Inside Bridge Command, a life-sized starship ready to propel you into space
Apr. 21, 2024Interview | Edge magazine boldly goes on a tour of the USC Havock
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Owen Kingston is Parabolic Theatre’s artistic director; today, according to the insignia on his jumpsuit, he’s also the captain of the USC Havock. Kingston lays one palm on a scanner and its entrance opens, with that trademark science-fiction swoosh, to reveal the metallic angles of a starship’s access corridor.
Off it, beyond another door – swoosh – is a shuttle pod, used for away-mission excursions or emergency evacuations. At the far end is a med bay and a cargo dock, complete with a brig, its entrance outlined with red light. On our way to the bridge, our tour guide points out bunks set into the corridor’s walls. These are so that sessions can eventually run overnight, or for entire weekends, he explains. Off this corridor is something rarely seen in sci-fi shows: a bathroom, its video porthole displaying the starfield outside. “We thought about putting showers into the ships too, but at some point you have to start axing things,” Kingston laughs. “It’s incredible how quickly you can spend three million quid.”
Up and away
There are disadvantages to using EmptyEpsilon, Kingston acknowledges: “The 3D graphics engine is a decade old”. And even then, given the game’s humble origins, it wasn’t exactly competing with Elite: Dangerous. The objects and environments on screen look like they could be from a decade earlier still, while the UI of various supporting maps, menus and radar screens is sharply functional, looking more like graphing software than a game. But perhaps that’s thematically appropriate. Besides, Kingston insists, “What we’ve found is that people don’t tend to notice too much when they’re actually playing.”
This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine. For more fantastic in-depth interviews, features, reviews, and more delivered straight to your door or device,subscribe to Edge.
Instead of graphical heft, Parabolic has chosen to divert power into the interfacing of software and hardware. While there are touch screens at each station, Bridge Command’s most satisfying interactions require getting your hands dirty. Encountering space debris on screen, for example, provides an opportunity to steer the ship towards it for an in-game loot drop – which causes a hatch, on one side of the bridge, to start beeping. Behind it is a kind of dumbwaiter, Kingston explains, loaded by unseen hands – knowledge that hardly diminishes the thrill of pulling out an enormous crate, its hefty latches snapping open to reveal a pair of fuel cells. These can be used to replace empties out in the corridor, with a series of twists and pulls – actions that will be instantly familiar to any sci-fi aficionado. The overhead lights dim, then surge, and the ship’s various screens show the fuel meter beginning to rise.
Bridge Command is in part a resource management game, in which various power levels must be constantly counterweighted against one another in the face of crisis. However, it’s also a game of communication and cooperation. While the bridge crew that greets us on this visit is Parabolic’s team, testing the game ahead of launch, real sessions will be staffed entirely by players. On arrival you’ll each be given a jumpsuit and assigned a role: engineering, navigation, weapons and so on. Each of these corresponds to a station on the bridge, and a set of minigames borrowed from EmptyEpsilon. The engineer, for example, uses an FTL-like interface to direct repair drones to different rooms and systems; meanwhile the captain, being a manager, stands at the helm issuing orders in their preferred manner and letting everyone else get on with the real work.
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Love exploring (virtual) space and pushing the bounds of reality? Check out the 25Best sci-fi gamesto travel into the future with
“We’re trying to pioneer what we’re calling ‘adaptive narrative’, where the audience isn’t limited to a set of pre-chosen options, like a decision tree”
Beyond this core loop of simple activities, Kingston promises there’s room for players to improvise new solutions on the fly. “The scenarios are all designed to give loads of different ways of tackling the problem,” he says, demonstrating one prop that players will explicitly be told not to use. But unlike the light sockets of an escape room, these rules are there to be broken. Players who think to use this equipment will gain a temporary boost, but at a cost, since it triggers an invisible countdown to a story event.
“We’re trying to pioneer what we’re calling ‘adaptive narrative’,” Kingston says, “where the audience isn’t limited to a set of pre-chosen options, like a decision tree.” This is a perfectly common concept in video game design, of course: presenting players with a consistent world and toolset that can be applied in multiple ways is the philosophy underpinning everything from Dishonored to Tears Of The Kingdom. But it’s not how things have traditionally worked in live interactive environments. In escape rooms, there’s generally a single solution to be found, while immersive theatre shows might just offer a choice of scenes to investigate.
As for what those story reasons might be, Kingston alludes to a few scenarios Parabolic has up its sleeve. Players might be tasked with escorting a nosy politician, adding an extra layer of social interaction with an actor, or else made responsible for a prisoner who breaks free. It’s easy to think of these as Star Trek episodes, and Parabolic wants to take that further, linking stories together into longer arcs, using a custom version of Notion’s workflow tool to track returning players. “The gamemaster can make sure they’re not giving them the same mission again, but also remember characters they’ve interacted with, and use that to brief the actors before they go on,” Kingston says. “If we can make you feel like you’re the stars of your own sci-fi TV show, and the world remembers you, the hope is that people will want to re-attend.”
It’s no surprise to hear that Parabolic is thinking long term, given the size of investment involved – not to mention how long Kingston and team have been waiting to deliver on this concept, leaving them with plenty of time to think of ways that Bridge Command could be expanded further still. Kingston lays out plans for larger multiplayer games. “We’re not opening with this in place, but by the summer we’ll be running shows with two ships in the same game where you can work cooperatively. Or, long term, go head to head – we want to introduce a civil war storyline.”
The ships can even dock with one another, using a polytunnel that the Parabolic team can move into place. Kingston has plans to use this method to introduce away missions, too, where players can visit sets built elsewhere within the arches: “A space station or a research lab or whatever – we really want to build a space casino at some point.” It’d be much easier to just let players walk freely between these, of course, but the idea is that a door never needs to swoosh open into what should be the void of space. Having worked so hard to construct this fantasy, Parabolic wants to maintain an airlock between it and the real world.
This feature originally appeared inEdge magazine. For more fantastic features, you cansubscribe to Edge right hereorpick up a single issue today.
Alex is Edge’s features editor, with a background writing about film, TV, technology, music, comics and of course videogames, contributing to publications such as PC Gamer, Official PlayStation Magazine and Polygon. In a previous life he was managing editor of Mobile Marketing Magazine. Spelunky and XCOM gave him a taste for permadeath that’s still not sated, and he’s been known to talk people’s ears off about Dishonored, Prey and the general brilliance of Arkane’s output. You can probably guess which forthcoming games are his most anticipated.
“It seems we’ve missed the mark”: As their Steam review score drops to 14%, Dauntless devs wade into feedback after a disastrous update that gutted progress
“It’s impossible to not be cocky when you have a game like this”: It Takes Two’s Josef Fares is back and drumming up another Game Awards reveal
Get hundreds of hours of RPG goodness for $30 with this bundle of 8 games that includes the first two Baldur’s Gate games, which are absolutely worth playing
