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| Anachronox Preview | // article |
| I got to see Anachronox yesterday. I received an email from Eidos here in the UK saying 'come along to a press day and see Anachronox and meet Tom Hall!' so I of course said 'Yeah, sure. Will there be free beer?'. So off I went to the Playing Fields. To be perfectly honest, Anachronox in full flight was nothing like what I expected. I thought it would be similar to System Shock 2 or Deus Ex in appearance and execution, but boy was I wrong! For a start, Anachronox uses a third-person control system for character movement rather than First Person, and rather than being a lone player, for most of the game you can have up to three people in your party, switching between them as required. You will need to make use of this facility, as progressing through the game needs you to make best use of the various world skills each character has, skills which you can improve through use or through mentoring. For example, we were shown the lock picking skill at one stage. It was a fairly simple lock to pick, being only three tumblers. Increasing skill levels in this area will do things like increase the amount of time you have to pick the lock, letting you attempt more difficult locks and the type. We were shown another world skill that involved making a patch circuit in a piece of equipment. As a basic world skill you would only get one or two circuit connector pieces, meaning some equipment was inaccessible as you would never be able to create a complete bridging circuit, however as your skill level increases you gain more circuit pieces allowing you more freedom of movement. Despite, or perhaps because of being based on the Quake 2 engine, Ion Storm have made major modifications, introducing effects such as shadows, 32 bit colours, real-time lighting effects and a particle system. They've also created a scripting engine called APE which moves the content of the game away from the maps - which take a long time to compile - and into an external script form - which doesn't. Also included in a full scriptable camera system for those people wanting to make modifications, and used to good effect within the game itself to create cut scenes that tell you the story as it unfolds. the APE engine also allows for entire new games to be created within it's scripting environment, which can then be imported into the game as whole. The game as a whole has a very strong back-story which is transmitted to you through the cut scenes, and here you can see some more of the work that has gone into the game. Each model has been created with the ability to deform the facial model and skin, allowing lip-synch to be incorporated, along with character emotions that greatly enhance the emotional involvement of this game. The intentions has always been to ensure the game is a playable and enjoyable experience, drawing you into it and getting you involved with the characters themselves. The designers have made a number of game play decisions to back this up, one of the most obvious being the removal of accidental death through falling from great heights - which means you can't walk off the edge of a cliff. There has also been a conscious decision to emulate the game play stle of Shigeru Myamoto, with the game play starting easy, getting progressively harder, then once you have mastered your skills, the game gets easy again, but you have a new skill or item to play with, and the difficulty starts increasing again. This style of game play flow serves to keep the game interesting, and to avoid the 'it just gets harder and harder' as you go along. Like all RPG's - well, like just about all games really - there is a combat element to the game. Since you control a party as a whole rather than just one member of the party, Ion Storm have decided to go down the turn-based combat route, very similar to Final Fantasy 7 and it's ilk. One major difference though is that the combat structure and story line actually allow you to see monsters before you have to fight them, and in many instances either avoid the encounter altogether or indirectly affect the outcome before the fighting begins. Utilising the combat skills of each of the party members in combination can also serve to enhance your party's combat abilities, and often a combination of attacks on a single enemy may be more effective than random attacks. Ion Storm have also implemented a save-game system based on 'save points' rather than more traditional save game systems. The option is there however to switch the save points off and save the game wherever you like. Which version will prove the most effective and most popular is certainly open for debate, especially if the save-point system is used to enhance the emotional intensity of the game. So when is it out, and can I play against my friends? Well, Ion Storm hope to have the in-game content finalised by December, with a planned release sometime in March 2001. You'll need at least a p2-300 with 64Mb of RAM and a Voodoo2 with 12Mb of Video Memory, and a demo will be released around the date of release, although whether before or after the game hits the shelves hasn't been decided yet. And multiplayer has not been included - it's a single player game first and foremost. That's not to say that multiplayer couldn't be added to the game - the tools used to build the game are being shipped with it, so the possibility is certainly there. The screenshots scattered around this article are all taken from the latest Eidos Anachronox Digital Press Kit. Thanks to Eidos for the beer and Tom Hall and Ion Storm for the game. | |
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