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Neither Vince nor I were entirely sure what we were doing in Bethesda's private room. While I am as fond of Elder Scrolls as anyone who might be me, I'm not really as versed in Bethesda's catalogue as I might be.
What we ended up with was a brief demonstration of a couple of the developer's most recent projects -- both licensed, both examples of why a popular license is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of game design.
We stepped in to the middle of a lengthy overview of Pirates of the Caribbean. For a game based off of a movie based off of a theme park attraction, the design is surprisingly deep. Bethesda seemed to take the pirate element as a springboard for their own whims, as the game comes off like a cross between Elder Scrolls and something that Sid Meier might appreciate.
Essentially, it's a buccaneering sim. You oufit your boat in every painstaking way, from sails to crew to armament. Your behaviour in out-of-boat adventuring elements affects your reputation, which affects your play options. Buy and sell contraband. Raid or demolish enemy vessels. Stab people, or be diplomatic with them.
It's bewildering, at least to me, how much detail is -- how many variables are -- available for any given decision. What do you use to shoot the ship? Where do you aim? How do you ride the waves? What do you do with your sails?
All of this is executed in the sophisticated, polished manner of Morrowind. It's far better than the property deserves; if anything, the license seems to exist merely as an excuse to make the game and as a hook to ensure that it will sell.
Far more interesting for me, however, was the second game: Head First Productions' Call of Cthulu. To be honest, I had thoroughly ignored any previous word on the game (that mostly consisting of Tycho's newsposts). From the treatment that Lovecraft is prone to receive, I expected little more than a sophomoric pass at the most sensational details and overtones of the so-called "Cthulu Mythos".
Well, whee! I wonder what else I've been unfairly filtering out from my radar. To call my assumptions inaccurate, a person would, in his or her own self-hewn manner, be not at all inaccurate in such a declaration.
This game looks good. It looks damned good. The people making it know what they're doing. They understand the source material; they understand Lovecraft's thought processes, and his writing style. They understand why it works as it does. They understand the specific appeal of a horror story narrated in the first person. This game is more or less an actualization, as it were, of Lovecraft's world.
If it reminds me of anything that I've played recently -- although this might sound a little odd -- it drags to mind my experience with Metroid Prime. Retro cared about their source material. They did their research, not only on the details but on the context and the philosophy of the earlier Metroid games.
Prime is sophisticated on far more levels than simply the gameplay; it is such a good game in large part because it is such a careful, observant internalization of its source. Retro did such a humongous amount of reverse development that they came to understand Metroid, as such, more thoroughly -- both intuitively and intellectually -- than Intelligent Systems probably even does.
Once a universe has been disassembled and reassembled enough times, one tends to incorporate it into one's personal web enough to accentuate it at will -- to cautiously fill in the cracks with as much logic and creativity as seem appropriate; to adapt the original material into a new and original shape, using all of the original signature elements.
That's what's going on here. This game is basically an adaptation of Lovecraft's "Shadow over Innsmouth", with a great deal of supporting material. The game system, interface, and design are all derived from Lovecraft's writing style -- both his tonal choices and personal quirks. The game is immersive, creepy, and -- indeed -- eldritch. Every overt conceit of game design seems to have been thoroughly considered; most have been discarded or creatively reworked so as to diminish any sense in the player of disaffection from the game events.
In short, a ton of thought has gone into this game.
At times it felt a little peculiar to watch the demonstration; one location in particular, from a scenario taken directly from the short story in question, exactly matches the images I had in my mind when I read that passage. The layout, the architecture, the room size, the furniture, the lighting -- all the same. To see it all played out in front of me was... a mild kind of a sanity test on its own right; as if the events of an old dream suddenly came to life.
Perhaps this is all merely a result of Lovecraft's thorough (indeed, delightfully overwrought) descriptive style; different minds, with different reasons, can't help but see the same images. I prefer to compliment the designers in this case, however. The point is, they do see.
It would be nice if I had a computer powerful enough to run games like this, but at least there's an Xbox version in simultaneous development. Not that I have an Xbox either, but that's somewhat easier a problem to solve.
Eric-Jon Waugh
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