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Tron 2.0 Game
Conspiracy_Of_Doves writes "Gamespot has an article about the new Tron 2.0 game in the works to accompany the movie. It looks like they are being very true to the original, the new light cycles are even being designed by Syd Mead, the same guy who designed the old ones. You will get to visit locations from the movie, as well as play around inside desktops and PDAs." IGN has another article on the game. Watch out for the gridbugs.
May 02, 2002 - It's hard to believe that it's been 20 years since TRON hit theatres. It makes me feel a little old that I was totally into something that happened that long ago. Sheesh. Even so, the movie does bring back good memories of a magical black-lit world where computer programs led lives in a warped mirror of our own society and had theological beliefs about the users that created them. It was a incredibly interesting idea with a look that will forever remain distinctly TRON. And it's a world and a look that will be pretty easy to fall back into and enjoy judging by the early info and art we received when Frank Rooke, lead designer at Monolith and Disney Interactive's director of marketing, Jamie Berger dropped by the office today give us a sneak peak at TRON 2.0 before E3.
.byte programs (even though they can say more than yes and no for the most part) and the old Recognizers that have been retired into tugboat and trash duty. The world has changed because technology in the real world has changed. Computer architecture is different, programs are faster and more powerful, and the stream is open beyond the confines of the mainframe.
While the bit they shared with us was restricted to a slide show of screens and concept art, the glimpse was real enough that they certainly piqued my interest. The look of the game follows the look of the movie 20 years ago pretty closely, but has even been moved forward a bit with more curved structures (apparently this was impossible when they originally made the movie) and more complex areas than we saw before. But the style is unmistakable. To make sure that was the case, Disney and Monolith hired on Syd Mead, who was one of the artists that helped give TRON that famous look.
To follow natural progression, the story of TRON 2.0 will mirror our own world and progress 20 years into the future. TRON destroyed the master control program with the help of the user Flynn and the mainframe computer went back to a peaceful existence and life continued as normal. But with the loss of the MCP, the research on digitizing real world matter and inserting it into a digital plane was lost. Alan Bradley, the creator of the TRON program, made it his life to bring that research back up to speed after the incident. After twenty years of finding errors in the process causing real world matter to be corrupted in the transfer, Alan succeeded. Any matter, including people, can now be inserted into a computer unlocking both incredible bounties and unlimited opportunity for crime if the technology was to come in contact with evil people. Darn you evil! Always having to poke your nose into things.
And then the inevitable happened. An Internet company known as fCon learned of the technology and decided that it would be best used by them in order to infiltrate government and military systems giving them near limitless powers over pretty much everybody in the world. In order to do this, they decided to digitize specially trained humans into the datastream called Data Wraiths.
As you also may have figured, not everyone thinks this is such a good idea, mainly Alan, who promptly disappears. Enter Jet, Alan's son. A twenty-year-old programmer for the same company his father has spent his life with. Jet's a little different from his dad however. He's a gamer. He's a partier. He's not the stiff that his father is. Regardless, Jet gets a little concerned after the disappearance and digitizes himself into the mainframe to hunt his wayward father down.
Throughout the adventure in the digital world, you, as Jet, will be treated to the first hand experience that many fans of the movie have been hoping for since the original TRON and Discs of TRON games came out into arcades. Disney and Monolith had thought to include some bit of the old games somewhere in the product, but have decided for gameplay considerations, the want to move forward with the technology and time, and some license issues to leave those out in favor of a new experience. This doesn't mean that you won't find some of the best parts of the fiction in the game somewhere. Be sure that you'll get the chance to zoom around on lightcycles and throw the discs around with abandon. You'll also see some of the greats like the
In your travels, you'll find yourself moving beyond the boundaries that held TRON and Flynn in the movie and out into the Internet and the world beyond. You'll visit PDAs, lab servers, personal computers, routers, and Internet city hub, a really cool looking firewall, and databases as well as meet some other important characters along the way like security programs name ICPs and a the game's hot little piece of code, Mercury. All of the locations and characters will have unique looks that fit with the locale including different color palettes. But for the sake of grounding the digital world as a living and breathing society of its own, some old favorites like the Game Grid and the ancient mainframe will be waiting for a visit as well.
In fact, you'll begin your journey in the Game Grid as you begin to get used to the controls of the game. While we have yet to see this all in action, the game itself will be played in the first person mode. But unlike many games that are in this perspective, you won't be strafing and peppering everything in sight with a machine gun. You'll have to take your time with the combat using the various weapons used by the different factions in the game.
Your main weapon, which you'll have from the beginning of the game is your disc. It pretty much would have been unthinkable to write these out of the script. At the beginning of the game, your disc will act pretty much along the lines that you might expect. It flies straight. If it hits the target, good, if it doesn't hit the target, there's not much you can do about it. Later on in the game you'll upgrade your weapon with "sub-routines". These will add specific attributes such as giving you the power to bend the path of your disc and control its course to some extent. You'll be able to guide the disc to hit enemies around corners and the like. Or you could go for upgrades that cause your disc to burst around enemies hurting everything in the area before recombining and returning to your hand. But for those that are scared of being hurt like me, it's nice to know that the discs are also used as defense. When the disc is on your arm, it'll prevent some damage, when it's in your hands it'll act more like a shield. But you can also swing it to hit weapons like other discs that were tossed your way, it will get reflected away to maybe hit something else. Just be careful because you're defenseless without your disc.
You twitchy shooters out there that need a machine gun to hit a target (yes, the pathetic ones that complain about sniper rifles and rocket launchers... you know who you are) will need to take some time and get used to the more thought provoking combat that a disc provides. Frank Rooke seemed very proud of the effort his team is putting into the AI routines for enemies and nuetrals alike. They won't just run at you and attack. They'll defend. They'll deflect. They'll recognize and react accordingly. The intelligence isn't restricted to combat AI however. Each individual in the game will have its own goals and purpose. They'll each have their own priorities for tasks. Disturbances around them will affect their priorities causing them to attack or run or a number of other things. This organic decision making AI will never give you the sense that you ran across some invisible line on the ground that triggers an event.
Monolith realized that only having discs as weapons wouldn't have given enough variety, so they've included several other weapons that are "native" to certain factions in the system. Being a user, you won't have the restrictions these programs do so you'll be able to use all of the different kinds of weapons. Each of the basic weapons are considered primitive. Like the Game programs that will have the rod primitive, which can be upgraded into different types of weapons from sniper weapons to hand to hand combat weapons. You can also expect Data Wraith weapon types as well as corrupt program types.
Which is another side to the story. Corrupted files will be found throughout the game and actually make up another side plot to the bigger story. It seems that one user named Thorne digitized himself into the system before the errors had been fixed causing him to be corrupted upon insert. Now he's running around corrupting other programs gaining mass amounts of power. You'll need to deal with him and his ever growing number of "cultist" religious fanatics that have been corrupted and are following him.
These guys are not only a danger to your health, but also to your systems. If you're hit by a corrupted file (kind of like being dry humped by Tal), then you have the chance of having your sub-routines and inventory programs corrupted. You'll either need to ditch them altogether or run a cleaner file on them at that point.
In order to give players the feeling of advancement and achievement as they move through the game world, Monolith has decided to include some small RPG elements. Don't expect a Baldur's Gate kind of number crunching here, but you can expect to perform upgrades on your character that will give him more health, better accuracy, more energy, sneakier stealth, and the ability to use processes faster and more efficiently.
Along with that aspect, there is also the inventory and sub-routine upgrade system that I briefly hit on before. When you begin the game, you have a certain amount of memory in your inventory system. Each of the items you pick up will take up a certain amount of memory. But when you add the sub-routines onto an item, it gives that item an upgrade but also makes it more efficient making whatever item it is take up less memory in your inventory. It's a clever system that really makes you make some choices in your character's progression.
And of course, a game like this almost begs for multiplayer action. With the game so early in production, Monolith is still kicking around a lot of ideas, but you can be assured that there will be plenty of team-based games such as capture the flag (I'm personally hoping for some objective based missions like we saw in Wolfenstein) and some of those disc games that were so freaking cool when the movie originally came out. One thing we won't see at this point are lightcycle multiplayer games however. This is something they really wanted to do right from the start, but have found that the current networking technology available just wouldn't be able to handle the mode. Lag issues would just cause havoc in a game that would need extremely fast reaction times from all parties. Sure, it's a little disappointment, but one that I'm pretty sure I can get used to if the rest of the game shapes up to be as good as I'm thinking it could.
Monolith has a good track record when it comes to games like this (No One Lives Forever) so we're all pretty stoked to see it firmly in their capable hands. There's still a ton to be done on TRON 2.0 at this point. But we will finally get to see the game in action at the big show this May, which I'm more than a little excited about. Actually seeing this world that held my fascination way back in grade school come to life will be a treat. Until then, make sure to take a look at the early screens and soak in the TRONiness of it all.
We get an early look at this upcoming action game, which is based on the classic sci-fi film.
We had the chance to take an early look at Tron 2.0, the upcoming first-person action game from Monolith and Disney Interactive. Tron 2.0 will be an action game inspired by the events in the classic 1982 motion picture, and the game's story will actually follow the plot of the movie. Programmer Allan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner's character in the movie) has advanced to a senior engineering position at the company that had created the evil Master Control Program 20 years ago, and he uncovers a secret plot on the part of the company to abuse a new form of technology. Bradley's son Jet becomes involved in the plot and eventually ends up on the other side, traveling through the world of Tron as a program.
Players will play as Jet in the game, and the developer is making sure to create a fully developed "real world" that will help advance the story through cinematics--but most of the game will take place within the computer-generated world. As a program, Jet will have opportunities to revisit the mainframe--where the events in the original movie took place--but will also be able to explore the inner workings of PDAs, desktop computers, and firewalls. Over the course of the game, he'll have occasion to disrupt the digital structures around him (known as performing an "illegal operation" in the game), in which case he'll have to deal with ICPs--intrusion countermeasure programs--burly humanoid programs that are the digital equivalent of guards. He'll also be able to visit lightcycle courses--the developers will include both the classic look of the original lightcycles from the movie, as well as an updated version, which will be designed by artist Syd Mead, the creator of the original lightcycles. And he'll have the opportunity to fight duels in disc arenas, as in the classic arcade game; among other things, discs can be hurled as weapons, set to explode in order to damage enemies or used as shields to absorb or deflect attacks.
Even at this early stage, Tron 2.0 looks very impressive. The art team has made good use of alpha-mask environment mapping, which helps create the pulsating veins of light that commonly line the walls and ceilings of the game's digital world. Tron 2.0 will make use of LithTech's powerful Triton engine, which will, among other things, include an edge generator that adds the colorful glowing edges to the game's walls and structures--a much better way of re-creating the look of the film than simply stacking textures. Tron 2.0 will be colorful but will make use of simple, clean color palettes--the areas and characters we saw were generally of a single, glowing color, with subtle variations on that color, to help reproduce the neon light effect from the film.
Tron 2.0 is currently scheduled for release in the fall of 2003, but the game will be on display at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo later this month. We'll have more information and coverage on Tron 2.0 from the show.
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And with a version for just about every OS.