Shouts to XBN for righting out the fallowing article, and Shadows Heir:
REAL
Inside Pariah: The FPS the Unreal Guys Always Wanted to Make
On the third floor of a nondescript building deep in Toronto's theater district, the members of the Pariah team sit with their arms folded, waiting. Meridith Braun, producer, bookeeper, PR person, and possibly den mother, has some news to share. Pariah may be going to Hollywood. For a moment, there's an uncomforatable silence as the team, exausted from working around the clock to have playable levels at May's E3, mulls this over. Then they come to life. Cue several minutes of chattering and joes about terrible videogame movies: Mario Bros., Tomb Raider, Double Dragon, Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat. "Hey, the fight scenes weren't bad," someone offers. Somebody else groans. Braun remains enthusiastic, while boss James Schmalz explains how this time, it's going to be different...
After the spectacular killing spree that was Quake, but before the epic thriller that was Half-Life, there was Unreal. In the summer of Digital Extremes' FP Sci-fi adventure that was the best looking game in the world and one of the first of its kind to offer a true movielike experience. Thanks to simple (but brilliantly executed) set pieces, it showed the true potential of the burgeoning FPS genre and opened the door to a new generation of games - including Bungie's own masterpiece, Halo. Though many expected a sequel, none was forthcoming. Instead, DE, under the publishing banner of Epic, found itself locked in an arms race with Id Software, trading blows in the form of successive iterations of the Unreal engine and online fragfests UT, UT03, UC, and finally, in 2004, another round of sequels for both.
Well before UC2004 was complete, however, Schmalz, Digital Extremes' founder and creative director, was planning a return to the single-player experience. He set his London, Ontario, studio to work on the long awaited Dark Sector, while in Toronto, his UC team began to work on a game with the spirit, if not the soul, of Unreal.
"The real idea behind Pariah is to address some of the stuff we haven't addressed in the past five years with multiplayer," Schmalz says. "We really want ot come back around and and put a lot more focus on the single-player side of things, especially since we're doing it on the Xbox. So that's kind of the genesis of the idea, after UC, to try something fresh and new, and outside of the Unreal universe because there are so many expectations as to what a new Unreal product may be or may not be. We really want to create an in-depth story."
To that end, Pariah's in-game script was written by two professional scriptwriters, Mark Pressman and Drew Fellman, who are, as you read, having their scripts not just optioned (Hollywood-speak for paid to sir on a shelf) but also turned into movies. By real studios. With real budgets. By Schmalz's reckoning, this gives a potential Pariah movie a better-then-average chance of reaching the people who make movies that an audience may actually want to see.
Meanwhile, Pariah's in-game script has been through 3 revisions to date--a testament not just to Schmalz's dogged determination to get it right, but also to his teams obsession with adding "just one more cool thing," to each level.
IT'S EARTH, JIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT...
The game is set on Earth in the year 2520. The planet has been drained of its resources and long since abandoned by its population. It now serves as a planetary supermax prison--not a place that favors rehabilitation (three strikes and you're er... abandoned in space). The inmates have formed gangs, the guards have done likewise, and both are fighting for supremacy. Enter Dr. Jack Mason (thats you), a demoted military doctor sent to transport an infected prisoner off the planet. In case you're curious, that prisoner, Karina, is the one staring back at you from this issues cover.
This month's cover star accompanies you throughout Pariah. Karina, a digital creation of Digital Extremes' founder and creative director, James Schmalz, is a prisoner on the future prison planet of Earth and the carrier of an unidentified infection--but don't let that put you off. She's single and very much available.
All reportedly goes to plan until liftoff, when your ship is shot down. From there, you have to survive until you can find a way off the galatic equivalent of Alcatraz. Needless to say, that's much easier said then done.
Adding to your problems is your prickly prisoner, whom someone obviously wants to kill. What follows is an adventure, an action-shooter, and a mystery all rolled into one.
"There are huge challanges," Schmalz admits, "because you want to have believable characters and a great story, and there's no denying that very few games have a great story. Obviously, it's something we've tried in the past, with varying degrees of success. Its's something that requires a huge amount of effort. Not only in hiring the writers--good writers--but in having the games developers understand what a good story is so that they can interact with the writers and find ways to communicate that story well inside the game."
Schmalz is no fan of cut-scenes, and the current trend away from this start/stop approach espoused by Namco's Breakdown appeals greatly. Instead, Karina becomes the story driver. She accompanies you throughout the game as you both search for a way off the planet. She's also the source of arguably the biggest challenge of all for the developers. Creating a detailed model of Karina is no problem for a team that knows every bump-mapped nook and cranny of the Unreal engine, but animating her, and having her act as if she were human, is daunting in the extreme.
Schmalz wants her to be much more than a talking head. "When you look at her, she'll look back at you. And she'll know were your looking, and she'll make conversation. We want her to be alive. We're putting a huge number of resources into making her as human as possible. We've made literally hundereds of animations so that when you stand there and look at her, she's not doing the same thing over and over again, which totally breaks the illusion of an interesting character."
The eventual goal is that as levels progress, Karina will make suggestions as to your next move, draw conclusions from any new evidence you reveal, and drive the game toward its conclusion, without and long-winded exposition or grand CG sequences.
AND...ACTION!
Despite the obvious focus on story and the problems the team faces to bring it to life, Schmalz is on familiar turf with the action. Unreal's trademarks of devestating weapons, intelligent enemy A.I., and now numerous vehicles conspire to make the less-tender moments with Karina a blast. Literally.
"We've read posts on the forums from people who played UC, and they're telling us that there were times when they couldn't tell which players on a map were bots, and which were other human opponents," he reveals. "Thats very flattering for us because it means that all the work we've put into the A.I. has payed off.
The outdoor enviroments account for 80% of Pariah's gameplay and feature epic battles btwn the military and the inmates.
It will pay dividends whit Pariah. Making Karina convincing raises the bar on all the other actors in the enviroment, and there will be many running battles with guards and inmates alike. Expect enemies to employ flanking, regrouping, taking cover and calling for backup, and possibly even asking permission to go the bathroom. As for Karina, the team has already bypassed the Big Book of Videogame Cliches by endowing her with a less-than-Himalayan chest, and is set to do so again by making her (at least in the beginning) the one who wears the trousers. The player-character, too, is no Rambo.
"Your character, Jack Mason," Schmalz confides, "is a doctor. He's not a soldier, but as the game progresses, he has to learn to use weapons and survive, so he's not this powerful hero figure to start with. He's an everyday guy."
Accordingly, your combat skills and access to more powerful weapons start light and ramp up from there. Kill an enemy, and you can take his WEC (weapon energy core)--a smart solution to the problem of players powering up to quickly. The cores allow you to upgrade a number of base weapons, from the aptly named Bulldog to the usual suspects of shotgun and rocket launcher, but only gradually. Getting the first upgrade for a weapon is easy, but to reach the third maxed out stage, you'll have to hoard your WEC's, resisting the temptation to spend them on badly needed ammo or upgrades for your healing tool (a device that is injected into your wrist and is followed by a short period of blurred vision, in case Mr. Lieberman asks). In practice, this adds a strategic element to the levels in which conservation is as important as devestation.
Mason, Pariah's level-editor program, makes creating multiplayer maps a breeze.
Pariah's map editor is extremely simple to use. Programmer Matthieu St-Pierre created a map in just minutes then demonstrated some of its features. To begin, he targeted an area of ground. Then he extruded it by selecting the Terrain tool and painted a greener texture on it. By dipping into the Lighting menu, he subtly changed the hue of the level and then used the Place menu to select a structure from a selection of premodeled buildings to plant on the hill. Choosing a radio tower (great for climbing and sniping from), he completes the construction. Selecting much bigger structures in equally simple--the red box indicates that at this angle, it's too close to another object to be placed. A quick rotation solved the problem. At any point during the process, the player can select "Try" and run through the level they just made.
ITS YOUR WORLD
Matthieu St-Pierre may be the most enthusiastic man in the building. Tasked with creating a gamer-friendly level editor for Pariah's multiplayer mode, he sets about demonstrating it like a kid who's just been given the coolest sandbox in the world. And he may be right. Pariah is primarily a single-player experience, but that doesn't preclude Digital Extremes from ensuring the multiplayer is at least as good as the games it spent six years perfecting on the on the PC--and just as customizable. Exploiting an interesting wrinkle in the Xbox Live setup that allows each gamer a tiny 64k piece of server space, you will be able to create an entire level, populate it with bots and enormous structures, vehicles, and weapons, and then save the whole thing online for anyone to see, download, and play. That will be a first for the Xbox.
Another first will be the level you can push, pull, deform, tweak, texture, fill, and sculpt the enviroment, as if it were made of Silly Putty, until you get what you want.An easy-to-use interface makes selecting any part of the map a breeze, and with two more taps on the controller, you can forge waterlogged swamps, towering cliffs, or rolling hills in moments.
"We recognize the difference btwn PC and console," St-Pierre assures us. "We know that this has to be the most simple process." With a few taps and tugs on the controller, he begins to create a level, selects a couple of bases and some bridges, puls the surface of the planet down 100 feet, and already he's halfway done. The level editor (see opposite page (In this case, my previous post)), code named Mason, allows for quick and dirty design, but it's also deep enough for the more technically minded. Textures can be layered on top of one another to create new foliage, and turrets and other stratigic weapons can be hidden from sight. St-Pierre and Schmalz both expect level editing to become a major pastime on Xbox Live once Pariah sees the light of day. If all goes to plan, that will be sometime March 2005--far enough from Halo 2 to give Pariah the space it needs to make an impact, but close enough to Bungies slam dunk to provide the next first-person fix for a nation with still-itchy trigger fingers.
As with Digital Extremes' previous titles, weapons will be nothing if not effective. Combined with the popular physics engine, Havok, the results are spectacular.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For those that are to lazy or tired to read the above article, I'll give a short overview. Admit it, we are all lazy sometimes.
Pariah is a far-future sci-fi game, with a story driven single player mode, and multi - player craziness.
Earth is now a prison colony ruled by harsh prison guards and others from far off lands; violent prisoners don't help either.
Powered by a modified Unreal engine, and Digital Extreme (developer) is quite familiar with this technology, makes for some not only excellent graphics, but physics also.
Build your multiplayer arena, and allow others online to download it for some serious shooting action. Not just crazy weapons, like "scorp eater" (whatever that is
), but vehicles as well!
REAL
Inside Pariah: The FPS the Unreal Guys Always Wanted to Make
On the third floor of a nondescript building deep in Toronto's theater district, the members of the Pariah team sit with their arms folded, waiting. Meridith Braun, producer, bookeeper, PR person, and possibly den mother, has some news to share. Pariah may be going to Hollywood. For a moment, there's an uncomforatable silence as the team, exausted from working around the clock to have playable levels at May's E3, mulls this over. Then they come to life. Cue several minutes of chattering and joes about terrible videogame movies: Mario Bros., Tomb Raider, Double Dragon, Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat. "Hey, the fight scenes weren't bad," someone offers. Somebody else groans. Braun remains enthusiastic, while boss James Schmalz explains how this time, it's going to be different...
After the spectacular killing spree that was Quake, but before the epic thriller that was Half-Life, there was Unreal. In the summer of Digital Extremes' FP Sci-fi adventure that was the best looking game in the world and one of the first of its kind to offer a true movielike experience. Thanks to simple (but brilliantly executed) set pieces, it showed the true potential of the burgeoning FPS genre and opened the door to a new generation of games - including Bungie's own masterpiece, Halo. Though many expected a sequel, none was forthcoming. Instead, DE, under the publishing banner of Epic, found itself locked in an arms race with Id Software, trading blows in the form of successive iterations of the Unreal engine and online fragfests UT, UT03, UC, and finally, in 2004, another round of sequels for both.
Well before UC2004 was complete, however, Schmalz, Digital Extremes' founder and creative director, was planning a return to the single-player experience. He set his London, Ontario, studio to work on the long awaited Dark Sector, while in Toronto, his UC team began to work on a game with the spirit, if not the soul, of Unreal.
"The real idea behind Pariah is to address some of the stuff we haven't addressed in the past five years with multiplayer," Schmalz says. "We really want ot come back around and and put a lot more focus on the single-player side of things, especially since we're doing it on the Xbox. So that's kind of the genesis of the idea, after UC, to try something fresh and new, and outside of the Unreal universe because there are so many expectations as to what a new Unreal product may be or may not be. We really want to create an in-depth story."
To that end, Pariah's in-game script was written by two professional scriptwriters, Mark Pressman and Drew Fellman, who are, as you read, having their scripts not just optioned (Hollywood-speak for paid to sir on a shelf) but also turned into movies. By real studios. With real budgets. By Schmalz's reckoning, this gives a potential Pariah movie a better-then-average chance of reaching the people who make movies that an audience may actually want to see.
Meanwhile, Pariah's in-game script has been through 3 revisions to date--a testament not just to Schmalz's dogged determination to get it right, but also to his teams obsession with adding "just one more cool thing," to each level.
IT'S EARTH, JIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT...
The game is set on Earth in the year 2520. The planet has been drained of its resources and long since abandoned by its population. It now serves as a planetary supermax prison--not a place that favors rehabilitation (three strikes and you're er... abandoned in space). The inmates have formed gangs, the guards have done likewise, and both are fighting for supremacy. Enter Dr. Jack Mason (thats you), a demoted military doctor sent to transport an infected prisoner off the planet. In case you're curious, that prisoner, Karina, is the one staring back at you from this issues cover.
This month's cover star accompanies you throughout Pariah. Karina, a digital creation of Digital Extremes' founder and creative director, James Schmalz, is a prisoner on the future prison planet of Earth and the carrier of an unidentified infection--but don't let that put you off. She's single and very much available.
All reportedly goes to plan until liftoff, when your ship is shot down. From there, you have to survive until you can find a way off the galatic equivalent of Alcatraz. Needless to say, that's much easier said then done.
Adding to your problems is your prickly prisoner, whom someone obviously wants to kill. What follows is an adventure, an action-shooter, and a mystery all rolled into one.
"There are huge challanges," Schmalz admits, "because you want to have believable characters and a great story, and there's no denying that very few games have a great story. Obviously, it's something we've tried in the past, with varying degrees of success. Its's something that requires a huge amount of effort. Not only in hiring the writers--good writers--but in having the games developers understand what a good story is so that they can interact with the writers and find ways to communicate that story well inside the game."
Schmalz is no fan of cut-scenes, and the current trend away from this start/stop approach espoused by Namco's Breakdown appeals greatly. Instead, Karina becomes the story driver. She accompanies you throughout the game as you both search for a way off the planet. She's also the source of arguably the biggest challenge of all for the developers. Creating a detailed model of Karina is no problem for a team that knows every bump-mapped nook and cranny of the Unreal engine, but animating her, and having her act as if she were human, is daunting in the extreme.
Schmalz wants her to be much more than a talking head. "When you look at her, she'll look back at you. And she'll know were your looking, and she'll make conversation. We want her to be alive. We're putting a huge number of resources into making her as human as possible. We've made literally hundereds of animations so that when you stand there and look at her, she's not doing the same thing over and over again, which totally breaks the illusion of an interesting character."
The eventual goal is that as levels progress, Karina will make suggestions as to your next move, draw conclusions from any new evidence you reveal, and drive the game toward its conclusion, without and long-winded exposition or grand CG sequences.
AND...ACTION!
Despite the obvious focus on story and the problems the team faces to bring it to life, Schmalz is on familiar turf with the action. Unreal's trademarks of devestating weapons, intelligent enemy A.I., and now numerous vehicles conspire to make the less-tender moments with Karina a blast. Literally.
"We've read posts on the forums from people who played UC, and they're telling us that there were times when they couldn't tell which players on a map were bots, and which were other human opponents," he reveals. "Thats very flattering for us because it means that all the work we've put into the A.I. has payed off.
The outdoor enviroments account for 80% of Pariah's gameplay and feature epic battles btwn the military and the inmates.
It will pay dividends whit Pariah. Making Karina convincing raises the bar on all the other actors in the enviroment, and there will be many running battles with guards and inmates alike. Expect enemies to employ flanking, regrouping, taking cover and calling for backup, and possibly even asking permission to go the bathroom. As for Karina, the team has already bypassed the Big Book of Videogame Cliches by endowing her with a less-than-Himalayan chest, and is set to do so again by making her (at least in the beginning) the one who wears the trousers. The player-character, too, is no Rambo.
"Your character, Jack Mason," Schmalz confides, "is a doctor. He's not a soldier, but as the game progresses, he has to learn to use weapons and survive, so he's not this powerful hero figure to start with. He's an everyday guy."
Accordingly, your combat skills and access to more powerful weapons start light and ramp up from there. Kill an enemy, and you can take his WEC (weapon energy core)--a smart solution to the problem of players powering up to quickly. The cores allow you to upgrade a number of base weapons, from the aptly named Bulldog to the usual suspects of shotgun and rocket launcher, but only gradually. Getting the first upgrade for a weapon is easy, but to reach the third maxed out stage, you'll have to hoard your WEC's, resisting the temptation to spend them on badly needed ammo or upgrades for your healing tool (a device that is injected into your wrist and is followed by a short period of blurred vision, in case Mr. Lieberman asks). In practice, this adds a strategic element to the levels in which conservation is as important as devestation.
Mason, Pariah's level-editor program, makes creating multiplayer maps a breeze.
Pariah's map editor is extremely simple to use. Programmer Matthieu St-Pierre created a map in just minutes then demonstrated some of its features. To begin, he targeted an area of ground. Then he extruded it by selecting the Terrain tool and painted a greener texture on it. By dipping into the Lighting menu, he subtly changed the hue of the level and then used the Place menu to select a structure from a selection of premodeled buildings to plant on the hill. Choosing a radio tower (great for climbing and sniping from), he completes the construction. Selecting much bigger structures in equally simple--the red box indicates that at this angle, it's too close to another object to be placed. A quick rotation solved the problem. At any point during the process, the player can select "Try" and run through the level they just made.
ITS YOUR WORLD
Matthieu St-Pierre may be the most enthusiastic man in the building. Tasked with creating a gamer-friendly level editor for Pariah's multiplayer mode, he sets about demonstrating it like a kid who's just been given the coolest sandbox in the world. And he may be right. Pariah is primarily a single-player experience, but that doesn't preclude Digital Extremes from ensuring the multiplayer is at least as good as the games it spent six years perfecting on the on the PC--and just as customizable. Exploiting an interesting wrinkle in the Xbox Live setup that allows each gamer a tiny 64k piece of server space, you will be able to create an entire level, populate it with bots and enormous structures, vehicles, and weapons, and then save the whole thing online for anyone to see, download, and play. That will be a first for the Xbox.
Another first will be the level you can push, pull, deform, tweak, texture, fill, and sculpt the enviroment, as if it were made of Silly Putty, until you get what you want.An easy-to-use interface makes selecting any part of the map a breeze, and with two more taps on the controller, you can forge waterlogged swamps, towering cliffs, or rolling hills in moments.
"We recognize the difference btwn PC and console," St-Pierre assures us. "We know that this has to be the most simple process." With a few taps and tugs on the controller, he begins to create a level, selects a couple of bases and some bridges, puls the surface of the planet down 100 feet, and already he's halfway done. The level editor (see opposite page (In this case, my previous post)), code named Mason, allows for quick and dirty design, but it's also deep enough for the more technically minded. Textures can be layered on top of one another to create new foliage, and turrets and other stratigic weapons can be hidden from sight. St-Pierre and Schmalz both expect level editing to become a major pastime on Xbox Live once Pariah sees the light of day. If all goes to plan, that will be sometime March 2005--far enough from Halo 2 to give Pariah the space it needs to make an impact, but close enough to Bungies slam dunk to provide the next first-person fix for a nation with still-itchy trigger fingers.
As with Digital Extremes' previous titles, weapons will be nothing if not effective. Combined with the popular physics engine, Havok, the results are spectacular.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For those that are to lazy or tired to read the above article, I'll give a short overview. Admit it, we are all lazy sometimes.
Pariah is a far-future sci-fi game, with a story driven single player mode, and multi - player craziness.
Earth is now a prison colony ruled by harsh prison guards and others from far off lands; violent prisoners don't help either.
Powered by a modified Unreal engine, and Digital Extreme (developer) is quite familiar with this technology, makes for some not only excellent graphics, but physics also.
Build your multiplayer arena, and allow others online to download it for some serious shooting action. Not just crazy weapons, like "scorp eater" (whatever that is
), but vehicles as well!
