Prototype, the game that does not live up to its name. Can we actually be rewarded for wreaking havoc? With the stresses of day to day living and especially the economy, working dead end jobs, or just trying to make it somewhere in our lives, isn’t video games the one thing that us gamers feel we can turn to and dwelve into a world where none of our real lives can interfere? Well, I don’t know about the rest of the gamers out there, but a video game is definitely my place to zone out and forget about harsh reality from time to time.
“Can you make the average gamer care about the teetering schoolbus on the edge of a bridge about to fall into the ravine,” asks Prototype’s lead designer Eric Holmes. “We’ve done conclusive testing and decided that… no you can’t. In fact every player would push that bus off the side of the bridge, swim down in the ravine to look at the carnage, and then expect to be given points for it.”
“You have to take into account that the player is going to be an absolute son of a bitch in every single scenario,” says Holmes. “Anything you put in the game they will try to blow up, break, batter it, drop things on top of it, anything they can do they will try. So that’s why Prototype fully embraces the spirit of players behaving badly.”
You know what I say to that? Heck yeah. We love to see everything explode. In fact, when I play a game that doesn’t have a destructable environment, I am disappointed!
“So the core of our game is really our character,” says Holmes. “What’s happened to him, what he can do, and who’s responsible. That’s the core of the story, and the core of the experience is what comes out of that character. And the whole play experience is coming out of that character. He’s a grey man, he’s not a hero, he’s not a villain, but he is fully equipped to do very bad things – the way the player wants him to. But there is also a reason for him to do that given the setting he is in.”
So imagine this, the setting is New York City with a virus on the loose. The virus turns people into zombie-like beasts. The military comes in to put the city under lock down. The whole city becomes a war zone.
“Think ‘Tom Clancy meets Stephen King’,” says Holmes. “Clancy is cutting edge, military, and real world, Stephen King is something disturbing. You put it all together and you get Prototype. It’s important to make this thing feel grounded, make it feel real, set it in a familiar place. That makes it more intense than if it was, for example, a shapeshifter on Mars in the year 3000. If the shapeshifter is in New York then there’s something not quite right about that, it’s a bit too close to home, and the events that take place will therefore also become disturbing, too.”
Prototype is obviously not the prototype for most games. I am genuinely excited to see this game in action, of course, played in my own hands. DESTRUCTION!!!
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