There has been quite a lot of hubbub recently about trying to make great interactive movies for the PC. We've seen a lot of products come out lately which try to put the player in the middle of their own cinematic adventure, and some even go as far as hiring big-name movie stars like Mark Hamill in Wing Commander III and Tia Carrere in the Daedalus Encounter. I think it's safe to say that these efforts have generated mixed results at best, but that doesn't keep game companies from trying. These cinematic ventures are always looking for a new way of putting the player in the middle of the action. Wing Commander III used movie bits as cut scenes which supported the arcade-style action heart of the game, while Under A Killing Moon used cinematic bits as part of the game itself, combining movie-style scenes with computer rendered environments. Going even further than both of those is Flash Traffic, where the game is nothing but movie footage.
The problem with some of these games is that when you're using live video, the game may sometimes suffer from the limitations of the actor - with the actor looking and acting like you would or wouldn't imagine. The fact that there's a live person in this futuristic environment sometimes makes the situations even more difficult to believe, since that sense of suspended reality is more easily broken when using a live actor. New World Computing seems to be getting back to the roots of computer games in its forthcoming game Wetlands by simply animating all of the characters and environments, just like in the old days.
Wetlands is a cinematic adventure that takes place in the gritty, dark future. The player is cast in the role of John Cole, a freelance "tracker" whose job it is to track down an escaped madman with the ability to control the weather. An action/adventure, the player will be led on a manhunt through two major cities and dozens of underwater facilities where the player will get to play with futuristic cycles, submarines and hoverboats along with a variety of other vehicles, weapons and technology. But more than just the single goal exists in Wetlands, for the player must face and resolve several different crisis situations on the way to the final conflict, which New World Computing says includes a dramatic twist.
Game play is basically a point-and-click system where the player must shoot enemy targets while speeding through the combat area. In a departure from other similar games like Cyberia, Wetlands will give the player the option of choosing his own path while traveling through each of the areas. This means that the added element of taking the correct course through each environment is thrown into the game. If there's a road that goes off in a different direction than the one you're on, it's possible to turn off onto that new road, so you're not locked into going where the game is taking you. So on top of worrying about shooting all the enemy targets, you also have to worry about taking the correct road.
In between the action scenes, the Wetlands story is revealed through advanced animation which rivals any cartoon you're likely to see on television. All of the characters are animated and the environment is completely computer-generated with ray-traced 3-D graphics combined with dynamic cell animation. But the overall look never becomes cartoonish in the juvenile sense of the word, because the world of Wetlands is often a dark vision of the future, not childish at all. The rotoscoping technology lends an animated feel to the game which, I think, is every bit as impressive as any game using live actors. Using animated characters gives the game designers the ability to really merge their ideas of what the game should look like into the game itself. The characters all look and move like they should, giving this the feel of a major animated feature movie during the cut scenes.
Wetlands, set to be released at the end of September, is attempting to bring together a blend of cinematics, puzzle solving and arcade gaming using advanced graphic techniques. Going beyond just being an action shooter, Wetlands wants to bring the player into the game by involving them in a complex storyline filled with villains, futuristic technology and exotic weaponry. Hopefully more developers will see the success games like Full Throttle are having with animated characters rather than live actors and continue forging on in this direction. The results of these types of games are very impressive and really have the capability to immerse the player into the virtual world.
