ES: The game will take the average player around 20 hours to complete. However, there are many paths through Republic and finishing it once will not mean that the player has seen everything the game has to offer.

AT: Is there a feature that's been left out of the game and that you would like to add later on in a patch perhaps?

ES: I guess one of the more obvious and painful cuts was losing female "lead characters" due to the huge animation and voice requirements (We have 1940 male specific animations - doing the same again for females was a step too far). Also, Republic's design and premise lends itself very naturally to multiplayer (with different players controlling different factions, maybe someone even controlling the President!). The core systems were tested internally in a multiplayer testbed, but unfortunately we could not include multiplayer with the initial release, as it would require a lot of additional development and testing time.