New Conduit Trailer, Details

A short clip of High Voltage Software's The Conduit has been shown, along with new details on the game in a recent interview.

In the interview with IGN, H.V.S confirm their presence at E3 next week, and reconfirm that The Conduit will support Online Multiplayer for 16 gamers.

IGN: First of all, will The Conduit be at E3?

Eric Nofsinger: Yes we will be at E3! We are only doing private showings and leaving playable demos with a few select folks who we are anxious to get feedback and input from... like IGN, of course.

IGN: You still haven't announced a publisher. Have you gotten serious about aligning yourselves with one yet?

Eric: No, not until they give us what we want and tons of money. Oh, and a monkey. [Laughs]

We are taking it real slow. We aren't in any rush. This is something I probably could have been a bit more clear about before; we have our own funding to completion. We know we want a publisher, but we want it to be the right fit for the publisher, High Voltage, the game, and the fans that have so vocally supported us.

IGN: So tell us, what does the E3 build encapsulate?

Eric: The E3 demo is the first half of one of the later missions in the game. It will be showing off the majority of our alien enemies (the Drudge), several of our weapons, and very pretty environment. Story-wise, it gives a small taste of what the player will be doing and finding out after the Drudge invasion of Washington D.C. has begun. Though, I should probably note the demo will be hard set on Easy difficulty so that casual players can have a chance of seeing everything without having to build up the skill set they would normally need to play the mission.

IGN: How would you say the game has progressed since we last wrote about it?

Eric: The single-player portion of the game is near the point of being just bug fixes and fine tuning. And polish, polish, polish. A lot of our team and development effort is moving to multiplayer now.

IGN: You've said the controls will be fully customizable. How so? Have you looked at Medal of Honor Heroes 2 for inspiration?

Eric: Yes, Medal of Honor Heroes 2 was a source of inspiration, but we believe we've taken things even a step further. In MoHH2, you were able to adjust things like dead zone size, player turning speed and cursor sensitivity via a paused menu. In The Conduit, you can adjust these and other options in real time. That means you don't have to go back and forth to get the feel of your changes; you see them instantly and can tell if your adjustments are working for you. We are also taking some inspiration from Smash Bros. Brawl and will be allowing players to customize their control layouts. Don't like using the B button to shoot? Map it to the button you prefer. Like to use a certain Wii-Remote motion for something? You will be able to map to those too.

IGN: Sounds great. We've posted some new screens that show off some additional graphic effects for the game. How much of your tech are you hoping to implement into the final product?

Eric: All of it. [laughs] Seriously, we wouldn't be showing this stuff off if we weren't planning on using it and using it a lot. Some really fantastic graphical improvements came on line recently. Our artists and engineers are so amazing! I just wanted to give them all a big hug.

IGN: Tell us about the online experience you're hoping to deliver.

Eric: Our current multiplayer benchmarks are 16 players and we will definitely have the standard modes like Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. We are still exploring the possibilities and depending on how things go, we will have more. But we want to make certain that our online experience is solid and if that means sacrificing some other modes or features to do that, we will. We are choosing quality over quantity.

High Voltage wants to bring all of its tech to The Conduit.
IGN; We're all for that. A lot of Nintendo fans have been ecstatic about The Conduit, but there are some critics who say that the game offers little to distinguish itself from other FPS efforts. What is your position?

Eric: We've been so happy with the response we've received! It really fuels us to do our best. You know? Sure. I think it's fair that some folks are pointing out similarities to other FPS titles but I hope that they can see that was one of our primary goals � to make a really solid fast-paced action shooter and that is the core of our game. Then we built the right differentiators on top of that foundation … we didn't want to be different just for the sake of being different. And I honestly believe we have some very unique and interesting gameplay via the All Seeing Eye device, a storyline that isn't set during World War II [laughs], a totally customizable control scheme and layout, and we've got some awesome high-quality graphics to boot. And this whole package is on the Wii, a platform that is crying out for a shooter like this like a desert cries out for rain. Even if I weren't making this game, it is the game I would want to buy for the Wii.

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