Now that it has been confirmed that Age of Booty (formerly known as Plunder) will be released this Wednesday, I figured some of you might be interested in reading more about the game before being able to try it out yourself. For those of you that aren't familiar with Max Hoberman: he was the multiplayer design lead of Halo 2 and 3, thus one of the developers responsible for key online features such as matchmaking and the party system. After his work at Bungie was basically done, he left and founded his own company named Certain Affinity. His team is also working on Left 4 Dead, but sadly Max wasn't allowed to talk that much about it due to the fact the Xbox 360 version hadn't been revealed by Valve yet when I originally contacted him.

Anyway... The actual interview (part 1, part 2) is entirely in English and discusses some of the following subjects:

● How we went from Bungie to Certain Affinity.
● Hints at a (potentially) next project.
● Whether he and his team would "only" like to develop multiplayer games.
● His opinion about other XBLA games, and what he thinks about improving Xbox Live Arcade itself.
● More details about Age of Booty's console customization options.
● His stance on why they included a single player mode in Age of Booty.
● Some tech related info, such as the framerate.
● More information about the game's map editor.
● Settling once and for all whether Age of Booty truly is Pimps at Sea!
● Et cetera.

Lastly, a few quotes:

XP: Would you be interested in collaborating with other, inexperienced XBLA developers should there be an increase of thorough multiplayer games on the service? Or might this be something that generally isn’t done in the industry?

MH: The games business is competitive, though I do have a little bit of experience collaborating with other groups inside of Microsoft. A lot of people used to come to me asking how to build a community web site as strong as Bungie.net. I always had the same answer—focus on building a game that people are passionate about, and then you can worry about everything else! It would be hard for me to help someone that lacked this focus, but if I found someone I’d gladly share some of my experiences with them. I’ve already done that with a couple of local developers here in Austin, which has an amazingly friendly game development community.

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XP: Now here’s something that also intrigued me for a while: how did Certain Affinity’s relationship with Capcom actually get off the ground? When Capcom suddenly announced that it would publish your game, a game with pirates at that, it honestly seemed a little peculiar that they were involved…

MH: We met with a lot of publishers when we were at GDC in 2007, not long after we started the company. Capcom made a point about being interested in small, downloadable games and so when Plunder was ready to be shown we called them up. They came to visit, played one game, and - excuse the pun - were hooked. Once we met their team we were really excited to work with them. I always tell my team that the best business partners are the ones that need you, and we saw a definite need on their part that we fulfilled, and vice versa. Our goals are amazingly aligned, creating the highest quality social online experiences around. I didn’t leave Bungie for nothing; Certain Affinity is determined to put out only AAA quality games that fit this billing.

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I guess nobody's interested in this week's release...