May 18, 2005 - Forget the crappy screenshots you've seen. They completely misrepresent the game. Forget that Microsoft didn't show its number one game at its news conference. That was a mistake, in hindsight. My first appointment to Microsoft's booth on day one of E3 was with the Rare team responsible for the upcoming Perfect Dark Zero, and I was wowed.
I had mixed expectations; I'm a realist. Games in development often have low framerates and shoddy AI. They're not done. Of course they do. Today, I saw a demo of Perfect Dark Zero running on a Xbox alpha kit (a PC) using an old ATI graphics card, not the final GPU from the Xbox 360, and was told the game was only using about 25% to 30% of the system's full power. And Perfect Dark Zero looked incredible. Incredible. It looked nearly as good as Gears of War, which, in my humble opinion is the best looking 360 game of the show so far (I saw that running in realtime too). So, simply put, Perfect Dark Zero shocked me.
Shocked, because I wanted to see this at the Microsoft conference. Shocked, because they hid a game that clearly does NOT look like merde. Shocked, because this looked like a real next-generation game, completely changing my perception I had temporarily formed based on the early screenshots. For whatever reasons Microsoft didn't want to show it, the game I saw looked like the game I wanted to play, and have imagined playing for years.
So, enough of that. In the demo room behind closed doors, Richard Cousins, producer, and Duncan Botwood, multiplayer designer, showed off three levels of the multiplayer game. There are two main multiplayer modes: Deathmatch and Dark Ops. Deathmatch is exactly what it sounds like, a free-for-all kill-or-be-killed multiplayer mode for more than 50 players. Rare clarified that they feel comfortable with 50-players simultaneously playing online right now, not the previously spoken 64 players (which was correctly quoted before), and are testing to see how many more they can get. Dark Ops is a round-based multiplayer mode with distinct rounds, a bunch of weapons, where you earn cash for kills, and is much like Counterstrike, only with different scenarios.
The demo started in a spawn room. The spawn room serves two purposes, the first of which eliminates spawn camping. If you're killed, you'll re-spawn in the enemy-free spawn room with weapons. The second use is for what Rare called Advanced Teleports. When you come upon an Advanced Teleport in the open space, you can wire it to work for you, given the proper tools. Once wired, it immediately transports you to the spawn room, for new weapons, health, whatever.
There are three vehicles in the game -- the jetpack, a motorcycle, and a hovercraft -- but Rare only showed the jetpack in motion. The movement and fluidity of the jetpack is excellent. You can fly around in full 360 degrees while the camera pulls out to a third-person perspective. The level of detail, shading and lighting on the jetpack is fantastic. You can easily jump into a jetpack with the press of a button, and both you and enemies have access to them.
Visually, the levels we saw are massive, and every thing you can see is being generated in realtime. There are no flat artistic backgrounds. What you see is actually there. The desert map we saw boasted two bases, and it was without a doubt, massive. But it's designed for up to 50-plus players, so it will double in size when enough players are there to play. Players can manually choose to scale the map sizes, or the game will count the players available and set up the right size map for the right number of players.
The game we saw showed off incredible high-fidelity imagery. Everything is bump and normal mapped. The roads and walls and surfaces delivered parallax textures, a technique that uses one- to two- polygons yet provides volume and normal mapping and perfect reflections, lighting and shadow work over vast surfaces. There was a level of dust moving though the bases, which looked like Persian forts and similarly architectured buildings. The color palates were sandy yellow and brown, but the fine tile work was bright in design, offsetting the desert surroundings. The jetpack issues a light-sea blue fume and heat vlurring effect that reflects on any surface you fly by, providing an eye-catching effect. Even the gun reloads are beautiful. There is a slight blur effect used for these too. The level of detail on the guns is ridiculously high.
