Negative Gamer

As well as letting us get our grubby mitts on upcoming titles, Eurogamer Expo ‘09 was packed with developers telling the stories behind their games. Here’s the last in a series of posts about what they had to say.

I must admit, I went in to the Army of Two: The 40th Day developer session cracking jokes about fistbumps and Gears of War clones. After seeing what Alex Hutchinson from EA Montreal had to say about their upcoming game, my opinion had changed somewhat.

Due to technical difficulties this session had to be shorter than the others I’ve written up, but it was still just as informative. It turns out that the original Army of Two sold over two and a half million copies, but 70% of these were in the US. According to Hutchinson, other countries don’t share the American “frat boy” culture, and were turned off by the crass tone of the game. To rectify this, EA Montreal are making some interesting changes for the sequel.

Like the first game, Army of Two 2 (as it really should be called) is heavily focused on co-op play, and the relationship between they two lead characters, Salem and Rios. Hutchinson says that “videogames tell awful stories”, without going as far to admit that Army of Two’s story is never going to win any prizes, and that games should allow people to tell their own narratives.

They’re planning to solve both problems with a rather clever solution. At the beginning of Army of Two 2, Salem and Rios will have a fairly neutral relationship and it’s up to the two players whether they want to engage in fistbumping and backslapping. Here’s the innovative part: if you play the game straight, the pair will take their roles and the combat around them fairly seriously. Get your frat boy on however, and Salem and Rios will start cracking inappropriate jokes and generally being dickish. It’s a neat way of tailoring the game to different audiences. The branching dialogue could mean two sets of players come away with very different opinions of Army of Two 2. That’s certainly a change from the rigid experience found in Gears of War.

A similar system is reflected in the game mechanics. For example, players can choose to rescue hostages, or just shoot them. Unfortunately these actions seems to be tied in to a crude “morality meter” which pops up on screen with a plus or minus score, which I can see as taking away some of the impact from your actions.

Let’s be clear though, Army of Two 2 isn’t going to be an RPG, and it’s not going to allow you to play as a pair of virtuous peacekeepers. At certain points in the game, players will have to make decisions that will offer your a reward for doing something evil, and nothing if you do something less bad. “And the choices get worse and worse,” adds Hutchinson. He wants players to argue on the couch about what to do.

The session concluded with a brief demonstration of the game by Hutchinson’s colleague, Guillaume Voghel. They explained that the enemies had been tweaked, so that “anything you can do, the AI can do too”. That includes teaming up behind moveable shields, flanking, and so on. Without the new story content they had been talking about, it was hard to tell it apart from the first game.

I felt the same when I later got some hands-on impressions with Army of Two 2 on the show floor. While it was clearly an early build (the two demo stations were being run through a laptop full of code), there was little indication of the morality Hutchinson had been talking about.

I’m hoping that will change as the game’s development continues, as it seems that EA Montreal are actually trying to do something new. It would be a shame for these interesting ideas to result in nothing more than yet another generic third person shooter.

Related posts:

1. Eurogamer Expo ‘09: Chet Faliszek Discusses Left 4 Dead 2
2. Eurogamer Expo ‘09: David Cage Discusses Heavy Rain
3. Eurogamer Expo 2009: The Indie Arcade
4. Gallery: Eurogamer Expo ‘09
5. NGCast Special: Eurogamer Expo ‘09

Whenever a big game or controversy hits, some sites seem to post far too much about it. I know I’ve unsubscribed from blogs where they have written annoyingly more than I thought was necessary about one particular subject. As such, I should have predicted how some NG readers would likely not be too pleased with today’s unusual quantity of MW2 posts.

After a tweet from one of our readers pointing out that today we’ve (almost accidentally) posted far too much about that game, I have made a filter. If you want to view Negative Gamer, but don’t care for warfare that is modern, add ?not=MW2 to the end of the URL, like this; http://negativegamer.com/?not=MW2 and it should be filtered out.

Being able to filter any old thing out of the front page isn’t going to become a regular addition to the site, but it will probably become a feature that’s used whenever stuff like this happens (massive and annoying controversy, hyped game launch .etc). Let me know if it breaks or if there’s anything else you really want filtered out.

Related posts:

1. Modern Warfare 2’s Campaign Will Be Short, And You Will Like It
2. Yet Another Overpriced Modern Warfare 2 Bundle Announced
3. Modern Warfare 2 Being Sold Early
4. Modern Warfare 2 Gets RRP of £54.99
5. Modern Warfare 2 Limited to 9v9 And Other PC Woes

It seems that another company has noticed the lucrative business model employed by the folks over at Evony. You know, the one where you steal other people’s work and pass it off as your own. You may recognise the character in the advert to the left from a certain famous fighting game. There’s also another version of the advert here that contains none other than Kung-fu Panda.

Kingory is as you may have guessed another flash based RTS, though unlike Evony has been developed in China and seems to be appealing to the weeaboo inside us all rather than the pervert. I wonder if anyone at Kingory remembered to ask Dreamworks or Capcom for their permission to use the pictures or if it’s supposed to be a good faith sort of thing, Chun-Li and Po are Chinese after all.

Via: Aeropause (via: Reddit)

Related posts:

1. Game Advertising Council Launched in UK
2. Advertising on Gaming Blogs Like This One is Annoying
3. In What Can Only Be Self-Parody; Evony Goes All In
4. The Evony Plot Thickens, Now You Can Help
5. Evony Girls, As Seen in Porn