OGaming: Let's start from the beginning. Why did Sam McGrath, Travis and Trevor Stringer, who received such acclaim for developing Savage at S2 Games, leave to start Offset?

Rod Green: It's pretty simple really; they just wanted to start a company to make a kick arse game. Being just employees they were limited to how much influence they could have so they decided to break off and make it the dream happen

OGaming: Understood. Sometimes to really get things done you have to throw off the shackles of "The Man." But, was your goal to create a new game with "Project Offset," or was the original plan to create a development tool to license to companies such as Red 5?

Rod Green: The goal has always been to create an epic FPS game. We developed the engine in such a way that it will allow us to develop quickly and expand the features as needed. As it turned out there are a lot of other companies who are interested in an engine that has these traits, so we, quite unexpectedly, received a lot of interest to license the engine externally.

OGaming: Necessity, the mother of invention, really seems to have paid off. So, what were some of the limitations of earlier MMO development engines that you worked to overcome with the Offset Engine?

Rod Green: Every part of the engine was developed with the idea to support the creation of a huge amount of content and to render these assets with the highest cinematic quality utilizing the most efficient real time techniques possible.

MMOs are massive in nature and so our engine and tools facilitate this development. As the game development industry progresses, these large team sizes we are seeing will give way to more efficient tools and methods and thus reducing the burden of overstaffing. This is where smaller independent teams can adapt to these techniques and deliver the content needed to succeed.