E3 2011: Over 10 Improvements Prototype 2 Will Have Over Its Mixed Debut
Jonathan Lim, one of the producers working on Prototype 2 from Radical Entertainment said Prototype was one of 2009′s best selling new IPs, selling over 2 million units. What was more interesting to me was the many ways he said Radical Entertainment will try to remedy this series’ mixed debut with Prototype 1.
Back in 2009, Penny Arcade did a comic strip asking whether you should buy Prototype or not, and in the strip it merely stated that you can karate kick a helicopter…
Prototype to Radical Entertainement is ultimately about the power fantasy, kicking a helicopter, coming home from a crappy day at work and blowing stuff up.
Prototype wasn’t perfect. If it was perfect Jonathan said he would be on a beach somewhere with a drink and enjoying the sunset; but now he was there to talk up Prototype 2.
So what did Radical Entertainment did do this time?
Radical took feedback from Prototype 1. Tons of it. That’s the beauty of it because there are a lot of reviews to mine, forums, blogs, and YouTube comments that made even Lim wish that we not receive comments as harsh as he’s read. “People say anything they damn well please, it’s like the wild west.”
Taking a look at all the post postmortems they did at Radical and Activision, they looked at all the feedback to kind of define what they wanted to do.
Prototype 2 is the story of Sgt. James Heller coming back from Afghanistan finding that his home is devastated along with his wife and daughter. Heller gets pissed off and eventually wants to eradicate the virus and kill Alex Mercer.
Mercer was a bit of an enigma in the first game because he was this crazy powerful guy running down the street, picking up cars, throwing them down the street, and then passively come back and take orders from his sister and his ex-girlfriend, “not exactly the stuff of movies, so we wanted to rectify this by introducing James Heller,” said Jonathan.
Game takes place in NYZ… New York Zero which is what New York is after 14 months of biological warfare. New York is a shell of its former self. It is split up into 3 distinct zones. The first being the red zone which is the Manhattan of old torn apart. The yellow zone is a former residential district now a quarantine zone full of shanty towns which will feel like Children of Men or District 9. Lastly, the Green Hills Zone green zone is the nice part of NYZ under martial law run by Black Watch, a private military organization tasked with keeping bad stuff out.
Absorbing the minds of enemies will now play more into the story of Prototype 2 rather than the passive system of the first game. Now it’s more of an active thing that Heller wants to hunt down to integrate this into his story.
Something that will make enemies standout and objectives clearer is “Hunting.” It’s like a sonar pulse that goes out into the world, rebounds off the target, and with a few different pieces of feedback including aural, visual, and on the minimap allows you to locate and pinpoint your target throughout the world allowing you to quickly move on with the story.
The new combat abilities include the tendrils and bio-bomb. The bio-bomb is sort of a stealth ability in which Heller can use to kill a bunch of enemies simultaneously or provide a distraction. The tendrils is similar to the whipfist in the first game allowing him to hit ranged enemies.
Mutations are like perks. Each mutation allows you to fly further and hit harder much like how you upgraded in the first game. The progression is non linear, so how you play will be different from how someone else will finish the game.
Dismemberment is improved by including vertical and horizontal prime cuts. Not only did it look a bit better, but Radical Entertainment said it will make a difference on the battlefield. It’s now a tactical decision on how you want to dismember. In some cases it makes them more deadly, in other cases it gives you more time to react.
You can’t just use the same thing for everything. In Prototype 1, once you’ve found your favorite power, you could pretty much use that power for the entire game. This time they’ll force you to change your tactics as well as react to the situation.
Over the top action was fun, but mostly got overly chaotic in the first game when you had 3 APCs, 2 helicopters and dudes with rocket launchers simultaneously firing at you. This made for some frustrating moments. This time they’re slowing the pace of the game down to put the control back into the player’s hands. They will fix this through longer melee attacks, and longer wind ups making it so that you can see where your next attack will go.
Next, they wanted to add the tactical dodge with a moment of bullet time to survey the action and plan your next move.
The improvements Radical Entertainment made to the overall graphics system is that they re-wrote the rendering engine from the ground up in order push the visual fidelity that they had in Prototype 1. In the first game there was a lot of density, but in this sequel they’ll have that density and a better looking game.
Overall the demo from I’ve seen is basically Prototype 1.5. Nothing particularly impressed me, but if Radical Entertainment works even harder then maybe they’ll reach true sequel status.
