Resistance 2... United We FallThe chaingun is heavy, and you're tired -- especially after that swarm of leapers hit the squad a little while back.
But the medics on your team have patched you up. The snipers are in position. You know running down this hill is suicie, but somebody has to take out that node. And you've got the squad at your back that can do it. You've fought beside some of these men dozens of times, and others are replacements, sent in after that last sorry excuse for a fight. but as the nearby wall explodes and dozens of Hybrids begin to pour out from the smoke, the seven men beside you don't care about being outgunned or overmatched, even as that colossal Titan roars its way out onto the field. You don't care either. It's your country this time, and you'll be damned if those overheated, body-stealing, six-eyed freaks are going to take it away.
Resistance 2 is a big game. That simpel adjective describes so much about Insomniac's latest endeavour. The scope of the game world is massive -- the cities and landscapes of the entire United States serve as the backdrop.
The player count is unprecedented -- an independant eight-player, story-driven cooperative game is being built right alongside the single-player campaign. Finish that, and you shouldn't have any trouble joining the various 60-player competitive modes.
The scale of the conflict is overwhelming, allowing for positively gigantic battles against dozens of enemies, along with overwhelming boss encounters against creatures and machines hundreds of feet tall. It is, in short, a tour de force for the untapped might of the PlayStation 3.Insomniac is a difficult studio to marshal complaints and concerns against. This is its third full retail game for Sony's latest platform. Its first two releases (Resistance and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction) are often cited as the biggest selling points for the console during a first year that otherwise wasn't everything Sony had hoped it would be. Insomniac's experience is apparent when we visit their Burbank studio, most particularly as they sit us down to play an hour of that insane eight-player online cooperative mode. Keep in mind this is a game that doesn't come out until this Fall. For neophytes out there, having something like that up and running at this point in the process is fairly remarkable.
Ted Price splits his attention between running the studio and serving as creative director on this latest project. As soon as he sits down to speak with us, it's clear that integrating all the elements of the game into a unified whole serves as a central goal for the project. "Most first-person shooters today have a very seperated single-playerand multiplayer experience," Price says. "We want to change that around."
The starting point for that endeavour is a gripping story, and the team is upping the ante to draw players into both an engaging, character-driven plot and a more sweeping, dramatic setting.
Resistance 2 abandons the third-person narrated account of the saavy British Intelligence girl from the first resistance, putting the emphasis squarely on hero Nathan Hale. "We realized we have to keep the focus on the main character. With Resistance 1, we spent a lot of time in narration. Rachel Parker was really the main figure as she told this story about Hale. This time we're going to stay with Hale the whole time."
The opening scene of the new game is the same as the closing epilogue after the credits of Fall of Man. Hale is cornered by some mysterious masked troops in a helicopter, and he hesitantly surrenders and is flown away to Iceland. "In Iceland, they are shot down because the base there has come under attack," says Price. "Hale barely makes it out alive, gets back to the mainland United States, and becomes part of a special program called the Sentinels." These soldiers have also developed a resistance to the Chimeran virus. They train at his side in the coming months as the military's secret weapon against the enemy, and will serve with him throughout the story to come.
Two years after arriving Stateside, the Chimerans launch a full-scale aerial assault. "Hundreds of giant ships invade the US from both coasts," Price continues. "They drive America's soldiers and citizenry into the middle of the country." Beginning in San Francisco, and eventually expanding to battlefields across the country, Hale fights back even as he continues the internal struggle hinted at in the first game; his viral resistance is a far cry from total immunity. "Throughout the game, the player is faced with completely overwhelming odds. It is a losing battle. We're creating a sense of despair and bleakness with the story," Price concludes.
The development team is insistent about the widespread locales in which the remianing and unrevealed plot points will take place. Hesistant to spoil the details, they only hint that anyone who has done a little stateside traveling knows full well the breadth of environments that a game set across the entire United States could yield.
"We have a style that is about the contrast between the sophisticated Chimeran alien technology and the more grounded human technology, which should be era appropriate for the '50s, but with a twist," art director Chad Dezern tells us. it's not hard to imagine massive cityscapes juxtaposed against the mile-wide aerial battleships of the Chimeran fleet, or full-scale infantry engagements across desert flatlands and craggy mountains. The game is set in the 1950s, but it's a place not much like the post-war boom of our history. In the world of Resistance, World War II never happened, as the Chimeran threat rolled over Europe. The darker America that results never really pulled out of the Great Depression. the developers at Insomniac are fascinated withthe idea of mxing this bleak new vision of 1950s America against the broiling might of the hulking Chimeran war machine.
A new backdrop isn't the only thing spicing up the campaign. Along with their mighty floating battle fortresses, we'll see any number of new monstrous threats that Hale must confront. price tells us about one: the Chameleon. This frightening stalker has a total claoking ability, and it attacks in close-quarters melee with its devestating blades. Your first encounter with it is when it gorily shreds some of the soldiers you're traveling with. if it's not openly assaulting you or your team, its virtual invisibility will have to be tracked with careful skill, like watching for its passing footsteps in a nearby puddle. Likewise, familiar foes like the Hybrid have been completely overhauled with dramatically improved AI routines and a new suite of detachable armor pieces that players will need to overcome.
Beyond a broadened array of standard enemies, Insomniac is also committed to overcoming the stigma that boss enocunters can't work in a first-person shooter. As expected, the studio is silent on the content of those major conflicts, but one need look no further than some of the surrounding images to get some good ideas. "Bosses are generally not the domain of first-person shooters, which generally focus on run and gun gameplay," Price opines. "We want to break things up and include these monstrous bosses -- things that are much larger than anything you saw in Resistance 1."
All of the above is enough to get us pretty excited about the single-player campaign. And, in another game, we'd be equally as excited to hear about tackling that story a second time with seven of our friends. However, that's not how Resistance 2 works. An independant story and campaign is being prepared for two-player offline co-op, or up to 8 players over PlayStation Network. "Traditionally, you have to make compromises," associate creative director Colin Munson says. "If you go crazy with single player, you have to compromise the co-op -- and vice versa. It's frustrating. We don't want to do it like that. We want to take it in a different direction."
Using the backdrop of some huge multiplayer battlegrounds, the cooperative mode reveals a story that runs parallel to Hale's, but focuses on other soldiers involved in the fight for America's survival. Initially conceived as a sort of bridge between single-player and competitive multiplayer, the co-op game hopes to reel in the huge numbers of players who buy a game like this and never bother to take it online due to the stiff competition. The cooperative challenges will be objective-based, delivering enoughplot and character interactionto keep gamers excited but encouraging squad tactics and fast-paced action above long cutscenes or narrations.
As planned, this second full campaign will be at least as long or even longer than the single-player story, and more than that, it will be different each time it is played.
You'll tackle this mode with your own unique character, chosen from one of three basic templates. A tank-style soldier wields a heavy chaingun to mow down enemy forces. His kills help to fuel a recharging mobile energy shield that can be deployed in front of him and his squadmates. A Special Ops class provides a distance damage dealer, as these soldiers wield a modified Bullseye rifle with zoom features and extreme stopping power. Finally, the intriguing medic class seems like it would be at home in an MMo raid encounter. The medic's "Medicator" gun fires damaging red bolts of energy at enemy targets that charge a special meter, but slip your reticule over a friend and the gun instantly pours out a healing blue shot fueled by that same meter. Any combination of the three classes can make up your team, encouraging unique approaches to each level.
Standard dfficulty settings have been discarded in favour of a challenge scaled to the skill of you and your teammates, since you'll be ranking up your character as you play. Even without a full squad of friends beside you, the game will be capable of auto-matching you with fellow players online who are also looking for co-op play,
and will find other gamers at the same place in the story as you.Finally, the levels themselves will morph on subsequent playthroughs. While the team isn't ready to promise truly randomized level design, the geometry of these stages can and will be altered each time you play.
If working together with seven players isn't enough for you, perhaps blasting away at 59 of them will be. The competitive modes of Resistance 2 will reveal yet another component of the wider tale, but here the story takes a total backseat to intense, large-scale conflicts. At the same time, the team is keenly aware that an unchecked 60-person battle could get unwieldy pretty fast.
"With 60 players, we want to give that sense of epic battle," lead multiplayer programmer Eric Ellis explains. "But at the same time, we don't want that to be the gameplay. We actually think more focused squad-versus-squad gameplay is going to be best."
When prepping for a night of competitive multiplayer,
you'll log into a lobby with smaller four-toeightperson squads, encouraging genuine communication and camaraderie pre-game before you join the battle as part of a larger contingent of troops. Your squad will usually be tasked with a particular objective --
each squad might have a different goal on the field. Likewise, your opponents will have rival objectives, and if all goes well, the skill level of the opposite team should match up with your own.
Careful level design aims to deliver intense combat zones of small team conflicts that flow together within the arena of the larger battle. It's an elaborate approach to online competition bolstered by an equally ambitious handling of the wider community features.
With online play more important with each passing software generation, Insomniac has had team members focused in on community from the get go. "It's been built into the game from the initial design," Price explains. "Most community features are just add-ons for the big first-person shooters. this is something we're passionate about."
Eschewing peer-to-peer networking, Resistance 2 will have dedicated gaming, community and stats servers that should allow for faster machmaking than the console games of 2007. Full-featured profile pages through
http://www.myresistance.net will incorporate social networking concepts. meanwhile, in-game, insomniac is enacting a totally open clan and party system to encourage everyone to join up and get to know other players -- no invites will be needed (Ed note- booooo on this front). Improved voice chat aims to deliver mobile phone-quality sound. beyond the details, there is a larger vision to make community building a central component of the game, rather than a tacked-on feature set constructed after the game is already on store shelves.
Given Insomniac's close relationship with Sony, it's unsurprising to hear praise for the flexibility and power of the PlayStation 3. Nonetheless, as the studio's third game on the system, Resistance 2 is taking advantage of more than just the sophisticated networking features of the console. "We've learned a lot about how to work on the PlayStation 3. Resistance 2 will see a lot of those benefits," Price tells us.
"Our technology is home grown. We develop everything here. We're not reliant on outside vendors."
Proprietary game systems are now being heavily farmed out to the PS3's SPUs, keeping the central PPU as a sort of traffic cop that organizes what gets attention at any given moment. In simple terms, the game is taking much better advantage of the untapped potential of the console. In regard to visuals, the expanded use of the SPUs means more enemies on screen, signifigantly more complex AI from all of those foes, and dramatically expanded options for special effects. Lighting and shader advances show off the broadened color palette of the game, which moves away from the cool grays and blues that filled the first game in the series towards a more vibrant, painted tone.
More complex normal mapping and detail mapping combine to deliver textures that look amazing both from afar and at extremely close distances, a complaint that some critics leveled against the first installment.
On the gameplay side, artificial intelligence is getting a lot of attention. The AI will scale on the fly to the player's perspective and viewpoint. What does that mean?
Enemies closer to the player will have more sophisticated AI routines than those further away. Likewise, assailants in your direct field of view also recieve heightened intelligence. The result is an observable cunning from the adversaries you're directly dealing with, while the more distant or out-of-sight enemies remain dangerous without being overwhelming or frustrating.
While the game strives to take some wild leaps forward, it's also clear that the team is reexamining where they came from with the first game. Some players found fault with the long checkpoints and health system management introduced in that installment. Refreshingly, Price and the rest of his team seem open acknowledging people's dilemmas, and honest enough not to promise a solution they haven't yet found. Rather, they are clear in expressing that those issues and any number of other concerns are being addressed, but that such balance and level flow issues are hard to talk about this far away from release. Instead the team has focused on early prototyping of the entire game, building early versions of everything from the levels to the enemies, then placing them into a functional game that can be tested and refined throughout the many months ahead.
"Viscerality is an internal word that we've been using, and it's kind of a silly word -- we made it up. But when you say it enough, it starts to get a real meaning. It starts to feel like it belongs in our venacular," Price explains. "Viscerality, for us, is the sense or state a player feels when the obviously unreal feels real -- when you're playing the game and nothing else seems to exist. We've been focused on that when we're setting up our levels, when we're implementing the gameplay, and honing in on what makes the game feel right." It's a common goal for developers these days that are increasingly eager to draw players into their unique fiction. However, at Insomniac, it has been an overriding focus across every gameplay component. the intense visuals, shocking and surprising sound work, taut storytelling, and even the rumble in the controller all aim to serve the wider goal of viscerality.
As evidenced by our chance to sit and play a full cooperative mission with seven members of the game's multiplayer team, Resistance 2 has a more than solid start. Our time playing was a blast -- each of the character classes contributes to the fight in a unique way, and we particularly loved the strategy-laden play style of the medic, as he juggles damage dealing and healing. there is a unique sense of teamwork involved in confronting the hordes of enemy fighters that the game throws at you. the opening of this article was no conjured fantasy, but a dramatized description of the exact events in the game level we played.
hybrids were shattering barriers and charging en masse as we descended into a valley. huge Titans would dominate a fight as our forces scattered around it, furiously pouring fire at it while our medics kept us barely alive. one fight would finish and we would immediately find our rear support troops had been ambushed from behind.
Even in its unpolished state, the excitement of these large-scale cooperative battles makes good on a promise many gamers have waited a long time for. We can only hope that the final version that releases later this year maintains that promise in its finished form.
While concious of its legacy, Resistance 2 is a game eager to move into the future. throughout our time at Insomniac, we read between the lines aboutg the bigger picture of moving the franchise forward. We ask about the mysterious Cloven hinted at in the first game, and are met with only cryptic and elusive answers, implying that even those questions might not be fully cleared up by this sequel. Nathan Hale's continuing struggle against the virus within him remains an equally well-guarded secret. Even the origin of the monstrous Chimera remians foggy -- but this is one secret we expect some solid info on by the time the credits roll on Resistance 2. Insomniac crafted what many regard as the premier launch title for Sony's PlayStation 3 in Resistance: Fall of Man. At the same time, its appearance so early on in that console's life cycle made it a remarkable game that some enthusiasts might have missed.
In contrast, however the final product turns out, Resistance 2 will be too epic to dismiss as anything but one of the biggest, boldest, and most high-reaching titles of 2008. It's a game that will not be ignored.
Also, it looks like he has a big gun. This artwork came with a caption that said...
