VicDienekes
04-28-2007, 11:44 PM
I had the good fortune to be invited to the first retailer presentation of Timeshift for 360 and PC on Tuesday, here in the Uk at RAF Cosford's Air Force Museum.
The games producer, Kyle Pechesel (I may have misspelt his second name), gave a pretty explosive demo of the game and its features in addition to going over the work on the game he and the guys at Saber have done over the past year.
First off, the graphics of this remarkable FPS were running @ 1080p on a 360. That's the same high-end HDMI perfomance you get out of the PS3. And unlike Resistance on the PS3 but like Gears of War, the game engine supports texture streaming. Time shift made both look ugly.
But that's by the by. The game itself is stunning. The way Kyle told it, he and the dev team were 7 bugs from finished- a day's work at most in dev terms- when his superior @ Sierra stopped him in the hallway and asked him what he would do to the game if he had another year to work on it. He was pretty pissed...so he told him.
"I'd pull the physics system and replace it with Havoc. The story isn't resonanting with gamers right now, so I'd completely rewrite the story, I'd change the main character for the same reason and ..." so on and so forth. He was a little surprised when the guys at Sierra told him that he should do just that.
The script written by a Hollywood writer at no small expense? Gone. Kyle's only comment on the voice acting and 10,000 lines of dialogue for the old lead character already provided by Dennis Quaid- "He's gone. I'm willing to make sacrifices to make the best game I can"
Timeshift's premise, that the invention of time control was taken advantage of by its inventor to go back in time and take control of the world and set up a fascist state and you the protaganist have gone back in time to stop him isn't entirely original. The gameplay is. Unlike what the dev team refer to as the "Oh shit button" time control of Prince of Persia, you can stop time, slow time and reverse time whilst being immune those effects.
Say what?
Let me describe some of the things I saw being done in the game- time stopped for everyone Kyle ran up to two armed guards, grabbed a weapon out of the hands of the first, turned and shot the second guy in the head before backing up just before time started back up for the rest of the world, leaving the first guy wondering where the fuck his gun had gone and the how the fuck it had done so. For a moment, before he got kneecapped.
"By now" the producer said, "you'll have realised I want the gamer to feel godlike"
"Don't make the mistake of thinking this will make the game easy- if you mis-use the time-suit's powers, I'll punish you. Seriously, if you don't play well and you don't play smart, I'm going to fuck you up."
I saw the producer have his character run along a walkway on the second story of a building, smash a window and jump thru the empty frame to gain access to the building. Nothing new about that. Once inside, he hit reverse time and the glass lift off the ground and followed its path to the ground back into the frame as a complete unbroken window.
"Now no-one will know I've gone thru here. You can be stealthy in this game, you don't have to but if you want to, the tactical advantages of doing so are there for the taking."
Later in the same level, an obstacle was overcome by slowing time. The seesawing of a fullpipe suspended on a crane necessary for traversing a broken bridge was reduced by slowing time, allowing you the time to cross before you fell out the end of the pipe. Another time, Kyle shot a barrel off a high ledge jumped on it, and reversed time to carried up on the "elevator" he created on the fly. Later, a two story mech blew the shit out a corrider between one half of the building and the half kyle's character was in. Reverse time, the completely demolished building springs back to its untouched self andhe runs thru the corrider to the other side and ducks down the stairs. Time starts again the corrider blows up again, and the mech's unstoppable onslaught is avoided. In another frozen moment in time, the protoganist walked on water.
This- and a hell of alot more- all happened in one level.
"I wanted to show the world what can happen if you give a development team another year to work on a game. I want the gamer to really feel like they are getting the most of their next-gen system. Right now, everyone is focusing solely on next-gen graphics. i've included Dolby 5.1 surround sound support, and sound acclusion thruout the whole game for a totally immersive experience. But gameplay is the key- if you are playing the same FPS game with next-gen graphics, you aren't playing a next-gen game."
The gameplay is tight. The AI of your enemies and how they work together in the game is something else. Shoot one member of a squad in the leg or arm, another will shout shout out something like "What's your status?" to get a reply like "I'm hit". You'll hear another command "Get to cover, I'll lay down supressing fire." and then have covering fire erupt from the other members of the squad previously in cover whilst the wounded guy scrambles into a better position. You'll get ambushed at choke points, have giant mechs hunt you down in combined ops with infantry and generally get fucked over by the underlings of the fascist state you are attempting to destroy.
But if it was just about graphics, Timeshift would be king. Texture-streaming @ 1080p? Sick. I've never seen rain so realistic, or hair and faces so well done. Up close as you can get, you'll still see the grain on wooden doors. The faces of enemies look like they are out of FF FMVs- except they aren't, they are in-game graphics- realistic bullet holes are left in the uber-real glass if it doesn't shatter. Water pools and splashes perfectly, there are no clipping particles in fires etc. It's so beautiful, no other could be compared to it favourably.
I could go on, but this already pretty long. Needless to say, Timeshift is going to be awesome.
The games producer, Kyle Pechesel (I may have misspelt his second name), gave a pretty explosive demo of the game and its features in addition to going over the work on the game he and the guys at Saber have done over the past year.
First off, the graphics of this remarkable FPS were running @ 1080p on a 360. That's the same high-end HDMI perfomance you get out of the PS3. And unlike Resistance on the PS3 but like Gears of War, the game engine supports texture streaming. Time shift made both look ugly.
But that's by the by. The game itself is stunning. The way Kyle told it, he and the dev team were 7 bugs from finished- a day's work at most in dev terms- when his superior @ Sierra stopped him in the hallway and asked him what he would do to the game if he had another year to work on it. He was pretty pissed...so he told him.
"I'd pull the physics system and replace it with Havoc. The story isn't resonanting with gamers right now, so I'd completely rewrite the story, I'd change the main character for the same reason and ..." so on and so forth. He was a little surprised when the guys at Sierra told him that he should do just that.
The script written by a Hollywood writer at no small expense? Gone. Kyle's only comment on the voice acting and 10,000 lines of dialogue for the old lead character already provided by Dennis Quaid- "He's gone. I'm willing to make sacrifices to make the best game I can"
Timeshift's premise, that the invention of time control was taken advantage of by its inventor to go back in time and take control of the world and set up a fascist state and you the protaganist have gone back in time to stop him isn't entirely original. The gameplay is. Unlike what the dev team refer to as the "Oh shit button" time control of Prince of Persia, you can stop time, slow time and reverse time whilst being immune those effects.
Say what?
Let me describe some of the things I saw being done in the game- time stopped for everyone Kyle ran up to two armed guards, grabbed a weapon out of the hands of the first, turned and shot the second guy in the head before backing up just before time started back up for the rest of the world, leaving the first guy wondering where the fuck his gun had gone and the how the fuck it had done so. For a moment, before he got kneecapped.
"By now" the producer said, "you'll have realised I want the gamer to feel godlike"
"Don't make the mistake of thinking this will make the game easy- if you mis-use the time-suit's powers, I'll punish you. Seriously, if you don't play well and you don't play smart, I'm going to fuck you up."
I saw the producer have his character run along a walkway on the second story of a building, smash a window and jump thru the empty frame to gain access to the building. Nothing new about that. Once inside, he hit reverse time and the glass lift off the ground and followed its path to the ground back into the frame as a complete unbroken window.
"Now no-one will know I've gone thru here. You can be stealthy in this game, you don't have to but if you want to, the tactical advantages of doing so are there for the taking."
Later in the same level, an obstacle was overcome by slowing time. The seesawing of a fullpipe suspended on a crane necessary for traversing a broken bridge was reduced by slowing time, allowing you the time to cross before you fell out the end of the pipe. Another time, Kyle shot a barrel off a high ledge jumped on it, and reversed time to carried up on the "elevator" he created on the fly. Later, a two story mech blew the shit out a corrider between one half of the building and the half kyle's character was in. Reverse time, the completely demolished building springs back to its untouched self andhe runs thru the corrider to the other side and ducks down the stairs. Time starts again the corrider blows up again, and the mech's unstoppable onslaught is avoided. In another frozen moment in time, the protoganist walked on water.
This- and a hell of alot more- all happened in one level.
"I wanted to show the world what can happen if you give a development team another year to work on a game. I want the gamer to really feel like they are getting the most of their next-gen system. Right now, everyone is focusing solely on next-gen graphics. i've included Dolby 5.1 surround sound support, and sound acclusion thruout the whole game for a totally immersive experience. But gameplay is the key- if you are playing the same FPS game with next-gen graphics, you aren't playing a next-gen game."
The gameplay is tight. The AI of your enemies and how they work together in the game is something else. Shoot one member of a squad in the leg or arm, another will shout shout out something like "What's your status?" to get a reply like "I'm hit". You'll hear another command "Get to cover, I'll lay down supressing fire." and then have covering fire erupt from the other members of the squad previously in cover whilst the wounded guy scrambles into a better position. You'll get ambushed at choke points, have giant mechs hunt you down in combined ops with infantry and generally get fucked over by the underlings of the fascist state you are attempting to destroy.
But if it was just about graphics, Timeshift would be king. Texture-streaming @ 1080p? Sick. I've never seen rain so realistic, or hair and faces so well done. Up close as you can get, you'll still see the grain on wooden doors. The faces of enemies look like they are out of FF FMVs- except they aren't, they are in-game graphics- realistic bullet holes are left in the uber-real glass if it doesn't shatter. Water pools and splashes perfectly, there are no clipping particles in fires etc. It's so beautiful, no other could be compared to it favourably.
I could go on, but this already pretty long. Needless to say, Timeshift is going to be awesome.