For those of you that haven’t heard of Antinomy it’s an upcoming video game being made by Against All Odds Games in collaboration with Homegrown Games. The game is currently on Kickstarter and the developers are hoping to raise £80’000 in order to deliver the best possible version of the game to the consumer sometime in 2016. If you think you’d like to support Antinomy, and see it come to PC, PS4, and Xbox One, you can do so here.
What’s it all about? The game is set in a fictional Middle Eastern country, which gives you 20 square kilometres of open world to explore. The player steps into the shoes of Nathaniel Rosenthal who returns home to Al-Hamra in his early 20s after seeking an education and military training abroad. However his happy homecoming is short lived when Al-Hamra is attacked by forces from The Capital. Nathaniel barely survives and is forced to roam the vast desert in an effort to rebuild his clan and find new allies to help him retake Al-Hamra.
What makes Antinomy stand out from the crowd is the fact that it’s not afraid to explore meaningful and mature themes such as family, friendship, justice, and unity all while attempting to demonstrate that people from all walks of life can work together and live in prosperity if they’d only put aside their differences. These themes are explored throughout the 34 main story missions and 35+ side quests.
We here at The Games Cabin thought Antinomy sounded great and wanted to learn more, so we reached out to Against All Odds Games for an exclusive interview. Well we got the interview with none other than Antinomy’s visionary, writer and producer Ali-Han Ibragimov. Wait there’s more to his title than that, he also happens to be CEO of Against All Odds Games. Here is our exclusive interview with Ali-Han:
1: I’m after reading up on Antinomy and must admit I’m intrigued, but how would you, as the developers, pitch the game to someone who’s never heard of it before?
Antinomy is an open world Action – Adventure game that perfectly combines fun and important messages. In this game you’ll see a lot of speeches and thoughts regarding topics that have been raised in the game, and a lot of them are relevant today, too. One of the most important concepts of the game, is that we have a very international set of characters. And same applies to our development team. Different people from different cultures and faiths unite in their pursuit of the same goal, in the game it’s fighting injustice, in our team it’s creating the game.
2: While the game is set in a fictional Middle Eastern country your Kickstarter mentions quite a bit on real world history, such as the Russo-Turkish War and the Ottoman Empire. How important to the development team is it to link the fictional world to the real one? Will real history play a big role in the game or is it just a backdrop to set the story up?
It will play a role in the game, but mostly serve as a background of game events and characters’ past. We wanted to have our main characters really carved out in every detail, which includes a background story woven into the world at hand. Of course, there will be several moments where players will ask themselves if our world wouldn´t be a better place today if the events from Antinomy had actually occurred.
3: The main character is Nathaniel Rosenthal, tell us a little bit about him, and why we should care about his story.
Nathaniel Rosenthal is the son of the man who started the revolt, along with Omar and Mustafa. His father has been betrayed and killed, and Omar took him under his wing, and became the clan’s new leader. He was mentored and educated by Omar, growing into a solid successor as the leader of the clan.
Nathaniel is the man with a strict moral code, and he never breaks it. He got a philosophy and ideology of a real revolutionary. He wants to make a change in the society, he wants to diminish the reigning lawlessness, he wants to get rid of all social differences that stall people from the progress, and he unites people from different cultures and ethnicities to set an example of justice and equality.
4: Your Kickstarter mentions that the game takes place in a “20 square kilometres open world with a vast lethal desert.” The phrase “lethal desert” implies that the environment will play a role in the gameplay, how does walking through the desert affect the player towards, for example, being in one of the games cities?
Exploring the desert is a key game element, but players will have to really think twice before walking into the unknown – because you’ll never know what you gonna get. Thirst, mirages, sandstorms, heat, quicksand – and of course bandits and thugs.
5: Your Kickstarter also mentions some things that are common in RPGs (such as trading, crafting, player skills, character customization, and so on), but it also mentions political alignments, shifting alliances, diplomacy and conquest. Those elements sound unique for an open-word game, I’d usually expect to see them in the likes of a Total War strategy game, so I’d like to hear a little more on them. How do they involve the player? How do they affect the game?
Nate Rosenthal will gain more and more control over the world, as the leader of the clan. The player in his shoes will have the choice to convince other factions to join his campaign, or execute it alone, what villages to protect, to expand, to trade with. All these decisions will affect the environment of the game and its world. If you don’t protect a certain village, it might be wiped out by barbarian bandits the next day. If you cannot supply a settlement with the basic goods to survive, they will be forced to align with your enemies. So all the decisions will be significant.
6: Tell me a little bit about the team at Against All Odds Games. How big is it? Who’s a part of it? What other games have the people there worked on? That sort of thing.
Against All Odds – it’s the Family for me. Literally, I have a few Family members working with me in this company. Antinomy is our debut game.
7: Against All Odds Games isn’t the only team involved with Antinomy, Homegrown Games is also a part of the project. How did this collaboration come about? What roles do both teams play in the development of Antinomy?
I’m writer and producer of Antinomy, and my company will be the publisher of Antinomy, when Homegrown Games will be taking care of the whole development process. Basically, Against All Odds provides the vision and the core, and Homegrown Games executes the vision and adds some of their spices to it.
About two years ago, I’ve met Ivan Ertlov, the CEO of Homegrown Games, and we talked about the game, I told him how I envision this game, and he loved it. You know, he had this experience from his work on Gothic and Spellforce, at the time we met, he was producer of Anno: Build an Empire for BlueByte / Ubisoft, now he is part of the Mipumi team working for IOI on the upcoming Hitman game, so he has quite some experience I find useful. However, neither Ivan nor Homegrown Games messed around with my creative vision, and that was very important for me.
So long story short, we agreed to work together, and I’m very happy about it. All of us are very dedicated to this project, and I couldn’t imagine anybody else right now developing this game instead of them. They rolled out a first version on their prototyping engine, tested my ideas and visions against gamers expectations and tech limits, and now they are moving all that into an astonishing Unreal 4 game. They are really doing a great job.
8: I see Dave Fennoy’s on board, that’s some pretty big talent for an indie dev to be working with. What was it like to work alongside him?
Dave is a professional, he knows his thing. When I heard him recording the first time, I really saw the insight of his professionalism. I feel like he is a perfect fit for Omar. He is also a great guy, I absolutely loved talking to him about Antinomy and other things. At the moment, we are very pleased that another big name has signed on – Adam Harrington, who dubbed Bigby Wolf and therefore worked together with Dave on The Wolf Among Us. Nice coincidence, isn´t it?
9: “34 main story missions, 35+ side quests,” what do these side quests involve?
Every side quest will be a story of its own, we made sure it doesn’t come out generic. These quests will have variety of stories, from assisting eccentric British lords digging in the desert for historic artifacts, to investigating murders, to chasing secret sects.
10: Ok I have two last questions about the game and it’s Kickstarter. Firstly if the game reaches its goal of £80,000 will that guarantee a release on Xbox One and PS4? Secondly what happens if you don’t reach your Kickstarter goal? Will the game still be released in some form just with less content?
Both we and Homegrown Games have already invested significant sums into the game, so yes, the base goal does guarantee a release on those two platforms, they will probably come out a little bit later due to TCR / TRC compliance work. But if this Kickstarter doesn’t succeed, we’ll launch another one. However, we are pretty sure this one will succeed, so you will get a game that won’t disappoint you.
11: So far you have 60 backers on Kickstarter, is there anything you’d like to say to the fans that have supported Antinomy so far?
I want to thank all people that supported Antinomy so far, all of you guys bring us one step closer to making it possible. And those who didn’t support us yet, we certainly hope that you do, whether its £1 or £1,000, your support matters. We have very high expectations for Antinomy, and honestly, I think sky is the limit for us with this game. We’ll make sure it’ll come out as a classic!
I’d like to say a quick thank you to Ali-Han for his time, and the interview (which was conducted via email). You can check out Antinomy’s trailer above. Remember if you think Antinomy sounds like your cup of tea you can help support it by heading over to Kickstarter. Lastly if you want all the latest updates on the game you can follow @AgainstAllOddsE over on Twitter, or if you’re dying to see what I re-tweet its @conorlhutton.