Interviews// Bioware's Miles Holmes

SPOnG: How much creative freedom were you given by SEGA? Did anyone from SEGA or Sonic Team give you a hard time with certain elements you might have wanted to include?

Miles Holmes: We had a lot of freedom in some areas and very little freedom in other areas. One reason we don’t have certain items that you can equip like suits of armour is because SEGA and Sonic Team are very particular about the way their characters look and that’s understandable. But on the other hand, they gave us an incredible amount of freedom to develop our story – that’s what we feel BioWare does best and I think they agreed with that. So, they gave us a lot of leeway in terms of what we could do with their IP.

To be honest, I did not expect that they would give us this much creative freedom to do what we’ve done in the story, and when you guys get to play through the game you’ll know what I’m talking about.


SPOnG: One of the cool dialogue features we discovered is what I’m calling ‘Sonic’s Attitude Button’, where you can give a rather sarcastic response to your teammates. What kind of thought processes did you go through to expand on Sonic’s character? What were the limitations?

Miles Holmes: Well, we approached that more from the standpoint of ‘What would the fan want to do with Sonic?’ and how the player expects Sonic to react. We know that Amy is loved by some, and hated by others, so one of the plots in the game is sort of like a romance arc with Sonic.

Of course it’s nothing on the scale of Mass Effect or anything, but you do have this romance plotline running through the game and it’s up to you whether you want to go through with it or not. If you just want to be a jerk to Amy you go ahead, and if you don’t want to use her in your party, that’s fine as well.

But, for those people who do like Amy, go ahead – keep her in your party and work that romance plot, see where it takes you. Obviously we have some pretty set limits as to how far that will take you, but… (laughs). We just thought it would be more fun for the player, and it’s like that with most of the characters. One thing we noticed is that there is sort of a dissention about many of the characters. Some people really like a few of the supporting stars and some people hate them – Big the Cat is a good example.

One of the challenges for me was to ensure that for every character that is playable, there has to be a good reason for putting them into your party. I want you to have to sweat that decision – it shouldn’t be obvious to just take the standard Team Sonic every time, it’s like ‘well I like this character’ and ‘Cream the Rabbit has this ability that can be useful later on’, so who do you pick?


SPOnG: The presentation of Sonic Chronicles is rather unique, the opening intro actually resembles a comic book, which I assume is a throwback to the Archie comics. Have you taken a lot of inspiration from areas outside the games, like the cartoons and comics?

Miles Holmes: Well, we had to focus on the game fiction, in terms of where the story was going to go, but the comics and TV shows certainly provided influence to the types of things we could introduce to the game fiction. Fans of the Archie series may very well see that we’ve paid homage to some of the things that might have happened in the comics.