The “Break it Down” Blog

Going off of the demo GameSpot was given at the Leipzig Games Convention, I had a mini heart attach… let’s take a look:

• Completely open world. At the beginning of the game the only goal of the game is introduced to you via a first-person scene: Kill the major warlord in Africa. From that point on, everything else you do (people you kill, friends you make, bosses you take on) are completely up to you and ancillary to the main story line.
• Literally… completely open world. You can go anywhere, any time you want with no load scenes. The world is constantly streamed off your HD and from the quotes in the article the world sounds like it’s 60+ square km or something in size (Directory said “1km of terrain is under 1% of the game’s total size).
• You choose from a list of Mercs to play when you start the game. Everyone/some of the Mercs you don’t select become NPCs you can deal with in the game (shoot in the face, befriend, etc.)
• The world has real weather. Wind currents can blow fires in certain directions, clouds form based on the atmospheric conditions, etc.
• Destructible environments (similar to Crysis)

• AI gives schedules and activities to NPCs. For example, coming upon the same scene, the baddies will be doing something different every time. Example given was about attacking a fuel depot where 2 guys were talking and one guy was eating lunch.
• AI will make decisions during attack that may include using vehicles to persue you. In the demo the AI (4x of them) crawled into a truck and chased the player down trying to ram him. Unfortunately they hit a dump in the road and rolled the truck… GameSpot said the director looked genuinely surprised at that result (Sweet!)
• Oh yea, VEHICLES.
• NPCs you befriend will come to your rescue from time to time. You can ‘engage’ them by talking with them and letting them know your plan, it’s possible to have them show up at a battle and help you out. Again, director claims this is AI driven, so you won’t get same result every time.

Overall this is sounding a lot like Operation Flashpoint (ultra-real worlds, no limits on battle, vehicles) with Crysis-like graphics with some NOLF-esque NPCs and friendlies thrown in… I totally dig this.

Then again I’m not sure how much salt to take these impressions with. The demo was hands-off, so it was being shown to the GS crew, also Ubi said it developed it’s own custom engine for this game… why not just license Crytek? And lastly, I think we’ve heard claims of weather and AI like this since Unreal 2 and no one has ever delivered to a level that made the PR match the implementation.

So fingers crossed… if a game like this WAS coming out… now would be the time, and the hardware available now would likely condone it to. So let’s hope it’s the case.