Dark Void Gameplay Impressions

Kotaku has a great writeup on some of their gamplay impressions from the new game, Dark Void. "Dark Void is basically Crimson Skies with on-foot combat. That may be overgeneralizing things, but Ed Fries co-founder at Airtight Games and former Microsoft Game Studios guy essentially pitched the game as such at Capcom's Captivate 08 event as the type of game that the team wanted to make. With a mechanic the studio is referring to as "vertical cover combat," Dark Void looks to distinguish itself from the 3D action game crowd by way of Crimson Skies know-how and a sci-fi mythology that pits man against alien invader, selectively borrowing from classic science fiction properties in intelligent places."

Comments

All we needed to know.

[Capitalist Piggy]

Dark Void is still said to be at least a year off, with plenty of room for improvement and development beyond the brief portion we saw at Captivate. The team at Airtight have already ruled out multiplayer, something that may not sit well with gamers expecting that feature as a givenâ"especially after they see the UFO combat and skyjacking gameplay. Being a big fan of the Crimson Skies series, all I needed to see was the above paragraph and stopped reading the article.

With map generation being a rapid process, the availability of multi-player shooter source to look at and the hordes of people who won't buy a single-player game out there, it seems like a bad idea to skip it.

While I am aware of how hacking was destroying the multi-player experience in Crimson Skies, it seems like they could have learned from this instead of just giving up.

Plus, the game is over a year away. The "impressions" are not going to be much of a gauge of the final product by any stretch of the imagination. The article could have just been named "I spent a few hours with game developers looking at the early stages of a project" and been a bit more accurate, as it is very uncommon for a retail game to represent something in this stage of development.

Re:All we needed to know.

[witchman]

I'd rather have a great single player game than a crappy single player game + multiplayer. It takes a lot of extra time and money to add multiplayer to a game and that distracts from development. Also, I didn't read anything that said the game was in "early" stages of development, it just said that the game was "at least a year off." Sounds like they are just putting more work into the game, or did you actually get to see it?