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.
Great piece, but I’m not sure if Army of Two 2 will be any good. The first one was pretty meh, and I agree about the ‘frat boy’ style that us Brits don’t get.