Hard Reset: The PC-Only, "Old-School" FPS
Time for a proper look at Hard Reset, the PC-exclusive FPS from new studio Flying Wild Hog, a supergroup of Polish devs formely from CD Projekt Red, People Can Fly and City Interactive. The initial trailer was really just a bloke very slowly looking up, with occasional flashes of some manner of urban dystopia. This one's a full minute of cyberbunk manshootiness aimed to demonstrate Hard Reset's graphics card-troubling techno-clout, but take heart - it also includes more footage of a bloke slowly looking up. Except he doesn't look very well this time.
Looks like utter carnage, hopefully in a way that lovingly tickles all the requisite fun-glands. Oh, and the combination of city streets, alien-looking things and oddball megadeath weaponry has me wondering if perhaps this will be the game to give the Duke Nukem 3D faithful some of what DNF didn't manage to.
Over on GameSpot, Flying Wild Hog boss Michal Szustak explains why they've elected to go PC-only on this one:
“If you want to show some amazing graphics, it’s better and easier to develop the game for PCs. Also, in the era of movie-like shooters almost ‘on rails,’ with player-environment interaction as limited as possible, we wanted to create a game for old-school PC players, raised on all those forgotten Dooms, Quakes, and Painkillers.”
They'll be using their own engine too, by the way, and the cyber eyepatch thing that keeps cropping up in these trailers will indeed have an in-game purpose that Flying Hog are keeping mysterious for now.
Hard Reset lands in September. Oh, it won't have a multiplayer mode because "We had to choose whether we wanted to put all our efforts into creating the best single-player experience or add a multiplayer mode just to fill the check box and still get it done worse than in other games focused on multiplayer modes." I concur with this line of thinking.