There’s a game out there being developed that just might alter the way we look at games altogether.  The style is such that it’ll blow your mind.  I’ve had the pleasure of spending some time at Pandemic Studios to see bits of the game already and I’ve never spoken words that are more true.  This is the game to pay attention to this year!

Allow me to introduce Pandemic Studios’ The Saboteur.  It has it all from story to gameplay to visual appeal to a unique main character.  Sean Devlin may be this generation’s alternative to James Bond and Jason Bourne.  His character is that interesting and packed with the type of volatile nature action fans should love.

I have something very special planned alongside this game so stay tuned.  The site will get a little injection of individuality themed after The Saboteur.  With that said, let’s find out more shall we?

The Saboteur
Developer: Pandemic Studios
Publisher: Electronic Arts

The Players

Lead Designer – Tom French

The Interview

How should gamers approach the game in order to get the most out of it? Strategy, run and gun…etc?

A little bit of both. The nice thing about gameplay in The Saboteur is that it’s up to the player to decide, and there’s no right or wrong way about it. The decision comes down to a combination of factors – your gaming skills, the weapons or items at your disposal, and even what kind of mood you’re in. You always have the option to try and sneak into a Nazi stronghold a variety of ways or using a disguise mechanic.

Or should that fail or you want to cut to the chase, just smash through the front gate in a truck and hop out guns blazing. The choice is always yours, and it’s really fun to come up with creative new ways to attack any mission.

What interactions will the world allow in terms of its buildings, people?

Unlike our other Pandemic Studios franchise, Mercenaries, the world of The Saboteur isn’t about blowing up buildings with a single airstrike. Paris in the 1940s is a magical place, and rather than detonate the cityscape, we allow players to venture all around it – including some special interior locations and especially the rooftops. The first time you climb atop a Paris neighborhood and look out over the city toward the glimmering Eifel Tower in the distance, it’s quite a beautiful sight to behold.

And even on top of the city, you’ll find an entirely new layer of life to interact with – both citizens and Nazis – different from the street traffic below.

How big is fictional Paris in the game?

To use a scientific term – ginormous. While we’re not recreating every single street and alleyway, it’s huge. Really, really big – and anyone already familiar with Paris will have no problem finding their way from the Eifel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe. And of course, there’s more than just Paris – you can drive straight out of the city limits, into a sweeping French countryside, on to neighboring French chateaus to other towns and even across the border into Germany. The game play space is massive.

Why choose to create a conflict based on Nazi history? Why not a unique conflict with perhaps a new enemy?

The concept of The Saboteur is actually inspired by a true story of a guy named William Grover-Williams in the early 1900s who went from being a mechanic to a race car driver in France – only to join the SOE as a British spy once World War II broke out. From there, he went on to disrupt Nazi operations from within Paris. We definitely loved that idea an everyday mechanic turning into a Nazi-killing machine, so we modeled a lot of our character Sean Devlin after him. But in The Saboteur, Sean isn’t fighting World War II (unlike the countless other Nazi-based games out there).

He’s not trying to win the war – he’s on a personal quest for revenge against the one person who hurt him, and the Nazis are just in the way, much like the Indiana Jones universe. This time in history, when Paris – the city of lights – was locked down under an iron curtain, is a tragically fascinating and unique period that begs for its own story to be told.