Tom French, Lead Designer on Pandemic's The Saboteur, chats to us about story-telling in games...

While previous Pandemic games have some story content, it seems as though The Saboteur is the studio’s most narrative-heavy game yet. What prompted the shift towards a heavy story?

When the core team for The Saboteur was assembled we were very film influenced. The idea of a race car driver turn Saboteur set in an over the top stylized world with WWII as a backdrop was definitely a challenging task. To help flesh out our hero Sean Devlin and tie all these threads together literally the second designer we hired for the project was a writer.

We watched a lot of movies to find qualities and ideas to inspire our designs. Indiana Jones, Die Hard, and Bullitt were great influences to help us achieve our goal of making Sean the hero we in our hearts all want to be. Sin City and Amelie were fantastic references for our color palettes and the separation of our occupied and inspired world.

Ultimately to make all these pieces fit together we needed to really make story and the telling of it one of the most important elements of the game.

What makes Sean unique in the context of other videogame protagonists? Is his unusual background and slightly seedy lifestyle a response to less interesting, gruff heroes?

We had a lot of goals for Sean when we first began working on him; the need for a daredevil nature to make the actions we wanted feel in character, a personality that could at one point be funny or charming but tough when he needed to be, and have personal rather than political/national motivations. His unusual background is inspired by the real Grand Prix Champion William Grover-Williams which was a great touchstone for a larger than life hero but grounded in reality. Part of making Sean our hero was creating ways for him to be separate from the war.

Paris has this inherit sexuality that worked with the grittier more Film Noir inspired tones we wanted in the game so tying Sean into it was a great fit for his character. Going back to film again, the more timeless heroes from some of movies we loved really let us pick a lot of traits that fit in the period and would elevate Sean as an action hero. What’s great is that we have a very clear understanding of who Sean is. To the point that I could say with all honestly he is one of my best friends and I care greatly for what happens to him. Strange, but true.

Our sanity check against anything is WWSDD (What Would Sean Devlin Do?) which helps keep everything grounded in the world we’ve created. One of my biggest desires for The Saboteur is that it introduces people to Sean and lets them relate to him like everyone on the team has.

To what extent is the game’s storyline based on real historical figures and events? Obviously, the Nazi occupation of Paris is real – but what about the events within that?

I like to say everything in The Saboteur is more inspired by history than based on it. While we certainly do have things in the game that happened in history they are changed to fit into our story or just exaggerated to make things bigger and more “larger than life”. Even our occupation is stylized and heavily layered into the world because it would make for fun gameplay as you explore the world.

… continued