As an antidote to the European focus of most World War 2 games, I\\'ve been spending more time reading about the War in the Pacific. After reading Walter Lord\\'s Day of Infamy and Hugh Bicheno\\'s new book, Midway, I was quite happy when SCi stopped by to show me a demo of their new game, currently known as Midway.
The new Battlefield 1942-style game takes the player from Pearl Harbor to Midway through a full single-player campaign. Over the course of those six months the player will lead the navies of either the Americans or the Japanese against one another in a series of missions. You\\'ll be leading a force of battleships, carriers, submarines, destroyers and even planes against your enemy. Unlike Battlefield, you\\'re not controlling an actual person in the game -- you\\'re controlling the ships and planes directly.
You\\'ll have a fairly small fleet at the beginning but your forces will grow as the game progresses to the tide-turning battle of Midway. It\\'s clear from the demos we\\'ve seen that the game isn\\'t a strategy game, it\\'s an action game. There are definitely strategic decisions to be made here but the focus is on jumping into ships and planes (which you can do freely as the game plays out) and fighting it out with the ships and planes of your enemy. Though you\\'ll be able to control the individual guns on your ships, even going so far as to fire depth charges off your destroyers, those stations and ships that you\\'re not manning will be run by a friendly AI.
But even though the game has a strong action focus, there are some interesting realistic touches. When ships are sinking, you can flood other compartments to level them off. In other words, if one of your battleships has taken a few torpedoes on the port side and those compartments are flooding, the deck will start to tip towards that side. This makes your big guns nearly impossible to aim. If you can flood a few compartments on the starboard side, you can keep your deck on the same plane as the water. So even though the ship goes down, it can go down fighting.
The flight model for the game continues the action game tendencies. It\\'s been described to us as somewhere between that found in Microsoft\\'s Flight Simulator series and the recent Secret Weapons Over Normandy. Admittedly, that\\'s a pretty broad range, but we can expect planes to stall out at low speeds and perform maneuvers as sophisticated as barrel rolls.
So we\\'ve talked planes and ships but there is land in the game. With literally hundreds of square miles of ocean in each mission, things would get a little boring without some islands and stuff. There\\'s actually not any land-based gameplay but you will be responsible for defending or assaulting islands from an aerial or naval standpoint. One mission even involves evacuating MacArthur from the Phillipines.
You\\'d guess from the screens that the game has some fantastic water effects. We\\'ve seen videos of the game in motion and the visuals look every bit as good while moving. It has a really interesting color filter that gives the entire game the appearance of color films from the war. Sadly, the unique saturation of the colors isn\\'t as apparent from the shots as it is when you\\'re actually watching the game in action.
Other things that you\\'re not seeing in the shots are the crews on the ships. Each ship will have a number of men running around and manning the stations in real time. You\\'ll even see men run and dive when planes come strafing by.
There are also a few newsreel-like moments, complete with a sepia-tone effect and a gritty audio track. We\\'re not entirely sure how the story moves the action along but we do know the team wants to emphasize the story as you move from one mission to the next. These newsreel moments can be put to good use here.
Right now the team isn\\'t saying much about multiplayer. We do know that there\\'s a plan to offer support for at least 16 players. We might expect the numbers for the PC version to be higher but nothing\\'s set in stone yet.
The game\\'s due out next year and you can bet we\\'ll be keeping a close eye on this one.
[此贴子已经被作者于2004-5-10 15:59:27编辑过] |
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发表于 2004-5-9 20:53:27
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