By Jim Rossignol on March 31st, 2011 at 6:48 pm.
But who? But what? I’ll explain! So it seems that Category 6 Studios are made of up the remnants of the recently exploded Pi Studios. BigDownload had a chat with them, and it turns out it’s a new deal being led by Kenn Hoekstra, who worked on just about everything at Raven up until 2008. ANYWAY, Blackout is “a survival horror themed first person shooter” being developed in Unreal engine. And that’s all the information we have for now.
31/03/2011 at 18:58 Mr_Initials says:
So basically stuff happened and we know a game is coming and we don’t know about the game. Sounds good to me
31/03/2011 at 19:00 Petethegoat says:
I find myself surprisingly interested in this, given the lack of info.
31/03/2011 at 19:03 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
This will have zombies that look like aliens.
31/03/2011 at 19:09 Ricc says:
So Zombies beat Aliens beat Robots beat Zombies, right?
31/03/2011 at 19:11 patricij says:
No more bloody (BLOODY) zombies, please..I’d prefer them clean-ah, thanks
01/04/2011 at 12:21 kikito says:
Yeah, let’s have some World War II instead.
31/03/2011 at 19:04 Jubaal says:
Or aliens which look like zombies
31/03/2011 at 19:05 Jim Rossignol says:
Either way, they’re getting called zombaliens.
31/03/2011 at 19:06 Nick says:
They should call it deadout.
31/03/2011 at 19:23 tomeoftom says:
The Black Death?
01/04/2011 at 00:46 Nick says:
nono, thats far too creative!
31/03/2011 at 19:14 westyfield says:
My guess is that it will be a comedy action-RPG set on a spaceship that crashed into another spaceship that was transporting a shipment of dragons to a penal colony. The crew of the first spaceship have to fight their way to the control room of the dragon ship to detach the ships because they’re jammed together. They have hilarious (mis)adventures along the way, as well as learning that the power lies within so long as they believe in themselves.
The twist is that they are all the Cold Sniper archetype.
31/03/2011 at 19:17 karthink says:
Jim is now consistently alt-texting!
This is good! We knew you’d come around.
31/03/2011 at 19:18 coldvvvave says:
Plot:
John Stalvern waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air.
BLACKOUT
31/03/2011 at 19:22 tomeoftom says:
“Sir! We’re getting issues with the font! It seems a enemy broadside laser has cut right through the typographical storage unit, severing all our consonants and vowels!”
“Christ… all right, we need to get a word out, and fast. What are our options?”
“I’m sorry to say, sir, but… well, we don’t have any backups online but Comic Sans”
“NO! Didn’t the end of the 20th century teach us anything?! We swore… never again…”
“There’s no choice, Commander. At this point the Press will cut through our shields within minutes!”
“I couldn’t do that! You know I couldn’t subject the quadrant to that kind of risk! God damn it, man!”
What happens next? YOU decide!
31/03/2011 at 19:31 westyfield says:
“Wait! There is something!”
“What?”
“It’s… no, it’s no use.”
“Tell us! Dammit, Jefferson, tell us now!”
“Sir, it appears that O is still active.”
“What good will that do us?”
“Very little sir – it’s nonstandard to the rest of the system. It’s much thinner, and it’s almost entirely black.”
“Maybe, just maybe, that might be its strength.”
ONE MINUTE LATER, AT SPACEBASE GAMMA:
“Sir, we have an incoming transmission from the USS Shippington.”
“OOooooOOooOooOoOOOOoO.”
31/03/2011 at 19:37 tomeoftom says:
Ahahaha! That was so much better than anything I was expecting; nice!
31/03/2011 at 19:37 The Army of None says:
Oh my god… its full of guttural stops!
31/03/2011 at 19:34 Mario Figueiredo says:
Survival Horror First Person Shooter in Unreal Engine… Innovation!
31/03/2011 at 19:54 ZIGS says:
Will this have the backing of a publisher or is it gonna be independent? It just doesn’t give a very high-profile vibe (not necessarily a bad thing, mind you)
31/03/2011 at 19:55 Ultra Superior says:
News blackout.
31/03/2011 at 20:00 Crane says:
Well, let’s see…
It’s called “Blackout”, and the logo appears to be showing a solar eclipse.
[SPECULATRON ON]
Science fiction. Not set on Earth.
Eclipse of the sun causes a previously un-noticed race of alien gribbly things to appear on a colony world. Probably a mining colony.
The aliens will almost certainly look vaguely like insects. If the designers are ruthlessly unimaginative, they will be capable of possessing humans so you can fight NotZombies.
The aliens will be massively vulnerable to light. Possibly only to light with a certain amount of UV in it, but probably all light, since that makes it easier to have all the encounters take place in the dark, and it also makes it easier to make a bunch of puzzles that involve illuminating a safe area.
The gameplay will have a hefty bunch of lighting-based gimmicks, which will probably vary from “quite clever really”, such as a scene in which you kill an alien by opening a fridge in its face, to “oh god who thought this was a good idea”, such as a scene in which you must go through an excessively convoluted puzzle involving mirrors despite a much simpler solution being immediately obvious.
The game will be fairly good, but not exceptional. It will suffer from trying to be both an FPS and a survival horror game, irritating the FPS afficionados by being clumsy and providing limited ammo, and irritating the survival horror afficionados by having too much shooting and too little tension.
[SPECULATRON OFF]
31/03/2011 at 20:14 ZIGS says:
I’m gonna save this and come back to it when the game is released to check for any similarities
31/03/2011 at 21:12 Prince says:
I seriously doubt it will be anywhere near as interesting as this game by the same name.
31/03/2011 at 23:41 shiajun says:
For a nanosecond there my ever optimistic mind thought this could be a game with an idea like the Flashforward TV series (not the book, that’s very different) with the whole global conscience blackout and visions of the future and strange conspiracies going on.
Aw…too bad.
01/04/2011 at 03:46 Zaboomafoozarg says:
Blackout? That’s offensive.
01/04/2011 at 04:34 Grey says:
Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain – The Game!
Seriously: Blackout > Solar Eclipse > Occultation > The Strain! Bet it’s something about zompires or vambies. ~_~ The novel is a pretty good read BTW.