A/ Although your primary mission success criteria are fixed, we hope the player will find all kinds of fun just messing with the enemies. If players feel confident enough they can also pick the pockets of the guards while they’re patrolling. That takes balls for someone who can’t just shoot the guards if it all turns nasty. Things like this may yield keys or combinations to unlock hidden areas later on. The primary objectives for each mission have been broken down and can be completed out of sequence, and the secondary objectives can be done in any order or even not done at all (hence they are secondary and optional). So there will be plenty of stuff for the player to do which will give the game replay value. Stolen will offer an open but very intuitive feel for exploration and success!

Q/ Will the AI try to hunt you down, and will they be able to work together to do this?

A/ The AI has been beefed up to provide an adequate challenge to a character with more than the average number of stealth abilities. If spotted, the guards will open fire and call for backup. The central guard booth will then send reinforcements to that area and put the rest of the level on general alert, such that your movements around the building will become greatly restricted without the utmost of care. Even if the guards are merely suspicious, they may start searching the dark corners of rooms with their torches, so unlike many other stealth games, simply hiding in the shadows isn’t going to outwit Stolen’s AI. Guards will not give up once they know you are there, and can leave their patrol routes far behind in order to sustain a pursuit from room to room. Guards can be knocked out and stunned, but not killed, so direct confrontation with them will only ever be a temporary solution. If security cameras or other guards spot a fallen comrade, they will immediately sound the general alarm. Fleeing from room to room to evade a pursuing guard will become exponentially more difficult if you have to pass through patrol routes of other guards, especially if they’re expecting you, with their guns drawn and ready. The AI does alter when guards ‘buddy up’ and work together, they cover different search points and work as a coherent unit.

A/ As mentioned above, a lot of effort has gone into building an AI system that reciprocates the different gameplay bias that Stolen contains. Apart from co-incidental characters, like cleaners and engineers, the security forces in Stolen are broken into several ‘companies’. Each is progressively more attentive and difficult to dupe, so it’s true that the first guards you encounter in the museum will be a little lazy and more preoccupied with the contents of the vending machines than checking-in every 5 minutes. However, they’re still not stupid – if you goad a particular guard or arouse his suspicion (even if he’s only heard something, but not actually seen something) and persist in doing this, he will shortly decide to call for backup or sound the alarm anyway. The enemies have individual short-term memories, so if you annoy them enough within a short space of time, even without ever being seen or caught, they will realise that someone is there by weight of the cumulative evidence. Adding to my earlier reference to guards working as a coherent unit, we didn’t want the AI to act as a single consciousness as it does in some games. Being spotted by a single guard will not automatically alert the rest of the guards or the booth until he can actually radio in his sighting. Depending on the security company in question, they may be more inclined to shoot first and radio for backup later. However, if you can incapacitate that guard silently and before he can call for help, then even after a sighting, you can still recover the situation and stash his unconscious body discreetly without all hell breaking loose (until he wakes up). Moreover, if you can take down an enemy instantly (with Anya’s nullifier rounds for example) without them even seeing you first, they may eventually wake up confused and groggy, but not necessarily inclined to sound the general alarm until they’ve gathered their wits about them and figured out what happened. Testing so far has shown us that the enemy AI is great fun to play around with, but you can never afford to get too complacent, even with the easier ones, because the bottom line is that they can kill you, but you can’t kill them…. so they will eventually beat you unless you can master the art of subterfuge.

Q/ We are always excited about gizmos. Do you have any examples of how the high tech wizardry is implemented into the game?

A/ Well there are a wealth of gizmos and gadgets that Anya will use. We don’t want to spoil the surprise for gamers but here are a couple of examples on offer in Stolen. The ArmPad is the central device which co-ordinates control and input from all the other devices including 2-way audio & 1-way video communications with Louie Palmer. The LED display is mounted on Anya’s wrist, with real-time link to a HUD display in her goggles. It provides real-time feedback on the GPS map, showing the relative positions of all the tracking devices that Anya has deployed across the entire building. It also provides functions like Lock-Picking where Anya picks mechanical tumbler locks manually and will use the ArmPad as a visual interface, allowing her to precisely align the correct picks to the pins, instead of having to rely on feeling her way through the process or peering into the drum directly. The ArmPad is also able to provide a superficial metallurgical scan of reasonably thin metal surfaces enabling Anya to cut through steel panels to access secure electrical junction boxes, or air-conditioning ducts. The ArmPad maps the micro-fissures and stress points in order to provide a feasible path for Anya to cut through, using only a miniaturised radial “hot-laser”, instead of requiring heavy (not to mention, noisy) cutting equipment. There are many more sophisticated gadgets on offer that you will need to understand and put to good use!

A/ Anya has the usual complement of direct hand-to-hand combat abilities. However, she is lithe and agile, built more for speed and evasion than for all-out punch-ups. One guard at a time is about as much as she can handle confidently. She can stun guards and knock them down, but she lacks the weight to literally lay them out flat with a punch or kick for any useful length of time. This may enable her to flee the scene without getting a bullet in the back, but mostly if she has to take out a specific enemy out of action to create a window of opportunity for something fiddly (like hacking a computer or cracking a safe), then she’ll need to get them into a choke hold to put them down for a minute or so. This is extremely difficult if faced with more than one guard at a time, so the player will have to be smart enough to pick their moment carefully.

Q/ What does Stolen have that you think will appeal to consumers instead of other games of the same stealth genre (in particular MGS)?

A/ Stolen has many distinguishing features that will appeal to gamers that love stealth games but hopefully, taking into account some of the information we’ve supplied you can see that we are putting a new slant to the formula with a number of our own ideas. Although we keep coming back to stealth because it is a stealth oriented game, you’d be very wrong to think that it’s a slow cautious game because of that. We’ve worked on broadening the whole spectrum of stealth and subterfuge to make it much more proactive than merely hiding behind a cupboard and waiting for a guard to pass.

A/ Well Forge City is rife with crime and corruption all the way through to its rotten core. The distinction between government and organised crime is swiftly being forgotten. Anya is a professional thief, sure… but she doesn’t kill anyone and she only goes after high profile marks, not piggy banks. So comparatively speaking, she’s positively noble. As it stands within the context of the game, she is hired by some nefarious people, but she makes amends in the end. You just want to spank her anyway, don’t you?

QA/ Yes possibly, if she were real and umm... but hey - I'm asking the questions.

Q/ And finally, and quite possibly most importantly, can you make Anya’s boobs bigger? (sorry for that one)

A/ Don’t apologise. In fact we have already fielded that request from HIP’s own marketing people in the U.S. I can confirm also that Anya’s breast size has increased from what it used to be. Personally, I think there’s far more to being sexy than just cup-size.. but then the marketing statistics probably show otherwise. There’s a wise quote from the film “Weird Science” on the subject of boob size: “Anything bigger than a handful, you’re risking a sprained thumb”.