Consortium: The Tower is a single player first-person sim with RPG elements designed to let players decide the outcome through their choices and actions. The team caught up with Greg MacMartin, CEO and Creative Director of Interdimensional Games, or iDGi for short to talk about the recent crowdfunding efforts leading up to the current Fig campaign, its inspirations and highlighting what gamers can expect from this truly ambitious project.

THE PITCH

For those unfamiliar with the game/series, what is marketing pitch/tagline to the general public for Consortium: The Tower?

Short version:  The original Deus Ex meets Die Hard the film. Longer version:  An RPG world shaped by YOUR choices! The ultimate single player first-person immersive sim. Explore, talk, fight or sneak through The Churchill Tower in 2042. 

How was the reaction to Consortium been on Fig compared to your first crowdfunding run on Kickstarter?

Very good, actually! We were admittedly a little bit worried switching platforms and introducing a relatively new concept to our fan base. In the end it definitely paid off, and it seems people are happy we made the switch.

Do you think the prospect of investing in the game and word of mouth from the failed Kickstarter added to the rapid success of your Fig campaign?

Absolutely. As you can see from the numbers alone, opening up the investing aspect through Fig has been the ace up our sleeve. It also certainly didn’t hurt having a starting base of folks willing to jump from Kickstarter to Fig right off the bat.

THE INSPIRATION

Your pitch video compares Consortium to the original Deus Ex. In what ways do you think your game is perhaps, channeling, the spirit of Deus Ex?

Consortium received a lot of comments comparing the game’s style to that of Deus Ex, and we believe this mostly comes down to freedom of choice and character interaction. We pride ourselves on doing everything we can to give the player REAL choice – both through action and dialogue – that can then lead to subtle or significant changes throughout the rest of the story.

Following up on that, one of Deus Ex’s highlights was being able to discover hidden ways of completing future events in the game. Can we expect a similar sort of approach in The Tower?

To a certain degree, yes. I would not call it an overall “approach,” but we do want players to be able to work out in-game puzzles or sub-plots that can unexpectedly lead to completing/altering future events in different ways. Perhaps in your first playthrough a certain event seems inevitable… but then you play the game again and realize no, there’s actually a hidden path to completion you didn’t even know existed the first time around.

THE AMBITION

What have you learned from the original Consortium, and what are you and your team going to do differently to avoid the missteps you may have made on the first of the trilogy?

What we’ve learned could fill a list ten pages long, and really that’s why we’re so excited to get going again. Consortium took 3 years of full production to complete, and we absolutely made our share of mistakes along the way. However, at the same time we created what was an experimental framework that can now be applied to the next two games of the trilogy – many of our mistakes and hiccups with Consortium came from building this framework. With The Tower we know exactly what we want to do, and nearly all experimental aspects of production have been dealt with. We’re simply applying the formulas we’ve already invented to a much larger environment.

I also like to think that by having the public keep an eye on us throughout production, this will significantly aid in keeping us on our toes.

Consortium definitely comes off more as an adventure game while The Tower looks heavier on the action from its initial footage. For the people who fell in love with the original, is there enough of that adventure game formula in The Tower to not alienate fans of the Consortium’s perhaps slower pace?

Absolutely. The Tower was always envisioned to be the more “action oriented” of the two titles, but at the same time it doesn’t have to be and that’s extremely important to us. Story and characters are key, first and foremost, and this will not change simply because we’re allowing the possibility of more combat. It’s just an extra layer on top of what made Consortium unique. We want to give the player another way of “being” Bishop Six, and that means more combat, but the level of intrigue and depth found within Consortium will be no different this time around. In fact, The Tower will have a much deeper, more involved story with far more factions striving to convince you of their truths.

I suppose the bottom line is that if you WANT the pace to be slow, you can make it so. There’ll be plenty of strictly adventure-game-style approaches to every situation.

Your pitch frequently mentions how the player’s choices will shape the way the story plays out. This made me think of Obsidian’s “Alpha Protocol” in how even minor choices in the game would send me into completely different gameplay scenarios that my friends never experienced because they made a different decision. Can we expect a similar sort of approach where choices offer dramatic changes to not only the story itself, but the scenarios you’ll play through or is it closer to something like Mass Effect or Fallout where your choices simply alter the way characters react to you and how the finale plays out?

I loved Alpha Protocol, and found its approach to choice very refreshing. Consortium has been compared to Alpha Protocol in the past, and we can’t help but agree with the comparison. We think it’s important to let the player have as much freedom as possible, but at the same time make it so that it’s not exactly obvious when “story changing choices” are being made. No red flashing, “make a choice now!”

You simply play the game as you want to play, and the game will adapt and change along the way. Play it again, or speak to a friend who also played the game, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much those little changes actually make a difference.

Perhaps you could say our approach is a little of both. Characters change their opinions of you, and will act differently toward you, based on your actions. Entire scenes and situations will also play out differently based on choice through action and dialogue.

Thank you for your time!