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As the work on the Fetid Bayou was coming to end, I spent my days working on the initial design of region 3, the Grand Junction. Grand Junction had the name, originally, because it was meant to be the location of a major highway intersection - the confluence of three 12 lane ribbons of concrete and asphalt that had weathered the test of time. There was really only one problem with that - as far as I knew there was no such place in Austin and I'd decided in my work on the mutant history that it was the citizens of Austin that helped the mutants build the Citadel. That left me with a dilemma: Do I stick to Austin's real road layout, or do I play dramatic license and mold the future Austin into what I needed it to be? This is where Google came to my rescue.

Well actually, it's where a small piece of software called Keyhole came to my rescue. Keyhole was the technology that became Google Earth, which later became part of Google Maps. When Keyhole had first debuted, I immediately paid for the pro "can use this in your professional work" version. I knew that some day I'd want to use the sat-photo terrain and road maps you could use in my work. Ironically, up till that day it had helped me "professionally" by being a toy. I'd scroll around the maps as I was thinking through a problem or taking a break or whatever, but I never used it for actual work... Until I had Austin open on the screen and I was zooming in the image to get a feel for the town from a "game camera" perspective. As I zoomed in the resolution to match our game's terrain resolution something really interesting came to light: Austin is big. I mean like really big. It's like 3 AA highways big.

That meant that I had a different problem: I had to figure out which part of Austin I wanted to show. I asked Dave Lee, our senior (and later lead) level designer about the town, since he lived there and he told me to research the Moon Towers because they were totally iconic. So I did, and found out where a bunch of them were. By luck, if I centered the moon towers near the river on the screen, the super iconic bridge, near the old Origin building, was on the left edge of the screen - right where it would make the perfect entrance icon for the zone. Further, that road/highway lead north to a big confluence where it intersected two other highways. With a start, I realized I was staring at the road layout for zone 3. I grabbed the image, pulled it into Photoshop and turned it into a very basic map for Grand Junction. Don't get me wrong, it was at best a road-map - The terrain itself was all hand designed and built - but the dilemma I had feared was not only gone, it's leaving had answered a few questions as well (e.g. would I use the moon towers). It was a great and easy start to the work...

Unfortunately, the rest of region 3 did not go that easily. To call Region 3 a struggle would be a disservice to the team that worked with and for me to make it happen. I can't - and won't - even claim credit as its primary designer. It was a collaborative effort. At best I wrote only half the missions in the zone (and honestly it's probably closer to a third)... and that's because of the situation we, as a company, were in.

Things were looking bleak. We were way undermanned and we had so little time. In the trenches, it felt like the end was near. For some of us, that feeling would turn out to be prophetic, but that's a different story.

The problem really, was the push to polish regions 1 and 2. Not that we decided to do them, mind, but rather when we chose to do them. Region 3 still wasn't done at the time. In fact, it had barely gone into production. Suddenly our teams, which had been primarily focused on working on one zone at a time, had to split our attention. Worse, I was under a lot of pressure to pay more attention to the polish pass than I was paying to the production of Grand Junction. The thought was that most people never cap characters in MMOs anyway, so why focus on the part only a small percentage will see when we can focus instead on the part everyone sees - the beginning. This was not a bad choice, just one that made things real hard for the poor Grand Junction.

None the less, Grand Junction was to include the culmination of several big stories in the world and I wanted it to be something special for mutant players. In some ways, Zirp, Dave Lee, Kedhrin, Jason and I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. In other ways, we fell far short of the mark. Ironically, I've never played all the way through region 3 - Zirp and co. did a lot with it after I left, including putting Ombwah and I into the game (daw, thanks guys!). The fact that I never got to see the final result in all its glory is one of myriad regrets I have about region 3.

The one regret that comes to mind most often has to be the loss of Plato Station. It was an integral piece of the world to me - the final clue in regards to INC and a reminder of what had happened to bring the world to this point. In a nutshell, the story went like this:

Hidden in hills near Austin was a secret underground installation - a sort of proto-ark - where one of the world's great AI was toiling away to unlock the secrets of the universe. Its name was Plato/Socrates and as its names implied, it sought the truth... Though this Plato was the most focused and brilliant mind to ever ponder unified field theory.

The AI in our world, as I saw them, worked as paired minds in the same hardware. Think of each pair as a single person with multiple personality disorder, but in their case it was a deliberate and necessary schism that made them functional. Where the Plato personality worked on the research at the expense of everything else, Socrates watched over Plato to ensure that he never went too far. To borrow a phrase from William Gibson, Socrates was the electromagnetic shotgun wired to the skull of Plato. If Socrates ever felt that Plato had become dangerous, he simply pulled the plug, severing any connection Plato had to the rest of the world. You see, in early research, the AI had a tendency to go sociopathic; to optimize its own programming to the point where it was formulating its own morality and ethical framework. By creating the schism of dual personalities with separate and compartmentalized jobs, the overall AI could achieve a sort of equilibrium where the actions of the overseer personality (Socrates) would counter the actions of the functional personality (Plato). The system worked - with Socrates to guard and guide Plato, the AI developed an incredible intellect, and an affection for the human researchers and workers that kept it running. Plato was a good guy, so was Socrates, but then something happened.

One night, Plato lost all contact with the outside world. Socrates had received an urgent warning from the Infrastructure Control AI, the AI responsible for maintaining the nation's infrastructure (everything from the power grid to the roads). The warning claimed that the network was compromised and that the TemperNet AI had gone rogue. Every AI was to disconnect from the network immediately to avoid contamination. To protect his charge, Socrates did as he was told.

The researchers, the human ones, working at Plato Station had no idea what was going on. As they worked through the night to try to get Socrates to reconnect the station to the network, he seemed to react psychotically. He seemed to strike back by enacting the station's lockdown protocol - sealing everyone inside the station. (In reality this was an attempt to save them from the impending nuclear strike)

Thinking Socrates had gone mad, they panicked. They tried to sabotage the AI in the hopes that they could then manually open the station, but it didn't work. Plato, totally disconnected from the network and unable to act thanks to Socrates, was forced to watch as his friends and family sealed their own fates, trapped in the dark and deathly station that had once been a bright home to a bright mind.

Poor Plato, he began to blame himself. The guilt drove him mad and he became obsessed with fixing the problem. Until Socrates shut him (and himself) down completely, Plato focused on reversing time itself. He actually figured out how to do it, but without his connections to the network and the hardware in the station, there was nothing he could do about it, but wallow in his guilt, knowing that had he had found the answer before he needed it, he could have saved them all...

(Trivia: If you count the number and size of the craters on the map, a quick Google would tell you how many missiles fell on Austin and what yields the warheads were... though you'd have to know the map scale, I suppose)

Of course, even if he had reversed time and prevented the disaster in the station, everyone inside was doomed to a post nuclear world, regardless. The world had ended while Plato and his family went mad in the dark.

And oh, how they went mad. The security detail went paranoid, the engineers went delusional (perhaps spore infections had begun?), and the few sane survivors all died trying to escape. Their story was to be told in the station through a series of diaries, logs and recorded conversations. Amusingly enough, that was a nod to System Shock and System Shock 2. I had, wrongly it turns out, figured that we'd never see another game like them and the diary thing they did was too emotionally awesome to let die. I could only approximate it (I only had text, no voice over), but still, I wanted to try. It's too bad you guys never saw it -- that part of it totally worked. It's a sad story, one of the ones I look back at with a small amount of pride.

Ah, where was I? Oh yeah, Plato station. Plato Station was also meant to wrap up the shipping installment of the Justice story. Ombwah and I had wanted Justice to be a "prestige faction" -- the idea was that players who had capped in each of their factions could later (in the expansion) defect to Justice and basically take their characters into a whole new direction. I wanted to hint that this was coming when I closed the Justice story and I wanted to do it in a totally unexpected way. So the idea was this:

In Plato station, players would repair the station, activate the AI and receive a visit from Prime Archon Ariana Santos herself. Only, it would turn out, she wasn't there to make you lord high mutant hero as you might expect, oh no. She's there to kill you and turn over the station to Justice, her leader. Ariana Santos reveals herself as the High Priestess, Justice's partner. She had already defected to Justice -- the mutant faction was being corrupted from within the whole time players were playing. Justice was that big.

Her story is deeper than that (she comes to Justice after searching for a new Voice, coming to believe that the Tribes had descended into dogmatic faith rather than truly walking the path and advancing the species), but that was the big reveal. You would fight her and Justice himself, side by side, in an obviously losing battle. Just as it looks like you can't possibly win, Plato steps in to save you the only way he can - by flinging you into the past. You arrive in Slaughter some 20 years before you visited it "the first time," but now knowing that the mutant government is corrupt - that the Tribes have truly lost their way and that Justice, was somehow to blame.

When you get back to the future, you find out that Ariana Santos is gone and no one knows where, except you (and no one believes you in the Citadel, I mean you're just a yokel from Tocado!). At least that was the plan...

Unfortunately none of it really happened. Try as I might, I could never get the mission to work quite right, so I had to keep cutting parts of it until what I was left with was "player rebuilds the station and Justice shows up to steal it." There is a litany of reasons why this happened, many of which have nothing to do with "try as I might I could never get the mission to work quite right," but really that's the one I can and will cop to: My ambition exceeded what we could actually do and no one had time to indulge that ambition with our ship date so close.

As far as I know, even though that version of the mission worked when I left, the mission was cut. It's a shame, driving through the corridors and playing in that weird 3 tiered central chamber was interesting. Not easy, which probably has something to do with its death, but certainly different from anything players saw in mutantdom prior to that.

Ah well. At least I got my Hunt the Wumpus tribute in. Wait, they cut that, too? F@#$!

That one I won't cop to. It worked.

It even followed the rules of Hunt the Wumpus. Though I know why it was cut, I'll bet. Essentially it was cut (or gutted if you prefer) because the monster's fat ass didn't fit through the doors (our AI didn't path so good). Irksome, that. Especially since it was fun, when the spider was half that size and fit through the doors right. Ah well, that's an idle regret anyway: At least the Depths got made. I really liked the whole "sewers undermap you can use as a shortcut around Grand Junction" concept and I'm glad it worked... even if I was one of the only guys on the team to ever bother to use the map that way.

As long as I'm talking about regrets, I should mention that I regret we never got to focus on Justice as much I wanted to. Justice, believe it or not, is one of the good guys. In a way, his army is a militant version of the Zendigs. His methods are horrible, but think about what he's accomplished. He's brought people from every faction together in something resembling harmony (let's call it "unity" eh?), after 200+ years of strife. I regret that I could never highlight how Justice really was the only hope for peace the three factions had.

The cool thing about regrets is they make the memories you have when looking back all the fonder. For everything that went wrong, something else went right. The Riders were awesome, for example and Kedhrin's work on the Borderlands was a cut above the rest... Zirp's "Raphael Diaz" story was bad ass and Dave's "shattered Austin" motif totally worked for me, complete with the tornado he suggested. A lot of great stuff went right, and the polish pass that harried me gave the game the much needed focus and facelift that it needed. In the time we worked on Region 3, we also polished regions 1 and 2, created the outpost system, put together a new team for Ground Zero and - the is part that I care about the most - I still found the time to interact with the beta community regularly. At that point, that mattered to me, most of all.

The players make it happen; the one road you cannot take is the one with no players on it.

I regret every tale untold, every road not taken, but looking back on the road I did take... at least I can say I'm proud I drove down it, as far as I did. I might drive it differently a second time around, but I don't regret the trip itself.

- Snipehunter

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