This used to be called 'Adrift' but is now 'Remember Me' and is being published by Capcom and developed by Parisian studio Don't Nod games. Â You can tell from the pic on the about page they are using unreal 3.
Some nice concepts on their facebook page plus a couple of intriguing HUD overlay shots...
Yeah I'm not omg day one excited, it's dystopian and Capcom which ticks two boxes for me straight away, plus I just ignore these things till their out anyway because fuck the corporate hype machine and its spoilers. I've seen couple of screens, I'm good till release now.
I know sci fi has always been popular to some extent, but it feels like since Mass Effect was so huge, others have become more confident in doing large and expensive sci fi stuff. Â Stuff that isn't just shooters set in the future that is.
Gameplay looks promising, they must have spent a ton of cash on it, and I'm impressed so far especially as it's a new studio. Â But of course we will see how it turns out...
Actually, I quite like that! Â The initial bit is a bit hoop (hey, where's Frank? Â Oh look, a huge billboard!), and I don't quite get how she knows that one of the goons has the memory of Frank's location so she can extract it. Â The Assassin's Creed style hopping around looks like fun though.
The memory stuff has so much potential. Â It's very Ghost Trick; little adjustments to things to make the memory play out differently, by the looks of things, but anything too unsubtle might be noticed? Â It'll live or die on the amount of options you're given there. Â If it's like Hitman, where there are 4 or 5 different ways to a solution then I think it'll be a lot of fun. Â If it's tightly scripted, so each scenario has 2 or 3 failures like this one but only one success, then it'll suck a bit. Â
Exactly the same potential criticism I'd aim at Watch Dogs. Â Excellent, if there are multiple routes through each section, each with the adaptability and unpredictability of the car-crash scene in the E3 reveal. Â Shit however, if that's the only "good" outcome, and there's no other way to do it.
Even if it's slightly generic new IP. Â I worry it's a game that's been bodged a bit as soon as Watch Dogs was announced. Â Couldn't they just call it the next Deus Ex?
Generic sci-fi female lead aside, I quite liked that gameplay video.Â
Metal Gear sneaking meets assassin's creed free running meets ummm a point and click-esque puzzler during the remix sequence!?
I would have preferred it if you had one shot at the memory remix, if it failed, the dude goes mental and starts jibbing out from having his brain poked about in and you then have to noisily do him in in the real world alerting all and sundry. At the moment it looks like you just kind of have a semi sandbox approach to remixing the memories, and keep going until you wind up getting the result you want.
"Let me tell you, when yung Rouj had his Senna and Mansell Scalextric, Frank was the goddamn Professor X of F1."
Yeah, a 1/2 shot system would be quite good, perhaps with sliding-scale ramifications in the real world depending on how often you screwed with his memory. Â I'm still hoping they'll be large and complex enough for you to have multiple ways out; could there be other ways to make him think Alexia's dead, rather than the gun? Â Will there be longer memories, where you go back and have 10-step rather than 2-step puzzles?
The memory puzzle part is a neat idea but the scenario was rather deterministic. How on earth would the guy at the start know that shifting that particular memory would make the guy so suicidal so suddenly? As a couple of people pointed out in the Far Cries thread, games are potentially broken but potentially brilliant when they're more realistic (ie. cover is not based on hiding in shadow) and don't abide by game-logic.
I love the idea of all this Minority Report style stuff, where you can move (or see) backwards (or forwards) in time and change things. But my problem with it is the same problem I have with forced emergent play, as opposed to freely emergent play.
I see freely emergent play as a bunch of people in L4D working out their escape route and amending the plan on the fly.
Whereas forced emergent play is where the game gives you the illusion of multiple paths through a section of play.
The forced stuff has had developers claiming all sorts of stuff like 'choose your character's destiny' and 'be an evil bastard if you want to'. But it's always totally hamstrung by the amount of content a developer can create for a game and the amount of engineering and design it takes to make it work.
Mass Effect might have a plot and characters people enjoy but the whole emergent aspect of it is twaddle, a few different paths here and there with different speech. No game that I know of has managed to provide drastically different results from forced emergent play.
Obviously it is possible, but doing it in a AAA wrapper is just too expensive, you end up paying for x amount of assets, animation and implementation. x being how many different paths you want to provide. Still not truly 'emergent' in the other sense, although that doesn't mean it can't be fun.
In a way this method of rewinding time and changing things is a workaround for the old save/checkpoint system. By building it into the story. But it is still basically linear, at least from what they've shown so far.
Taking it a step further, what I would like to play is a game version of the film Primer, where you are able to jump around time, see yourself doing things in other timelines, and interact with yourself and other versions of yourself. Leaving yourself clues or traps etc.
I'm really looking forward playing in the world they've got here, and hope it's a little more Blade Runner and a little less Star Trek than Mass Effect turned out to be.
If it doesn't work out we've always got CDProjekt's Cyberpunk game to look forward to, as well as Watch Dogs.
You're right that it can't really feature truly emergent gameplay, but multiple options can be done very well, especially if they can cross over a bit. Â That was what the Hitman games did particularly well; you can plant a bomb after breaking into a staff room and getting a pass to get to a staff-only area and a disguise, then bomb him as he walks past; but you could also use that same pass to get into an area to rig a bit of equipment as a trap, or meet him on his own. Â That sort of thing.
The thing I loved about them was playing my way through a level, then asking a mate what he did; and being amazed that there was a different route that I hadn't even considered. Â That was there in the most recent Deus Ex as well, and I hope it's there in this and Watch Dogs. Â At least the concept of messing with memories is nicely abstract and different from any of the other offerings.