Gamescom Presentation
So we took some time yesterday to show off the game to the press here at Gamescom in Cologne. The presentation featured a new level, the Feudal Japan Episode hub and also the two other levels we had presented at E3.
We started out in the hideout, these are a staple of the franchise and we are going to be greatly expanding on them for Thieves in Time. We showed off a couple of new hideout features, the treasure wall and the costume gallery. Treasure challenges will now result in collecting specific items to be displayed on the treasure wall. In Sly 2 and 3 you would just sell them on Thiefnet but now they are cherished collectibles that unlock new aspects of the game as you gather an entire set.
The costume gallery will show all the costumes you have gathered and provide more info on their special abilities and history.
Next we moved on to a Sly job in the Feudal Japan Hub environment. We really liked the sort of “hub and spoke” structure of Sly 2 and 3 and are expanding on it for Thieves in Time. The hub environments allow for free roaming non-linear gameplay with multiple jobs and challenges layered in to the environment, while the spoke missions allow tighter, platformer oriented gameplay tailored to specific characters or missions. We feel that this balance and variety really are a pillar of the Sly Cooper series.
As you can see from the screenshots the environments are now much larger, more dense, lush and organic thanks to the power of the PS3. But our first consideration when developing them was the density of gameplay, we didn’t want a great big empty world that you had to spend most of your time just running across the level to your next objective – that’s not Sly Cooper! We want cool transfers between buildings, multiple paths to different objectives, lots of good sneaking around and thiefy-ness and that’s what we have focused on bringing to Thieves in Time.
Sly’s job in this mission is to gather the pieces of the samurai armour which he can then use as a disguise to get past a guarded door. He will need to move quickly and undetected across the huge level, but luckily there are dozens of different options for getting across the village - along the ground, across the bridges, over the rooftops, along the ropes, with clue bottles and other secrets scattered all around the level to rewarded choosing new and challenging paths.
Next we showed the spoke mission that we had presented at E3, featuring Sly and Murray working together. And then we went on to demo the El Jefe boss battle, also shown at E3, which uses the Samurai armour collected earlier. Both of these have been covered pretty well already so I will leave it at that.
I think we got a good reaction from the press in attendance and the articles I have seen online are coming in pretty positive! We will post to Facebook as we see them.
I think this presentation answers a whole bunch of questions that had been posed on the page, and we will still try and continue to answer whenever we can!
Cheers!
