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Preview Q&A
Insights into Velvet Assassin

I’ve been following updates on Velvet Assassin ever since word of the game first surfaced. While I can’t quite put my finger on it, the game has long sounded and looked unique enough that it reminds me of the many Xbox-exclusive titles I treasure most – but don’t fret, it’s coming to the PC too.

Informal surveys suggest that gamers are tired of games set against the Second World War, despite the fact that they seem to keep buying them. But Velvet Assassin holds the allure of a game that searches out a more creative use for that backdrop. Velvet Assassin is a stealth title, and one that uses the historical figure of the secret agent and saboteur Violette Szabo as inspiration for its narrative. It’s a unique decision for a game’s direction, abandoning the “one-man-army” tendency, and building on a real figure that is perhaps less known to many, and thereby less burdened by myth. I was completely unaware of Violette’s story prior to hearing of the game, compared to the historical weight and inferences of a character like Jeanne d’Arc for instance. With these decisions, Velvet Assassin seems to offer a fresher slate through a more realistic character with a human story, ideally delivering a unique gaming experience that isn’t merely “another WWII” game. And aside from all the previews and hands-on descriptions available, that’s what we really wanted to know more about.

Fortunately for us, Aubrey Norris, Product Manager at SouthPeak Games, was willing to offer some insights regarding how Velvet Assassin works to separate and define itself.

Jamie Love: Any game that enters the stealth genre is automatically going to draw comparisons with Metal Gear and Splinter Cell. But both Sam and Snake are ‘one-man-army’ type characters, often taking on direct missions. By offering players the role of a saboteur during the Second World War, one imagines goals and objectives where there isn’t always a clear reward to an accomplishment. If a player were disrupting German communications there would certainly be an immediate result of course, but the real ramifications of that action would be much larger it seems. I’m curious as to how much this idea factored into the design of Velvet Assassin’s objectives, or if the team approached it from yet another perspective?

Aubrey Norris: Lots of WWII games focus on the front lines of battle—pitting armies against armies and emphasizing direct combat in the progress of the war. In Velvet Assassin, what we wanted to focus on was a new, different perspective. What goes on behind the front lines that affect the outcome of the conflict? Certainly, the work that was done by the unsung heroes of the war, the intelligence services, is an intriguing and poignant aspect of WWII that is too often neglected as a major topic in games themed around this time period. And, as the story of Velvet Assassin is inspired by the real-life experiences of a secret agent during the war, the game objectives are designed around things that one might be sent to do in this sort of livelihood. Things that may seem small – helping one of your comrades commit suicide so as to not leak vital Allied secrets to the Nazis while imprisoned, destroying key enemy infrastructure, assassinating one lynch-pin enemy leader, is definitely not the same experience as recreating the battle at Normandy. But, it does call to attention the fact that even small victories such as the ones that Violette embarks upon in Velvet Assassin can have a wide effect on the success of the war effort, weakening the enemy from behind enemy lines so that the troops on the front lines have a better chance at victory.

JL: The footage we’ve seen for Velvet Assassin paints a very dream-like state, a chain of memories Violette is reliving from her hospital bed. The impression that first struck me was that while the events for Velvet Assassin are set during the war, that the game could present the war as a more personal experience to Violette’s character. And if that is the case, I’m wondering what the challenges are in creating situations and events that come across as truly personal to her character versus the traditional gun-down every enemy style of most war games.

AN: You are absolutely correct in that Velvet Assassin does present the war in a very personal, psychological way. One thing that many games do not attempt to do is explore situations of conflict from an individualistic perspective. What does being involved in a war do to a person’s psyche and psychological health? How are they changed from the experience? What kind of people involve themselves in such an experience, how does it affect their lives, and how do they keep themselves pushing to go on? These are topics that are not often addressed in other games but are so incredibly important to the brute reality of war. Many games don’t attempt to bring a real sense of humanity to any of the sides of combat–they are just like plastic armies pitted against one another and you don’t have an opportunity to understand any dimensions about them other than that they are expendable resources. In Velvet Assassin, a lot of historical research was done regarding the psychological effects of being a combatant, on both sides, and these effects are a very strong theme throughout the game’s story. Creating a realistic psychological element to the game is, certainly, more of a challenge than not exploring that territory, so we are lucky that we had a real-life basis to the game’s story to work from and that the aftermath of World War II has left a multitude of references for us to help tell the tale of the traumas of war.

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