To
date, Midway hasn't released a next-gen game.
The company has only shown one internally
developed title publicly and is just starting to
make next-gen announcements for its established
franchises. If the early reaction to Stranglehold
is any indication, however, that slow and steady
approach is about to pay off big time. We
recently spoke with director Brian Eddy and
senior producer Alex Offerman to figure out
their battle plans for Midway's first homegrown
next-gen game.
For
Midway, step one in creating the game was
linking together a critically acclaimed
development team with a license that would
hopefully provide that team with bigger sales
numbers. After working on the well-received
psychic action thriller Psi-Ops, the
development team inside Midway's Chicago studios
was rumored to be working on a follow-up --
after all, the first game ended with an obvious
cliffhanger. But when Psi-Ops didn't perform so
well in stores, few were surprised at the news
the Psi-Ops team would be working on a new
franchise. ("I'm not allowed to comment on
Psi-Ops 2," Eddy says with a smile.)
For
that new franchise, Midway didn't take the
obvious route. Stranglehold is a movie-game, but
it's free of one of the biggest limitations that
comes with many movie-licensed titles -- the
forced deadline to meet the movie's release
date. Instead of being a game version of an
upcoming film, Stranglehold is an original
sequel to 1992's Hard Boiled. "We
think it's the best of both worlds, because we
get Chow Yun-Fat playing [Inspector] Tequila,
and we get John Woo's involvement, but there's
not a film that we have to play towards,"
says Eddy. "So we can have their
involvement and get their characters, and make
this really cool adventure and really cool
gameplay around just that, and we can really
focus on making that fun, and not have to worry
about matching the movie or something like
that."
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| [click
the image to check out all Stranglehold
screens] |
More
than just pretty graphics
Much like Ubisoft with King Kong (which
was developed by the team behind the similarly
well-received-but-disappointing-at-retail Beyond
Good & Evil), Midway is taking a proven
team and letting it experiment with a key
license. In Stranglehold, that experimentation
comes with the idea of emergent gameplay, where
the developers give players options and let them
decide how to use them. It's a concept Psi-Ops
incorporated as well, as that game allowed
players to choose whether they wanted to use
telekinesis, light enemies on fire, use their
guns, etc.
"What's
cool about [Stranglehold] is you'll come in,
you'll look around, and it's like, 'Hey I can
run up that banister, run along it, take out
guys, jump on that chandelier, swing across to
the other side of the balcony, and take out the
guys over there,'" says Eddy. "Or I
could see the roll-cart over there -- 'I'm going
to run, leap onto the roll-cart and take out
guys as I'm shooting.' Or maybe I see the table
-- 'I'm going to slide across those tables and
take out guys that way.' So it's really up to
the player. We're really big fans of emergent
gameplay -- give the player a cool toolset, and
let them play how they want to play it."
A
big part of making this work is the unique
control scheme the developers have implemented
to make environment interaction a breeze. To
ramp up the action but make it accessible to
players who may not be accustomed to complex
game controls, the developers have come up with
a system that they hope will let players of all
skill levels jump in and have fun without having
to struggle too much.
"As
you run around through the world things
highlight slightly, so you can tell that, 'Hey,
this is something I can do something cool
with,'" says Eddy. "And all you have
to do is hit the 'interact' button and [Tequila]
will do something really cool -- he'll dive onto
the roll-cart as you're sliding through, he'll
run up the banister for you, he'll jump onto the
chandelier. You can even chain these events
together, so it's really accessible to everybody
to just make it look cool."
Attention
to detail
Other key gameplay features rely on the added
horsepower of next-gen consoles. Perhaps the
most well-known of these is the idea that you
can destroy any part of any environment, piece
by piece, and this can actually affect the
gameplay if your cover gets taken out. "It
becomes a mini-game almost," says Eddy.
"Players, after they take out everybody,
can go around, pick up all their weapons and
just trash the place even more."
The
attention to detail doesn't stop there, however.
Bullets will elicit specific reactions no matter
what they hit. "Enemies in Stranglehold
will react differently to being shot in
different areas of their bodies," says
Offerman. "For instance, you can
incapacitate an enemy by shooting him in the
knee, which will cause him to grab his wound,
fall to the ground and writhe in pain. However,
he may recover his senses after a bit and manage
to get off a few more shots before he passes out
from blood loss. On the other hand, shoot an
enemy right between the legs...well, let's just
say that he won't be recovering from his senses
any time soon!"
