By John Walker on July 27th, 2009 at 4:53 pm.
We mentioned The Saboteur last week – Pandemic’s Second Earth War game, following the semi-fictional story of a professional racing driver turned French Resistance pioneer. This week, courtesy of Comic Con and GameTrailers, there’s a video interview with lead designer Tom French (whose excellent beard means his head is the same both ways up, apart from the eyes/mouth thing), which includes lots of game footage.
I think they may be deliberately avoiding showing black and white footage at this point, which makes some kinds of sense. There are an unfortunate number of people who would see the greyscale design and run away frightened, screaming, searching for the nearest fruit machine to soak in as much colour as they can before they’re sick. You and I aren’t those people, obviously, but you can’t ignore them.
You can also get an idea quite how “semi” the fictional really is. There’s an interesting mix of authenticity and the complete abandoning of historical accuracy in order to make sure it’s fun.
Oh VENGEANCE. Max Payne is older than I realised.
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The story description sounds a tad clichéd.
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That’s a superior beard.
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Yes, I think we can safely say that Pandemic are playing fairly loosely with the historical record with this one.
At the moment it’s kind of looking a bit too much like Mercenaries with Nazis for my taste, but I’m still keeping an eye on it.
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Geez… not sure how they could have sucked out my interest for this game any faster. At this point I think the nifty black and whiet palette is pretty much the only thing it’s got going.
Gameplay looks all vert console generic and oh look… now you also have to drive a clunky vehicle from site to site.
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One mission is to destroy 13 panzer divisions? Not too shabby.
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I was really looking forward to this until today. TekDragon sums it up perfectly.
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I too thought highly of this game… thought.
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Is it me or do the graphics look really horrid when there is colour used? The black and white with the spurts of red blood was much more interesting to look at. Makes me not want to help the Resistance.
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Considering a full strength armoured division could have 328 tanks, this means the main character stealthly destroys 4264 in the course of a single mission. Does this mean we get to nuke Paris?
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Exactly what I thought – the hideous ‘run into a room, sponge up a load of bullets, run away’ gameplay really wasn’t that endearing…
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“Nazi Armor (sic) Division Destroyed! [1/13]”
that’s no error! just because all you Brits are all backwards and throw in extra “u”s all the time doesn’t mean everybody has to! Think about it this way, if your on british twitter (aka. britter) and want to talk about ‘colourful armour’ you are WASTING CHARACTERS!!!!!
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Vandelay says:
Is it me or do the graphics look really horrid when there is colour used?
Don’t forget it’s a TFT-screen filmed with a camera.
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Nah, that looks a bit wanky to me.
When’s Just Cause 2 coming out? That’t the over the top third person extravaganza I’m waiting for.
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Why do they have to say as well after they say PC? Thats bloody PCism right there.
Anyway is it just me or did that UI look ugly? It just looks like a generic third person shooter to me, I laughed when he was talking about sneaking there was absolutely no sneaking involved…
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As with tekDragon i was interested but am now probably gona not even bother reading reviews of it. It’s a shame for Pandemic as im sure with a good and interesting idea they could pull something quite great off.
Oh and Eli Just, i believe debating the spelling of the English language with English people is probably a fruitless cause.
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Looks pretty bad
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I love how he’s talking about stealth and disguises while the video shows Devlin shooting Germans and throwing grenades.
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I love how Smurfy literally posted the exact comment I wanted to, word for word.
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@Eli Just
I believe he meant Armored Division
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“Oh and Eli Just, i believe debating the spelling of the English language with English people is probably a fruitless cause.”
Or, indeed, a fritless cause.
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Wow, that’s some pretty deep characterization there! They are clearly aiming to unseat Valve as the kings of game writing.
P.S. A French Resistance fighter named… Sean? Really?
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@Jason: He’s Irish. I mean, duh. Everyone knows that La Resistance didn’t have any French members. That’d be RIDICULOUS.
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All the character cares about is vengeance… And dapper hats.
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It’s refreshing to see a dev comfortable with playing fast and loose with the facts of WW2 to create an entertaining game. I think I’ve probably destroyed at least as many Nazi divisions in the course of my long career as a thumbstick commando.
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Yes, beause the shooter genre has such a rich heritage of colorful maps. Especially if the color is brown.
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@ phil:
And that’s just one sector of Paris. If the game conforms to open-world norms we can expect at least three sectors housing 39 panzer divisions in total and therefore a potential 12,792 tanks just waiting to be kersploded. It’ll be angry house genocide on a scale not seen since Supreme Commander.
I was actually just being a touch cheeky with the throwaway sic, but Wirbelwind is correct that it should be Armo(u)red Division.
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uh, ancient artifacts buried in cemeteries and wanted by nazis, how far into the game do you have to play until someone opens the evil-in-a-can and starts the full blown WW2 zombie apocalypse ?
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Separated at birth?
http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/5684/653807-sm_pawnshop_10037_super.jpg
That’s all I could think during the entire video. I don’t even remember anything that was said about the game, my reminiscing and beard-induced distraction being too powerful a combination for Tom French’s discourse.
I remember something about cemeteries, which only cements my theory.
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Debating english language with the english is useless because, astoundingly, half of us can hardly speak the fucking thing and we invented it, never mind the american spellings.
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Fighting an army inside an occupied city reduces alarms…brilliant!
Yeah, this game will bomb.
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Those misguided Nazis spent way too much time lusting after mysterious artefacts and standing around explosive barrels.
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“Werner, can you move the nitroglycerin? I think I see something shiny…”
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How could a game go wrong when its lead designer is Smiling Jack from VtM: Bloodlines?
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Pandemic, I am disappoint.
I was loving the look of this game until the gameplay. They said quiet in, noisy out, so I was looking forward to a WW2 version of Hitman, but where missions go wrong all the time.
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Only good thing about that vid is the dev’s beard. The game looks like total and utter shite. A poster boy for the over exposed 360 bullshit generation.
That is all.
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“Second Earth War”, really?
Caugh.
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Poor bearded dude, he will get his fingers slapped when the game come out and no one likes the where the game went.
This game will not be received well, I predict a score under 65%.
Yes, I judge without knowing shit about the game. Don’t hate me for it (or you’ll have to hate everyone here)
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I love how I came here to post the same comment as Smurfy and Pags, except maybe with 5 words being different.
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Why can’t they just make a game about the French Resistance? I mean, men and women lost their life for no other reason than dear of loosing their way of life. No vengeance, no “Nazies Are The Devil”. It’s an untaped storyline as far as video game goes, and yet, they make it into a game that could have taken place in any modern day American cities.
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Bobsy: “He’s Irish. I mean, duh. Everyone knows that La Resistance didn’t have any French members. That’d be RIDICULOUS.”
And yet, while the french actually had a recistance, ireland reamined neutral throughout ww2. Somehow I find the idea of a neutral irish citizen fighting the nazis even more preposterous than a cheese eating surrender monkey fighting them (generic revenge plot not withstanding).
By the way, I get the irony, just wanted to add to the absurdity concerning the game setting.
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I just think you folks are confusing “stealth” and “stealth”, heh, heh, you see the difference right. “Stealth” means the use of the environment to hide one’s self, or the alteration of the environment to the same effect (see RADAR stealth, where the plane’s shape limits radar effectiveness ranges for detecting the aircraft). “Stealth” on the other hand is a general term for fighting many people alone or in a smaller group than the enemy, unless the people around you are employing “stealth” to hide until the appropriate moment, in which case the group on your side can be bigger, and will usually wait until you and whoever was crazy enough to go with you have resolved the situation and then come out guns blazing and declare themselves heroes. Similarly, the new “stealth” kills trailer for Sam Fisher depicts him “stealthily” hiding behind a half blown away coffee table as he is temporarily filled with lead from 3 or more MP5s, as well as stealthily running up to people who are in bright light, notifying them of your presence, and then taking them down with some kind of Neeson (see Liam Neeson’s patented neck punch) followed up by a gun barrel jab to crush the airway entirely. See you silly guys, “stealth” and “stealth” are two completely different things
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This looks like a game that has some interesting mechanics which may make their way into future games, but which will ultimately be severely hampered by its campiness and generally poor execution.
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Add me to the formerly-interested-now-less-so group. At least no one has complained about the setting yet. Oh, wait…
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its funny how the game loses any speck of appeal it had once things are colored, i can’t believe they would deliberately avoid their only slightly original idea
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I hadn’t heard of this before today. I wasn’t even interested until I read the generally-negative comments, so I watched the video, and :(
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wasn’t there a game about sucking colors and putting them in black and white things ? “The Void” was it ? was that ever translated ? it had a similar idea to Saboteur iirc (minus the machineguns, nazis and brothels)
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I bet his beard has a better back-story.
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The outdoor combat shots made me want a Freedom Fighters 2.
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amazingly enough, I’m actually looking forward to this game now more than before I saw this trailer. The armoured divisions thing totally made me lol though. But I think that’s why it appealed more, because it dropped the pretense of trying to be anything serious. I don’t care about the absurdity of engaging in LARGER firefights to reduce the enemies overall alertness if the mechanic works. And by mechanic, I do not mean jean-pierre, who fixes your truck, I mean the system in which the game conveys its intentions. This game actually looks like it might be amusing to run around and blow up nazis in, as opposed to a ‘superserious reload every time you accidentally cough and it hurts a little and you alert every nazi in a 300 mile square area as well as losing half your HP for a misdelivered cough game’. I’ve got hitman for that kind of endeavour, sans nazis. Mainly, anyway. *ponders that the next hitman game should have a level set in a WW2 themed fancy dress party*
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Jesus, is there some sort of template used for making generic games? This game could have been interesting if it focused on how the resistance actually had to work, i.e. NOT engaging in large firefights with a numerically and technologically superior enemy. Instead it seems like they are making generic 3rd person shooter #395.
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Oh, yes Xercies, the UI is terrible. And bulky. At some point it seems to take more than half of the screen, it feels like playing a relatively recent game in a too low resolution :p
It seems that the UI designer thought “it’s in the past, so I can get away with an old parchment look instead of actually designing something creative, relevant and efficient”.
(also, since we’re nitpicking, “Gare De L’Est” should probably be written “Gare de l’Est” :p)
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FPS gameplay? Stealth gameplay? Duck and cover gameplay? GTA-style driving gameplay, AND my character is motivated by vengeance?
Wow, I totally have to get this.
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I thought the game was always going to be like this. I wonder why everyone is so surprised…
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Mark me up as another entrant to the was excited, now feeling very meh about the whole thing crowd.
Fortunately the awesomeness of that man’s beard meant the video was still worth watching
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Argh. tekDragon and Smurfy nailed it. And nicely spotted, Nox. Like CaptainHairy, I was hoping for some good old Deus Ex/Hitman sneaky-sneaky-oh-crap-plan-B-DAKKADAKKADAKKA-oh-god-my-legs-plan-C in a rich slightly-noir sauce. Does not look forthcoming. Sadface.
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OT: That picture makes it look like soldier on the left is using his rifle to hit the other soldier on the head.
“Dummkopf! Shoot straighter! I hired you expendable grunts to deplete the PC’s health before inevitably dying — not to MISS him!”
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He called us consumers!
That makes me mad :( and sad.
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Eh, wasn’t ever interested? A black and white game? Like everyday life for me. I happened to like Mercenaries 2 but this looks like a crappier, frenchier version of Freedom Fighters. And with less wrench!
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