Last writeup of the day, as I was feeling awful by the mid-afternoon of GDC and went back to my hotel room to sleep.  Sinusitis FTL. 

The highlight of this was definitely a long-ish demo of Prototype.  It looks quite exciting though 2008 is really shaping up as the year of amazing open-world games so the competition will be fierce!

Prototype:  Open Mind, Open World: Next Generation Thinking

Tim Bennison and Eric Holmes, Radical

Prototype, new IP from Radical.  Radical, 17 years in business.  30 million units.  Simpsons Hit and Run, Scarface, Hulk UD.  Epic Combat, over the top locomotion in a real world setting from Hulk. 

Give the player something new.  Not just better, give them more.  More leads to a new experience… Something new.  The Prestige … not just X meets Y, where is it going? Value!   Why bother?  Others are exploring “better”, is that where new experiences lie?  Better taps out eventually… 

Wolf 3D > Goldeneye > Call of Duty > Call of Duty 4.  Visual quality of better is slowing down.  Approaching real, and then what? 

“Next Gen Open World”.  What is next gen?  Just hardware?  It’s a software change, something that creates a new experience that was not previously considered possible.    Some are More and Better, Elite on the C64.   What is open-world?  OWG – free roam, sandbox.  Systems interacting = fun.  Players behave badly in OWGs, so go with the flow.  OWG is a medium, can be used to tell a lot of stories.

Player character, simulations you can poke / collide.  Environment, player freedom with parallel story threads.  Tough to make. 

Protoype, a “from the ground up” OWG concept.  You are the prototype, a man without memory and shape shifting abilities.   Mind is a blank, fill his past with the minds of his victims.  Steals memories by taking them from the physical form of other people.  Dangerous + Aloof + Calculating.

New IP, constantly evangelizing internally.  Shapeshifter, become a mailbox – no no.

Tom Clancy meets Stephen King.  Military, real world + distrurbing.  Reality plus one fantastic element.  No laser beams and hover tanks, but one element, “the virus”.  Sweeping through NYC.  Make it feel real, a real place, makes it much more intense.  NYC in current day is closer to home.   “What the hell is that” – look in closer and find something disturbing. 

Story touches on real world issues:  viruses, martial law, conspiracies. 

Get team on the same page to narrow focus to the project.

Game Pillars:  Deadly Shapeshifting Action, Power and Agility, Deceive or Destroy (player choice), NYC is your hunting ground (NYC as a character), Unravel the Conspiracy.

New tools in an OWG, “consume and become”.  Not a hero, not a villain, but equipped to do things the player wants to do in that setting. 

“Web of Intrigue”, hundreds of memories that form the story.  Player driven.

Locomotion: adaptive open-world parkour.  Seamless integration with combat.  Movement on dynamic objects.  Scale of movement vs fidelity.

NYC: grounds the whole experience.  World evolves through the story, not just a snapshot.  “cascading effects”  Metagame – 3 way war across NYC.  Player, military, infected.  Immersed in it and you can affect it.

OWG production: systems deliver content.  System = engine, content = fuel.  Order of construction is important.  Visibility comes late because systems are the experience.  Production flow:  build systems then add content.  Parallel system and environment stuff.  Build game content comes late.

OWG, player nature is key.  “oh, can I do that?”  Make stuff up as you go along.  Players behave badly, that’s in their nature.  Can you make the player care?  Generically, no.  But about their things, yes.  So no tottering school buses, but RTS base model works.   Specific characters.

Basic structure:  kill guys and take their stuff.  Interconnection of systems is much richer in an OWG.  Those interactions are the good stuff.  This is where the rubber hits the road.  Goal is lots of connections between systems.  Example: bases in isolation, vs set in the middle of a city.  Identify your systems early and bake them into the IP.  Consciously connect them!  Consider scale, need to identify that.

More vs Better – we need to explore “more” more!