Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873
Gaming n n n n game in 2002, Mafia II is not a story about the mafia. It’s the story of a regular guy who ends up in the mafia, and all the risks, rewards, and consequences that go along with it.” Electronic Arts/Visceral Games Electronic Arts brought gamers face to face with evil when they introduced Dead Space and its “strategic dismemberment” to shooters back in 2008. Following the 2009 Wii prequel with Dead Space: Extinction, the game gets its first sequel this winter with Dead Space 2. It’s been three years in game time since engineer Isaac Clarke faced off against the Necromorph monsters aboard the mining ship Ishimura in the original game, and since that time, tech- nological advances and upgrades to the Dead Space Engine have allowed the development team to further explore this protagonist. For one thing, players will actually see Clarke’s face and hear his voice for the first time. “In the first game, Isaac always has his hel- Dead Space 2 met on, so there was no facial work necessar- ily,” says Ian Milham, art director for the Dead Space franchise. “Tis time, it’s a much more complicated rig. All the shaders have been punched up.” According to Milham, Clarke’s helmet can fold away, revealing a full head underneath. He’s been given full mocap performances for his body, which now has more fluid, lifelike movement, and for his uncovered human face, which has the ability to emote. Milham said the team came up with this whole dynamic sys- tem for his helmet to fold away, so you could really play with that emotion on his face. “All the technology had to go up to match,” says Milham. “A lot of it wasn’t necessarily tech- nological advances as it was re-budgeting for a character that was much more complex and featured more bones, more shading, and more texture to support a fidelity of performance that is greater.” Te character also was given upgrades to its space suit for gameplay purposes. Players will now have full control of Clarke in zero-gravity The characters and their relationships with one another were vital to the story behind Mafia II. A mix of proprietary tools and middleware were used to create the protagonists and antagonists. combat, so the suit has flaps, rakes, and jets that respond to player input. Te visual up- grades to the suit are immediately recognizable and are the result of the pipeline that the team employed for the sequel. Because the world of Dead Space is rooted in reality, starting with the early-concept artist work, all the engineer- ing has to actually work and have real funda- mentals behind it. “Rather than using CG to fake-transform how Isaac’s helmet folds up and away, we cre- ated engineering schematics so that the helmet actually works,” says Milham. He explains the process: “Tose get passed to a modeler who does a high-res base model in Maya. It’s not all done in ZBrush because sometimes you’re just doing panel lines and that sort of business. Tat high-res base model in Maya is taken into ZBrush and up-res’d and done up com- pletely. Once that’s approved, a low res is done in Maya, and the normal maps off the ZBrush version are brought in. Tat gets passed off, and then a base set of textures is done for that. Next, a specific shader tech comes in and does the final shader punch-up. Our character’s pretty unique in that he has his health bars built in, so there’s actual gameplay informa- tion playing on the character. He has different helmet glows and things like that, so it goes through a whole technological pass before it is finaled up. Ten it goes on to rigging, and everything else.” Since Dead Space is a horror game, the envi- ronments the player will explore are dark and foreboding. Milham and his team are dealing with a world that tends to have a huge num- ber of lights that are moving, animating, and flickering, but they have relatively quick fall- offs. As a result, they have tweaked a lot of the shading for the character. “Because Isaac’s suit is now more shiny and metallic, there’s much more stuff for those lights to chew on,” explains Milham. “Tat’s just as much thinking back to the design as it was in the shading. We concentrated our new shader upgrading primarily on things that would pay off on a world that has a lot of light sources, as opposed to being outside where there is one sun. We’re on a spaceship with lots of blinking lights and lots of stuff moving around all the time.” Part of that movement comes from the fact that this world—and those lights—are com- pletely destructible, which meant more work for the team to bring the causing effects to life as the player tears through these environments. Tis game employs live specularity and real- time reflections. In contrast, the original game used more canned content with prebaked environment maps or cubic enviro-mapping. Te end result is a character that fully comes to life with a more realistic look and a new voice, whether he’s barking commands at his team or navigating the dark corridors, waiting to un- leash his weapons on the aliens. Heavy Rain Quantic Dream Developer Quantic Dream first pushed the envelope of interactive entertainment with its PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 title Indigo Prophecy in 2005. Since that time, the French- based developer focused on its dream project: Heavy Rain. Tis PlayStation 3 exclusive was created using the innovative new technology that allowed producer/writer David Cage and his team to utilize real actors to bring virtual characters to life. Te game introduces four unique characters that the player interacts with throughout the noir thriller: Ethan Mars, an architect suffer- ing from mental and emotional instability, journalist Madison Paige, FBI agent Norman Jayden, and private investigator Scott Shelby. Every decision that is made in the game di- rectly impacts the outcome of the story, which involves a missing boy and the hunt for the so- called Origami serial killer. As Cage explains, August/September 2010 23