Interview with Louis Lamarche, Associate Producer for Ubisoft's Rainbox Six 3: Black Arrow

While venturing around the Tom Clancy section of Ubisoft's E3 pavilion, I came across a dark corner, with few sounds and a crowd of people staring at what I thought was a wall, until I got close enough and the looked up to see the sign!

While observing what was going on, I noticed some people standing off to the side and talking to some people interested in the game.  I saw that someone had on an "Exhibitors" pass so I decided to get really nosey and this is what I got out of Louis Lamarche, Ubisoft's Associate Producer for Black Arrow.

R6 Retreat: Thank you for your time Louis.  Can you explain some of the major differences between Black Arrow and the game play of Raven Shield and Athena Sword?

Louis Lamarche:  Mainly, we made Black Arrow as a console game.  We made it a lot easier and changed the way the game plays.  We made it a bit more linear compared to Raven Shield.  Another thing, you are playing with the controller and not a keyboard.

We also incorporate voice command recognition.  We have over 84 different voice commands that you can use.  You could control the whole team using your microphone.  Using the 84 commands, you could give a command to your team such as opening a door throwing in a frag grenade and clearing the room.  That’s the first main aspect of the game.

Another feature is that Black Arrow is more story driven.  The difference with Black Arrow is that there are whole bunch of new missions for the Xbox console.  It’s very different from the original game. 

The Xbox functionality has given us a lot of options for Xbox Live!  It gives it support for in-game plan management, in-game competition system which will allow you to challenge others in Xbox Live right from your console and also from the website.

Xbox Live will also allow voice communications in full-duplex voice and it's all real time.

There are also new features for game modes in multiplayer.  We added Conquest and Capture the Flag.  People wanted more team related gameplay modes that we didn’t have on the original title.

During the development stage, what was the largest obstacle in rolling Black Arrow out?

Louis:  Since we are the first game shipping out with the new Xbox Live 3, in August, we didn’t have much experience.  No one had any experience with the new technology.  We had to learn a lot from Microsoft and they were really, really helpful in helping us build the game in at very fast pace.  We started development in January.  As you can see, were doing a good job at staying on schedule for our anticipate ship date in August.

R6 Retreat:  Regarding the game environment, are there a lot more interactive features?  Are there any features that stand out to you as a gamer and player that you like the most?

Louis:  What I like the most is that there are a few aspects in the map that are interactive.  We added different game play objective in single player also.  For example, if a terrorist tries to escape in a helicopter, you would be able to shoot the pilot while the copter is flying.  Take out your sniper  rifle, shoot the pilot and the copter goes down.  That’s some of the types of interaction in the environment you can expect.

R6 Retreat:  How many people were involved in the development in Black Arrow?

Louis:  Our whole team is about 40 people. Half of that team was in Milan, Italy and the rest in Montreal , Canada.  The team in Italy helped build all the single and multiplayer content and most of the maps while we did the code and integration in Canada.  It was pretty cool experience working with two different studios.

R6 Retreat:  Are there any major difference between the Raven Shield game engine and the Black Arrow engine?

Louis:    What we did with Black Arrow is used the Unreal engine.  Of course for Xbox, we had to highly modify the engine in order to added the new graphical feature like soft bodies, the flash bang effect or the gas and smoke effect. 

R6 Retreat:  Is that anything you would like to add?

Louis:  I expect to see everyone on Xbox Live and we are going to have fun!!