This is all from my perspective and how I remember it. I may have misremembered some bits...
I-War 2 was first proposed just around the time that I-War shipped to the states, via a cinematic trailer created by the original team's artists.
Development started once Particle Systems had signed a 3 project deal with Infogrames. Also considered for development was a PS2 I-War game called T-Zero, but that never went past the design proposal stage unfortunately. The Storm Petrel was designed originally for T-Zero, and there's a subtle reference to the cancelled proposal in the Storm Petrel's Encyclopaedia entry. The ship design was so good, and the high res assets had already been created so it was incorporated into I-War 2.
I was working on Defiance for the Deluxe edition while the I-War 2 team was formed. I wasn't a part of that core team at the beginning, in fact apart from the artists few of the original I-War team were involved in I-War 2 at first.
I-War 2 was always going to be a more open game than I-War 1, but it evolved much more over time than I-War 1 did. The most concrete part of the game that was worked out was the overall plot, and missions were designed and worked into that.
Originally it was also going to be a Dreamcast game which led to some design decisions with the various screens and interfaces that went on to cause some issues for the PC version, long after the Dreamcast version was cancelled. However some of the design constraints of developing for a console led to the much easier to understand HUD and command interface, so there were benefits to that too.
The piracy mechanic was partly based on a mission for Defiance where you swapped cargo pods on a freighter. It was realised that technology made it possible to add individual cargo pods to freighter structures, and these could be detached and stolen. Ironically the piracy mechanic didn't fully come together until really late in development, and it wasn't known how successful it would be. In the end it turned out to be the most fun and addictive feature of the game.
The original idea for the space stations was to have them randomly generated, with dockable segments, but the overhead from that was too huge, and in the end we decided on a few fixed designs.
We also planned to generate random side missions, but this proved infeasible, so we created a more limited set of template side missions instead.
The sequences in the station where you see the interior locations came about quite late in development due to feedback from Infogrames.
The game was in development for over two years, during which time the bottom dropped out of the space-sim market unfortunately, so by the time it was released it was critically acclaimed but sales were disappointing.
The game was developed on mainly Pentium 2 400mhz PCs, with Geforce graphic cards. The framerates and resolutions you can play the game at today were undreamed at that time. Max resolution we played at was probably 1024x768, and the framerates probably around 15-20fps. I remember seeing the game running on a Pentium III 1ghz Geforce4 machine after release and marvelling at how smooth it was.
Post edited February 24, 2011 by Ravenger