The future's bright?

After teasing the internet rotten last week, Ubisoft’s whisked the dustsheets off a new Ghost Recon game. Specifics on Future Soldier are in short supply right now, with naught but a press release to chew on, but the mere thought of a third tour of duty for Scott Mitchell (assuming he hasn’t fielded a desk job) and co is enough to make us wet the bed.

So what do we know about the title, right now? Well, we know it’ll offer “cutting-edge technology, prototype high-tech weaponry, and state-of-the-art single-player and multiplayer modes” – standard issue features for the battleworn tactical shooter series. But we’re also told that it’ll “go beyond the core Ghost Recon franchise and deliver a fresh gameplay experience, with an unparalleled level of quality that will excite long-time fans and newcomers alike”.

Good news? Sure. The last Ghost Recon was more of a refinement than a reinvention of its predecessor, and it’s high time Ubisoft started pushing some boundaries. But here’s a speculative caveat: the mention of “going beyond the core” and “newcomers” makes it sound a little like the publisher is courting the mainstream market.

We’re pretty down with the mainstream – hey, we review Wii games – but we’re fond of Ghost Recon’s more authentic, less accessible approach to urban warfare, and we wouldn’t want it to go soft. Financial realities presumably dictate that the Future Soldier team branch out from the franchise’s tightly wound fanbase; we just hope they’re able to create a truly scalable product, one which won’t skimp on intricacy and challenge for the layman’s sake.

This is the game soldiers relax with between trips to the Middle East, Ubi. Don’t turn it into Ravin Rabbids.

Press release over the leaf. UPDATE: You can find the announcement trailer on VGTV.

UBISOFT® EXPANDS TOM CLANCY PORTFOLIO WITH TOM CLANCY™’S GHOST RECON: FUTURE SOLDIER™

***

Exclusive Multiplayer Beta Available This Summer

For ongoing updates about Tom Clancy™’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, please visit: www.GhostRecon.com

1. Quickfire Q&A: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Hands-on time with EA Digital Illusions CE's second big native console Battlefield. Let the question mark bombardment commence!...

Halo: Reach factoids have been popping up all over the place like decloaking Elites, thanks chiefly to the chaps at Edge and Game Informer but also, somewhat less officially, to EB Games, who let slip a few gameplay screenshots on Wednesday morning. You know what this means, readers? It means Whining Season has officially commenced.

We’ve had a good old gander at the material, and we’re ready to throw down a gauntlet or two. Brace yourselves for some serious subheadings.

What’s hot…

Six Spartans is a bit ridiculous now, isn't it. The Covenant really should have called in sick.

The return of the Elites

We got on well with the Brutes in Halo 3. Which is to say, we enjoyed blowing their shields away with our battle rifles and grenade-tagging the suckers to screaming submission. But for all their secondhand camo cloaks and jet packs the Brutes never quite lost the status of thuggish Covenant middle-management – glorified bully boys, giddy with excitement at their newfound prominence within the caste structure. For a game as solemn, as elegaic as Reach, we need an enemy we can respect. And with the Elites, it’s all about respect.

Crysis-style power-ups

Bungie is good with gizmos: slightly ludicrous though they appeared in concept and execution, the Bubble Shield and Grav Lift proved to be fantastic, highly tactical additions to Halo 3’s campaign and multiplayer. Reach tips its hat to Crysis in the form of recharging, one-at-a-time “armor abilities”, transforming your Spartan into a speed freak or a tank at the touch of a button. We like it. We also like what it implies for the game’s environments, which will probably need to be both larger and more abundant in secondary routes and landmarks to accommodate the greater range of run-gun possibilities.

Reach can handle up to 40 on-screen light sources, in contrast to Halo 3's two or three.

Bigger but not too big

Numbers are a much-abused weapon in the fanboy arsenal. Right now, for instance, there’s a lot of ballyhoo among the PS3 faithful about how the 256-player MAG is da biggermost online FPS everer, and so forth. While Halo has always gone heavy on modes and auxillary content, Bungie has never been in the business of feature overkill, and nothing’s changed with Reach. Online matches are still limited to 16 players – cosy affairs in which a man can be reasonably sure of walking two feet from a spawn point without taking a bullet through each of his major organs.

Which is not to say the game won’t offer more: Reach can handle double the AIs per area that Halo 3 can, we’re told. But the onus, as in past Spartan sequels, seems to be on providing more stuff to do within existing parameters, rather than piling on the bullet points.

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Battlefield Bad Company 2 saw a burst of somewhat unexpected sunny publicity last year thanks to Infinity Ward’s decision to scrap dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 2 on PC. DICE’s Gordon Van Dyke was quick to reassure official forum posters that his game would tick all the boxes on server support, to considerable applause.

Bad Company 2 online has more going for it than a sound network backbone, of course. According to producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson (whom we accosted at a recent preview shindig), the franchise’s approach to team play “has always been deeper” than that of most rivals – and remains deeper today.

Asked if there was anything he felt other multiplayer shooters were doing wrong, Troedsson replied: “Well I wouldn’t say ‘wrong’ – I don’t want to judge people, other games like that. But for us – multiplayer, online play, we’ve been doing that since Battlefield 1942, and to us it’s open environments, it’s sandbox, it’s team play.

“Because team play – what we’ve done in Battlefield for a long time is team play,” he went on. “You play as squads, you play teams, it’s very important. A lot of the other shooters are still actually in team deathmatch mode – they have tons of different game modes, but they all one way or another are just people playing to get the maximum score.

“This game is deeper, and Battlefield has always been deeper, and that’s due a lot to the gameplay. Like for instance you can heal each other, you can give each other ammo, you can revive each other – we’ve got the shock paddles in now.”

We find this claim a little dubious, to be honest. Among other current generation highlights, Killzone 2, Left 4 Dead and Gears of War have all done compelling things with player revival, healing and ammo sharing. 1942 may have been a trend-setter, but Battlefield faces stiffer competition nowadays. What do you think?

The game’s out on 2nd March in North America and 5th March in Europe.

1. Quickfire Q&A: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Hands-on time with EA Digital Illusions CE's second big native console Battlefield. Let the question mark bombardment commence!...
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3. Preview: MAG beta Zipper Interactive play the numbers game. You and 255 of your friends are invited....

Singularity is what happens when crackpot Cold War sci-fi and gritty contemporary realism have a punch-up. Brought to you by Wolfenstein dev Raven Software, the game takes place on a mysterious Russian island facility with a highly volatile temporal signature. Besides shooting people in the face, players can manipulate time itself with the imaginatively titled Time Manipulation Device, tapping into the facility’s dark mid-century past. FPS Gamer recently lent its lungs and ears to a roundtable discussion with Activision’s Kekoa Lee-Creel. Results below.

FPS Gamer: So how does it feel to be working on one of Activision’s few original properties?

Kekoa Lee-Creel: As you said, Activision doesn’t do new IP often so it’s a huge deal for me, I’m really glad to be working on it. I worked with Raven on Quake 4 as well, and they’re a fantastic team, so I’ve got a good new IP, I’ve got great marketing behind me, and I’ve got a great development team, so I’m pretty psyched. It’s a big deal.

And it’s been crazy, but the thing about Singularity is that it was brought in by Raven when it was just a demo – they did this prototype of it, to show the concept. They wrote out the concept, they brought it into Activision and they showed it off, and Activision bigwigs were pretty impressed by the whole thing, and they thought this is going to be great.

So they tested the concept, and it was one of the highest-testing concepts in Activision history, which is a pretty big deal – we’ve had some good concepts come through. So that’s what led to the greenlight, so it’s not trivial, it’s not something they would have taken on lightly, because it’s a pretty big investment.

FPS Gamer: How important is new IP to the industry?

Lee-Creel: I think it’s absolutely critical. I personally am a hardcore gamer, I like playing things that I haven’t played before. I think if the industry doesn’t invest in new IPs, good ideas, then we’re really going to be playing the same game over and over again in a few short years when everything dies off.

A solid 7.6 on our Weird-Shit-O-Meter.

So I’m really glad to be part of it, and I’m really glad that other people are doing it as well. Even if it hasn’t always been met with the most substantial financial success, like there are other games out there that came out this last year, and they’re great ideas and I’m really glad they were made, and they’re fun and different.

FPS Gamer: Ray Muzyka from BioWare once told us that new IP rarely makes its money back straight away, but becomes profitable over time.

Lee-Creel: Sure, initial investment’s the big difficulty, initial investment to start an IP. Obviously they can take years of iteration to get it right, to really feel out the things that make it unique and special. So that’s a pretty substantial undertaking, it’s a risk, and it’s just money kind of “going”! But I think the pay-off is definitely there. There are plenty of franchises that have been built off a mildly successful first title, that have ramped into something hugely successful, and I think it’s a worthwhile undertaking.

1. New IP can take “years of iteration” to get right – Singularity producer Don't count your chickens before they've been blown to bits with plasma grenades....
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3. New Perfect Dark XBLA/original comparison shots N64 classic cleans up a treat in high resolution, hopes to clean up on release day too....

So we weren’t planning on posting screenshots today, but when Rare’s community lead Mike Wilson popped up with side-by-side comparison snaps of Perfect Dark on Xbox Live Arcade and the original game, we couldn’t say no. Wilson would have pulled his Sad Face if we had. I’ve never actually seen Wilson’s Sad Face, but he’s from Rare, so I’m guessing it resembles Gruntilda off Banjo Kazooie. Ugh.

Joanna Dark isn’t currently wearing a Sad Face. She’s quite the alluring one in fact, thanks to the Xbox 360’s graphical chutzpah. That PVC-trimmed physique no longer looks like it’s been hacked from foam packaging blocks with a pair of half-melted plastic scissors.

We heart Blade Runner homages and vapid facial expressions.

Cassandra DeVries has also been to the beautician, though in her case the transformation isn’t sufficient to induce manly trouser pangs. Here she is before:

From cardboard dummy...

And after:

...to Hilary Clinton.

And how about a high-def version of weenie B-movie accomplice Elvis? Wax on:

From flying hexagon...

Wax off:

...to flying saucer.

To compliment those pin-sharp character models, each and every one of the game’s future spy weapons has been reskinned. Out with the old Falcon 2 pistol:

From Tetris L-shape...

And in with the new:

...to Bond movie death implement.

Check out the official site for more.

Thanks, Mike. The game’s coming out in early 2010.  If it’s a match for Serious Sam HD, we’ll pronounce ourselves well-pleased.

1. Feature: FPS Cult Classics With Modern Warfare 2 fever gradually dissipating, it's time to mull over the shooters you might have missed....
2. Singularity Interview Extensive tongue-wag with Activision Producer Kekoa Lee-Creel on Raven Software's upcoming dual-timezone shooter....
3. Quickfire Q&A: Alien vs. Predator Predator. Survivor. Prey. Potential? Rebellion's revamp of the classic sci-fi horror franchise is appropriately conflicted....

Activision’s Kekoa Lee-Creel has a few cautionary words for developers of new game properties. Basically, you shouldn’t expect your spark of originality to explode into a system-selling trilogy overnight: these things take time. Not to mention cold hard cash.

“Initial investment’s the big difficulty, initial investment to start an IP,” Lee-Creel told FPS Gamer during a preview showing of Raven Software’s Singularity, a gloomy, temporally disordered shooter for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. “Obviously they can take years of iteration to get it right, to really feel out the things that make it unique and special. So that’s a pretty substantial undertaking, it’s a risk, and it’s just money kind of ‘going’!”

“But I think the pay-off is definitely there,” he continued, presumably to the intense relief of Activision shareholders (not that they’ve got much to worry about these days). “There are plenty of franchises that have been built off a mildly successful first title, that have ramped into something hugely successful, and I think it’s a worthwhile undertaking.”

Lee-Kreel thinks Singularity has a decent shot. “I worked with Raven on Quake 4 as well, and they’re a fantastic team, so I’ve got a good new IP, I’ve got great marketing behind me, and I’ve got a great development team, so I’m pretty psyched. It’s a big deal.”

Having seen the game in action, we’re inclined to agree. Stay pumped for the full interview this week. Singularity’s out in Q1 2010.

1. Singularity Interview Extensive tongue-wag with Activision Producer Kekoa Lee-Creel on Raven Software's upcoming dual-timezone shooter....

The Killzone franchise is five years old today, and Eric Boltjes, Mathijs de Jonge and the rest of Guerrilla Games are accordingly sinking into mattresses of purest purple cotton-candy nostalgia over at the official site. The grimy shooter series has returned to headlines for other reasons of late, with the second iteration swiping a Golden Joystick and no less than three nominations for Spike’s Video Game Awards 2009. An appropriate time then to slip off those rose-tinted goggles, strap on some glowing Helghast varieties and do a little retrospective whinging.

I loved, and still love Killzone 2. Rather fortunate, that, as I spent close to 100 hours with it in the hysterical two or three months before its release. But the game had, and still has some definite shortcomings, and recent tidal shifts in the waters of first and third-person shooting have made one of these shortcomings especially evident.

Do you feel lonesome tonight, Sev?

If you’ve been keeping up with our reviews, you’ll know it’s a great season for cooperative gaming. (So great, in fact, that we’re going to publish an editorial on the subject in the next couple of weeks – but I digress.) Following in the footsteps of Insomniac’s Resistance sequel, Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2 have boosted their respective co-op components from humble campaign add-on status to that of a full-blown separate mode. Left 4 Dead 2 is busily reaffirming the marvellousness of the original game’s signature four-players-against-the-world dynamic. I am utterly gutted that I didn’t get to grade New Super Mario Bros Wii, that peerless provoker of beery retrohead camaraderie. And all this occurs against a backdrop of mighty advances in multiplayer gaming generally, with the MAG beta asking unheard-of feats in team (or rather, army) management, and Demon Souls carving a wild, uneasy line between roguelike and MMO.

In that context, Killzone 2’s strictly solo ten levels feel a little bloodless, despite its artery-ripping graphical excess. This game needed co-op – needed it like a daffodil needs sunlight, Jade Raymond her hair straighteners or David Jaffe his sedatives. Its war-ravaged, multi-storey maps and the find-fix-and-flank nature of its action would have suited team play right down to the bullet-scoured earth.

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3. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Review EA DICE is out to level the playing field a second time. FPS Gamer hunkers down in the woods with an Xbox 360 build....

I'm too young to die!

Poor old Left 4 Dead. Just over a year old, and already consigned to the backseat of history by Valve’s uncharacteristically headlong rush to sequel-dom.

Well we’re not quite ready to let go, chaps – as befits the PC version at least. Here are some reasons to put off uninstalling the original zombie co-op FPS for a few months longer.

Because Left 4 Dead wasn’t broken, hasn’t been fixed.

Bit of an obvious point, this one. Left 4 Dead is still utterly, utterly fantastic, and worth experiencing alongside its younger sibling. Those soggy North American forest, industrial and residential maps aren’t getting any less gripping or well-balanced. It’s a whole five quid cheaper than Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam, too.

Because Valve’s keeping its word as to downloadable content.

OK, they took their sweet time bringing out Survival mode, the new “Crash Course” campaign and Versus functionality for the original maps, but Valve seems to be building momentum on the DLC front. We downloaded a 4v4 matchmaking update only a week or two back. Watch this space.

Because Left 4 Dead now boasts hundreds of custom maps and campaigns.

There are plenty of prolific would-be Valve employees out there, it seems. This writer’s favourite custom maps include Claustrophobia, a cramped, two-storey Survival arena featuring some stunning broken wood geometry and shadows, L4D Dust 2, for all the Counterstrike freaks in da house, and Who’s Laughing Now?: The Evil Dead Cabin, a bastard hard homage to Sam Raimi’s stuffed-crust B-movie classic. Hunter Training is great for putting a little extra spring into your pounce.

Custom-campaign-wise, you might want to consider this Silent Hill remake, or this sequence ripped from Resident Evil Outbreak File#2. Cream of the crop, though, is Death Aboard, which takes you from the depths of a prison to a gloomy dockyard and onto a precariously balanced ship. Fans of the surreal should check out Night Terror and its daring hot-air balloon rescue. Gadzooks.

Because you can stuff all the original game’s content into the sequel.

Those lynch-pins of the underground code-breaking scene at L4Dmods have figured out how to transfer all Left 4 Dead campaigns (and, excitingly, custom campaigns) to Left 4 Dead 2 – well ahead of the release of Valve’s official SDK.

Hold on though, doesn’t this make the first game rather redundant, we hear you protest? Ah, my son, but you’ll need a fully paid-up, squeaky-clean legit copy of both games to pull the trick off. Plus a bit of technical know-how, naturally. And the patience to endure a fair few non-crippling bugs. Hit the link for a tutorial, and check out the video evidence below.

Because Zoey is way fitter than Rochelle, innit.

Look, let’s not beat around any bushes here (after all, one of them might contain a Boomer). If we had the chance to leap into the sack with either of the Left 4 Dead ladies, it’d be pasty girl-geek brunette Zoey all the way. Rochelle’s too respectable for our unhygienic, society-averse tastes. She’s a TV producer, for God’s sake. Plus she wears a Depeche Mode T-shirt (admittedly it’s got a stencil of Gordon Freeman on it). Stupid establishment chick.

So what’s keeping you glued to the original Left 4 Dead, oh well-informed reader?

No related posts.

Simultaneously the best and worst thing about the First Person Shooter genre is that there are so damned many of them. And because there are shooters appearing with such alarming regularity, the truth is that sometimes it’s difficult to keep up. You know what it’s like. Three games come out in the same week that you like the look of, you pick one of them, and by the time you’re ready to go back, something else shiny and new has distracted you.

Over a period of time, it’s inevitable that we’re all going to have missed out on some great games – maybe the ones with a quirky premise that never quite got the recognition they deserved. So that’s where we come in with a round-up of some of the bona-fide Cult Classics of the genre that you may have missed out on the first time around.

A great FPS never dies.

The Operative: No One Lives Forever
Monolith (PC, PS2), 2000

For reasons that are not entirely clear, very few people wanted to play a game starring a sexy female spy in a catsuit, the buffoons. Evidently influenced by late 60s Bond movies and, more recently, the Austin Powers movies, Monolith created a superb premise where ex-cat burglar Cate Archer tip-toed around a plethora of memorable environments armed with a plethora of gadgets.

Exceptionally ambitious for its time, it gave players a great deal more opportunity to experiment than many modern shooters ever bother to offer. Players were afforded the opportunity to sneak past hazards with the aid of gadgets (such as the guard dog distracting electric poodle), dispose of corpses with body-removing powder, or just blast their way out of situations.

The overall look and feel of the game was memorable, too, with excellent swinging sixties-inspired music, and all manner of unusual locations and scenarios, such as a space station in zero gravity, a shipwreck, or a freefall from an aircraft. And yet despite scooping awards galore, it sold precisely bugger all – even a subsequent PS2 port and sequel didn’t do the job. Go and see what you missed.

A sight for sore eyes.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay
Starbreeze (Xbox, PC, Xbox 360, PS3), 2004

Precisely one month before Riddick came out, the press got to see the game for the very first time. Gobsmacked as we were by the visuals on display, it seemed incredible that publisher Vivendi wasn’t shouting from the rafters, but a combination of film-based restrictions and general PR apathy ensured that the Xbox-exclusive game limped into stores with a complete absence of hype.

A few sites championed it around release, but by then it was too late. The Vin Diesel movie bombed, retail didn’t put it in front of punters and few gamers put their money down, despite the game being arguably one of the best shooters of its era. Blending stealth, adventure, melee, shooting and even mech combat to quite glorious effect, it almost defied categorisation, and proved beyond doubt that this was how to treat a film license.

To compound the tragedy of it all, Starbreeze also managed to create one of the finest technical achievements of that console generation. No other Xbox title even came close to matching its ludicrously detailed, bump-mapped environments. The game’s subsequent ports to PC and, eventually, 360 and PS3 via the recent Assault On Dark Athena release have put it back in the public eye again, thankfully. Check it out.

1. Feature: The History of First-Person Shooters As FPS Gamer clears leather, Kristan Reed turns in the ultimate retrospective: the evolution of first-person shooting from Maze War to Modern Warfare 2....
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3. 1-on-1: Modern Warfare 2 vs Left 4 Dead 2 Can Valve's grab-bag of southern comfort and zombie goodness overturn Infinity Ward's steamroller of an action blockbuster? Click on for our pre-release feature face-off....

A quick disclaimer. Modern Warfare 2 is, in all probability, going to be one of the best-executed and most substantial shooters you play this year. I was very impressed by the game when I previewed it last month, and the fact that my name won’t be gracing our review when it goes live tonight is the cause of many a flung teacup at Kikizo Towers (the honour falls instead to FPS Gamer’s veteran duelist Kristan Reed, with whom I’m currently not on speaking terms).

Not every aspect of the game or its titanic marketing putsch is above question, however, and as the first pre-orders blast through letterboxes and all-night-queues sprout from the doors of HMV, we should take time to reflect on the controversies Activision and Infinity Ward have ignited in the run-up to release.

The furore over pricing needs no introduction, nor is it chief among my concerns. A £55 RRP (or $60 across the Atlantic) is pretty steep given the reported shortish campaign length (Kristan’s run-time is 7-8 hours), Activision’s refusal to supply dedicated servers and the absence of crucial new gameplay functionality (not to mention a host of minor compromises), but retailers haven’t turned a deaf ear to consumer complaints – you can now pick the game up for two-thirds to as little as half the RRP in most major UK supermarkets. Over on GamesIndustry.biz, Rob Fahey has commented with characteristic eloquence on the risk that Activision’s brash pricing strategies will find over-eager imitators, but in the near future at least there seems to be nothing to worry about.

Yours for just $150. Cheer up, it could be the PSPgo.

The infamous playable airport massacre sequence leaked online a few weeks ago deserves less forgiving attention. Right-wing tabloid rants concerning the effects of such (100% skippable) material on the hearts and minds of young people are as predictable as they are groundless, but why, we might ask, did Infinity Ward feel obliged to provoke such reaction at all? Considered (admittedly) out of context, the decision to let players slaughter civilians in callously unhurried style seems little more than a shock tactic, a morbid attempt to one-up the previous game’s hostage execution intro, rather than a sensitively judged trot into the realms of ultra-realism.

1. 1-on-1: Modern Warfare 2 vs Left 4 Dead 2 Can Valve's grab-bag of southern comfort and zombie goodness overturn Infinity Ward's steamroller of an action blockbuster? Click on for our pre-release feature face-off....
2. Killzone 2 look-back: sorry, still needs co-op As Guerrilla's sometime Halo-killer reaches the grand old age of half a decade, we kick a little post-coital dirt at the sequel....
3. Battlefield team play “has always been deeper”, says DICE producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson says other multiplayer shooters are "still actually in team deathmatch mode", fail to nurture real teamwork....