Mike Bantick
Monday, 02 June 2008 07:45
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Shara Miller, Executive Producer on Fracture took iTWire through an early code look of the game.
The main ‘trick’ of Fracture is terrain deformation – first really attempted in a shooter back in the days of the Geo-Mod engine in Red Faction (THQ – 2001). With this third person shooter however, rather than simply destroying terrain objects, the entire landscape can be reshaped.
Using the Entrencher cybernetic enhancement, players can raise terrain to provide cover, or enable Briggs to get to higher map locations. There are also many other “weapons”, 17 to be exact, in the game to further modify each game level.
Briggs can use grenades to create spikes of ground, from which to launch further devastating attacks.
During the presentation, Miller was keen to point out that the code on display was yet to be optimised; this was a good thing as once the action heated up, the frame rate dropped significantly.
Fracture looks like it will indeed be frenetic, many enemies on screen (during the game a player will encounter at least 10 types of foe), along with a great deal of ground pulsing action will keep Briggs busy. It certainly keeps the display active.
Visually, from the demo, Fracture is embedded in a design structure of modern style buildings fused with a broken and desolate landscape. Think some portions of Mass Effect's planetary locations.
With terrain changing on a moment to moment basis, it was heartening to note enemy AI switching as needed to adapt to the surrounding landscape – these enemies seem more alive in this sense. Rather than pre-programmed paths, each enemy trooper would take advantage of newly formed cover, or retreat as required.
Finally, once again taking advantage of the ground modification, and physics abilities of the Fracture engine, Miller noted that there would be a medium level of puzzle challenges within the game. Some of these were on show during the preview, from the relatively easy process of raising a hill in front of a platform, to disabling enemy power turbines by flipping barrels into the spinning fans.
