YouGamers - Articles - GC 2007 - Day 3: Codemasters, Ubisoft and Jagged Alliance 3

Home

News

Reviews

Games

Hardware

Downloads

GC 2007 - Day 3: Codemasters, Ubisoft and Jagged Alliance 3

By: Jarno Kokko Aug 25, 2007

For the third day, things around the trade visitor area were already visibly winding down. At the same time the public halls were just as packed as they were on Thursday, and as I arrived to the site late, I just gave up on the idea of even heading for any of the public demos, and instead concentrated on meetings with publishers.

Codemasters

Operation Flashpoint 2 - Dragon Rising

Codemasters had a couple of upcoming PC titles on display for the press. Operation Flashpoint 2 was obviously the biggest title in name, but as it's Q4 2008 title, there wasn't much of anything yet on show.

Operation Flashpoint 2 - Dragon Rising is set in the near future on an island off the east coast of China. The place has had many owners along the years - Chinese, Japanese and now Russian, and then the place was found to be rich in oil and natural gas. Initially you play as US Marines defending the local Russian population and the US oil interests on the island, and things get hot when Chinese troops invade the island.

We were shown the same video you can find online (say, here, in YouGamers game video blog), and we were told that it was a "pre-vis" piece rendered as a target to aim for. It's designed to indicate what the developers are aiming for as the look of the actual game. Now the little that's there looks very impressive, and it may be hard to believe that it could look that good in the actual game, but in fact Colin McRae DiRT had a similar pre-vis video done well before the game was running, nobody believed the game could look that good, and it actually did - with the caveat that you needed a cutting-edge PC to get those visuals.

Operation Flashpoint 2 is using the same Neon engine used in DiRT, but it's getting extended and developed further to support huge play areas, around 200 kilometres square with view distances up to 3km. We were shown in-game models, for vehicles and weapons, and the detail was incredibly high. Physics for explosions and projectiles was also hyped.

Operation Flashpoint 2 is being developed for PC and next generation consoles, with PC as the 'main' platform. The game is set to include multiplayer support, including co-op play, but the details are still under wraps. It's also too early to say what the system requirements are going to be, but as a start, if your system can now run DiRT smoothly, there is a good chance that will do fine also with Operation Flashpoint 2, so a fast dual core CPU and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 or faster is probably a good idea.

Race Driver One (working title)

Then we got an actual running demo of the next driving game from Codemasters. Currently titled Race Driver One, the presentation stressed that this is only a working title. The demo was presented on the XBox 360, with the game also set to appear on the PC and PS3.

Race Driver One is being developed by a separate team "competing" with the guys who did DiRT, with the teams sharing some key people and the same underlying Neon engine, with parts of it such as car damage modelling rewritten by the team working on Race Driver One.

Before the demo we saw preproduction art indicating what they wanted the game to look like, and I was positively surprised when the actual early build we got to see actually matched that beautiful art, and it's still a long way from being ready as the release is set for mid 2008.

What sets Race Driver One apart from being Just Another Shiny Car Game is the career concept. You set out as a new driver for hire without any reputation and have to work your way up earning money and fame. Then you get to start your own team, and as your fame and fortune grows, the team gets better facilities, better cars and additional drivers to hire. You also get to sort out sponsorship deals for your team to get extra funding.

The game isn't set in any single racing class, but you get to race all kinds of cars around the world. Each continent also has their own racing scene and even if you are a top dog in Europe, you have to work your way up from the bottom in status once you head to Japan to race there. The locations around the world have their own unique type of racing, with for example Japan offering drifting and duel races up and down narrow mountain roads; Europe having races on actual race tracks and USA concentrating on elaborate street circuits built without sparing any expenses.

The game is set to be a realistic arcade racer, so while the gameplay aims for realism, it's not a simulator. A key goal is to have up to 20 cars on track in some races, with multiplayer supporting large fields too, but it looks like that the single player career is the most important feature here (although not much was said of the multiplayer features yet).

The actual live demo shown was just a single car on a street track, but already the visuals looked incredibly polished for something almost an year away. What really caught my eye is that both cars and trackside objects deform on impact, so no more indestructible world - if you slam that car to the barriers, it's going to bend and your car is going to shed a lot of bits around the track, and all that debris and trackside damage persists lap to lap. Very impressive.