The Saboteur Preview

24 Apr 2009 at 16:49:37 by

The Saboteur is a game that takes gamers to Nazi-occupied Paris during the war.  Now before you start whining that this is another Second World War game, just hear us out.  This isn't your standard "soldier story" affair; this is a whole new approach, and an approach that sees Pandemic, for the first time, using narrative to drive the game.

This narrative follows the story of protagonist Sean Devlin, an Irish racing mechanic who is on a mission to avenge the death of his friend by taking out as many Nazis as he can.  Along the way, and being in Paris, Devlin meets and completes missions for The Resistance, helping turn the tide against the Nazis and inspiring the locals and The Resistance themselves to be more brazen, taking up arms against the enemy.

Lead producer, Tom French, told us that the Sean Devlin's character was an amalgamation of Harrison Ford as Indy, Bruce Willis as John McClain and a generic Bond.  Not only that, but he's based on a real-life figure, William Glover-Williams, a saboteur for the British Special Operations Executive operational in France.

"We wanted to make this about Sean, and not about the war," said French, "we wanted him to become a hero and not start off as one, so he has an ‘everyman' quality' about him."

And Devlin, as an "everyman man" is more than capable of making his way around the streets of Paris.  He's an acrobat, a hot-shot driver, a lethal weapon and a sharp-shooter.  A weapon and a sabotage tool any nation at war would love to have.  Acrobatic might seem a little far fetched, but he does have a knack for heights, and it won't be uncommon for you to be navigating rooftops as well as streets in a bid to accomplish your objectives.  This is, after all, a Pandemic game, and with a little inspiration from the Mercenaries world, The Saboteur will be a scaled-down, open-sandbox interpretation of Paris.

"We built the monuments of Paris to scale, so it's basically a Disneyland version of Paris," said French.

And although the monuments of Paris are in roughly the right location and built to scale, the rest of Paris works around the monuments, giving the city the feel without making it to large and overwhelming.

What is overwhelming, however, is the colour and art-style the game delivers.  It's a black and white game which takes inspiration from film-noire and the Sin City comics, where colour is hardly used except to highlight danger, enhance explosions and help the player navigate what would otherwise be quite a confusing landscape.

"Using the bold reds an using colour to dramatise things like explosions really helped the unique visual style of our game," French says, while he goes on to say that the choice of black and white was made to really "help demonstrate that bleak feeling of occupation."
And he's not wrong, the black and white gives a really dreary feel to the game, an almost sluggish and defeatist feeling, where taking the battle to the Nazis feels like a mammoth undertaking.  But Paris is divided into three main areas; the affluent areas, the middle class areas and the working class areas.  Each of these areas has a unique feel and a different style to other parts of the city, but this isn't really visible until you see the pocket of that area light up in colour.

"As you inspire people around you, you give them hope and so the Resistance will aid you and the colour returns to the environment."

Yes, I know I said the game's art-style is unique, and I know I mentioned the gamespace will be black and white, but I didn't tell you about the "Will to Fight" (WtF) system Pandemic has incorporated into the game.  Without making it too complicated, the WtF mechanic indicates whether a certain area in the world has been liberated or is still occupied by the Nazis.  As you have probably already guessed by now, occupied territories are black and white while liberated areas appear in full colour, meaning you'll have the local Resistance in that area looking out for you and supporting you if you find yourself in a spot of bother, as well as a more lively environment with people populating the streets and going about their daily business as if there were no war.

French said that the WtF mechanic was one of the most important aspects of the game, and getting it right, the feel, the colour sheme and the depth of blacks and white is what caused the team most problems at first.

"When we took the colour out the first time, it was just a horrible black and white world.  We had to work on enhancing it and this is where the we learnt a lot about lighting and shading from the Sin City films," he said.

"We really wanted to define a unique visual look, and key to that is the Will to Fight.  The concept of colour verses black and white does that."

And even before the colour floods the screens, the art style is actually very beautifully crafted so that the lack of colour never actually detracts from the gaming experience.  Even when you're fighting the Nazis surrounded by the depressing and drab colour scheme, the enemies have a glow (which increases in intensity as you rise through the escalation levels - a system very much like the police-level indicator in other games) which makes it easier to find them.

But you don't have to kill all enemies with your guns blazing.  On the contrary, sometimes stealth is the way to go, and this is what The Saboteur is all about.

Although we don't know much about the gameplay and French was keeping that all very hush-hush, we do know that we can expect a game with more personality than Pandemics previous offering, but with all the great features we'd hope to see, such as vehicle hijacking, a huge open world (French says he believes the world is about five kilometers by five kilometers) and gameplay which just keeps getting better.

The game hasn't had a release date, but one thing is for sure; we'll be keeping a very close eye on this one.

Comment