kuppy
creative mind
- Registriert
- 14 Juli 2013
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Third-Person Shooter, Tactical Shooter
2K Marin, 2K Games
23. August 2013
XBox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
[ Informationen ]
Wir schreiben das Jahr 1962, John F. Kennedy ist Präsident der USA und der Kalte Krieg versetzt die Nation in Angst und Schrecken – allerdings bedroht eine weit mächtigere und teuflischere Gefahr als der Kommunismus Amerika. Die strenggeheime Regierungsorganisation [highlight]"The Bureau"[/highlight], von der nur ein paar Auserwählte wissen, untersucht und vertuscht eine Reihe von mysteriösen Angriffen durch einen fremden Feind. Als Special Agent William Carter übernimmt der Spieler in einem packenden Third-Person-Tactical Shooter das Kommando über eine Einheit hochspezialisierter Agenten, um die gesamte Menschheit in einem ultrageheimen Krieg zu beschützen.Die Mission von [highlight]"The Bureau"[/highlight] ist klar – überleben, anpassen, siegen. [highlight]"The Bureau"[/highlight] vertuscht die Wahrheit schon seit Jahrzehnten. Doch die Wahrheit wird bald ans Licht kommen.
[ Developer Diary - The Evolution of The Bureau ]
[ Press Release ]
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Available 23rd August
in Australia and New Zealand
Call the shots, pull the trigger, and erase the truth in the origin story of XCOM
Sydney, Australia – 26th April, 2013 – 2K and 2K Marin, makers of BioShock® 2, announced today that The Bureau: XCOM Declassified will be released on 20th August, 2013 in North America and 23rd August, 2013 internationally for AUD$89.95 SRP on the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system and for AUD$79.95 on Windows PC. XCOM: Enemy Unknown, developed by Firaxis Games, dazzled turn-based strategy fans and rebooted the classic franchise. Now The Bureau will deliver a new experience within the XCOM universe.
Set in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, The Bureau tells the origin story of the clandestine XCOM organization’s first encounter with a mysterious and devastating enemy. Originally established as America’s covert defense against the Soviet Union, The Bureau must adapt and overcome a threat unlike anything the world has faced before. As special agent William Carter, players will call the shots and pull the trigger, leading their squad of agents in the high-stakes secret war for humanity’s survival. Paramount to repelling the outside threat is The Bureau’s ability to cover-up the enemy’s existence in order to prevent worldwide panic.
“We’re thrilled about 2K Marin’s refined vision for The Bureau: XCOM Declassified,” said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. “The game has evolved through a creative and iterative development process, and the result is a narrative-driven experience that is smart, engaging, and challenges players to think tactically.”
“The Bureau tells the story of XCOM’s mysterious beginnings,” said Morgan Gray, creative director at 2K Marin. “We’re expanding the universe with a declassified tale of government conspiracy and heroic cover-ups told through third-person tactical gameplay.”
In the spirit of the XCOM franchise, The Bureau’s calculated combat design requires players to think and act tactically. The game’s third-person perspective gives the player a sense of spatial awareness and grants them the freedom to transition in and out Carter’s unique Battle Focus ability seamlessly – heightening the tactical shooter action. The Bureau also fully embraces the concept of permanent consequence. As our last line of defense, every command can mean the difference between life and death for Carter, his squad and mankind.
“The team has been working hard to leverage core XCOM elements like tactical decision-making and permanent death of squad mates in a purposeful way that makes this a unique tactical shooter,” added Gray. “To that end, The Bureau will challenge players unlike any other third-person tactical shooter.”
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified can be pre-ordered today at all participating retailers. Those who pre-order will receive the Codebreakers side-mission as a bonus. In this special campaign side-mission, a communications facility responsible for intercepting and interpreting the enemy’s transmissions has gone dark. Special Agent Carter and his squad must make contact with any remaining personnel and investigate the incident.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is not yet rated by the OFLC. For more information, please visit Facebook, or the official web site: http://erasethetruth.com.
2K Marin is a 2K studio. 2K is a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO).
About The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
The year is 1962, JFK is President and the Cold War has the nation gripped by fear – but a far more powerful and insidious enemy than communism is threatening America. Known only to a select few, a top-secret government unit called The Bureau begins investigating and concealing a series of mysterious attacks by an otherworldly enemy. As special agent William Carter, players call the shots, pull the trigger and lead their squad in a gripping third-person tactical shooter set within a high-stakes, covert war to protect humanity. The Bureau has been erasing the truth for decades. The time will come for the truth to be revealed.
[ Polygon Preview ]
[...] Unlike previous XCOM games, The Bureau will have players taking on the aliens in a real-time third-person shooter, rather than in an isometric turn-based tactical game. But Morgan Gray, creative director at 2K Marin told polygon that the game won't be a typical run-and-gun shooter.
"What we're attempting to do is a third-person squad-based tactical shooter," Gray said. "Putting you right there in the field. No more sitting back, watching everything unfold from a god's eye view."
Gray said the game's action strives to be somewhere between the methodical pacing of a military shooter like Full Spectrum Warrior and the faster paced action of a game like Rainbow Six.
"What we're trying to achieve on the gameplay front is a very tactical ... a game that demands skillful play from the player and a game that expects that," he said. "In true XCOM fashion, it's not just your Rambo brawn, but it's using your brains, your team, the technology at your disposal, creating plans and then executing them."
While gameplay never freezes to allow for decision making, in "battle focus mode" time dilates, Gray said.
"There is never a frozen time, you're always making snap decisions," he said. "To use a sports analogy: It's more about calling audibles then huddling. We are trying to emulate the fantasy of being the squad leader out in the battlefield versus the commander sitting at the desk who has all of the time in the world observing from afar."
This morning's announcement comes nearly three years after 2K Marin's XCOM was first unveiled at E3, though at the time it was in development by 2K Australia. That version of the game was a first-person shooter based on the XCOM franchise. The reaction to the initial concept for the game sent the team back to the drawing board to revamp the game and show it again during E3 2011, where the reception was better but still not great. Now, with the remake of the classic XCOM tactical game out, this shooter variant has a chance to take a run at the franchise.
Gray says that The Bureau will "at a high level" looks a lot like what was shown, visually at E3 2011.
"2011 for us was showing sort of an expression of we think we've cracked the code of finding a different reinterpretation of the classic XCOM DNA and then we spent the rest of the time iterating on that and refining that," Gray said. "I think it will draw a nice through line from what you saw there, but obviously we've been dark for awhile. We have so much new stuff that we've cooked up, refined and has become a game that we're currently poised to finish.
"Things like the period are going to come through, the visual aesthetic is going to seem slightly familiar, some of the high-level aspects of the story, but there's a lot we've been cooking up in the shadows."
[ Kotaku Preview ]
[...]"It's pretty hardcore," Gray told me. "We're not trying to make a hyper-accessible game. We're trying to keep XCOM tied to its roots as a game that demands skill. Some people might say 'ahh, that's hard.' Hard's not the same. It's a game that requires you to use your brains and your bullets to win. Picture a modern, small-unit tactical combat game set in the '60s with technology that NASA should've made back then and your opposition are aliens.. That's what we're shooting for."
Gray also made it sound like there might be some time-shifting in the game's storyline, where players get to be there at the day-one stage of the organization and they also get to be part of the government covering up The Bureau's existence.
And what about permadeath, the most haunting element of last year's Enemy Unknown? "Bad decisions on the player's part can result in permadeath for agents in the field. So this guy you’ve customized for hours is now gone and you're screwed. And, unlike the turn-based strategic games where you can pull away from the main campaigns and kind of pull somebody off the bench, [the Bureau's] campaign is constantly moving forward. So our expression of the consequence of agent loss is even more brutal. But kind of awesome, too."
I asked Gray if there'd be any kind of reward mechanism in The Bureau that would benefits players who bought Enemy Unknown. "We do not have a mechanical tie-in explicitly in the game," he answered. "Although we have been investigating various ways to acknowledge that someone's a franchise fan. But we don't have anything where having an install of Enemy Unknown produces something in our game or vice versa."
So why the change from a first-person perspective, which was what XCOM was when it was last seen? "When we first showed in 2010, the focus was on a different side of XCOM. It was a focus on investigation," Gray explained. "In 2011, we had decided that XCOM was an organization that was built on going out and kicking alien ass, not necessarily researching it as a primary game mechanic, per se. So we began to show the hybrid which was first-person navigation and third-person tactical squad combat controls. We then decided to go third-person all the time since the game's all about tactical combat. There's inherent advantages to third-person: I know where I'm at, where my team's at and where the enemies are at."
Gray said that the decision to move away from the isometric, top-down view was to create a different sense of battlefield awareness and engagement. The campaign structure of The Bureau isn't like that of a shooter. "It's not level-cutscene-level-cutscene-credits," Gray explained. "You'll always have the map of the battleground, which is all of America, and players will pick and choose between primary mission types and side missions."
While all these changes were being wrought on The Bureau's design, Enemy Unknown came out to much acclaim. I asked Gray how the success of the Firaxis-developed game impacted the corporate cousins at 2K Marin. Did it change what they trying to do? "I don't know what 2K's meta-expectations were," he began. "But, as a classic XCOM fan—and not just a 2K employee—I expected it to blow up because classic XCOM is one of my favorite games of all time. I thought they did a great job!"
"What it did for us, philosophically," Gray continued, "was show us that not only are there a lot of classic XCOM fans with money in their pockets, but there's also a generation of gamers that is ready to play games like we used to play them back in the day. Games that are a little harder, less forgiving and demand more skill. Finding that out was awesome for us. We then were able to say that we're going to balance and tune our game for a specific type of gamer."
"We don't need to be a watered-down everyman super-accessible kind of game. We can make a creative statement with what we're trying to achieve," Gray told me. "Usually, in development, it's 'how do we try to get everybody in the world to like what we're doing. That's not happening here." The people the dev team are aiming at might feel a little underserved by the games they have to choose from. "Maybe they're Ghost Recon fands, maybe they're Rainbow [Six] fans. People who dig a little harder into third-person games. We can make a table for them to sit down at and check out what we're doing."
Because they're both XCOM games, there were things from Enemy Unknown that The Bureau's dev team were able to benefit from with regard to design. "Things like aspects of visualization of tactical awareness," Grey told me.
And what about the focus on story and characters glimpsed in The Bureau's previous outings? Is the closeted gay scientist still going to be in the game? "Absolutely," Gray confirmed. "The idea of telling a very character-focused narrative is a first for this franchise. The other games have been more strategic sandbox types of games with a high-level story that wraps around it. In this one, William Carter's your viewpoint character and it's through him that you meet other characters and find out why they're in this war and how they're developing."
"We did BioShock 2 here at 2K Marin and that was a toolbox kind of game where we focused on player agency—letting you play how you want and a lot of tools to do it with—combined with a more directed story. We don't ever want to be too on-the-nose. We're in the 1960s in The Bureau and subversive subtext is what interests us the most as a studio."
Ich find das Theme toll, da pass ich mich gerne für an, wird aber sicherlich schon gut.
Gameplay Überlegungen sind eigentlich echt toll, muss man wohl abwarten, wie es wirlich bei einem selbst ankommt.
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