Lair Revisited
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
by Jeremy Dunham
October 19, 2006 - Journalists that attended the 2006 Tokyo Game Show may be disappointed to learn that the playable version of Lair at Sony's Gamers' Day is "content identical" to what they saw there, but the company has made a few visual improvements in the weeks since. Specifically, Factor 5 has enhanced the framerate when running in 1080p (the resolution we played both levels in), and it moved along at a pace 5-10 frames faster than last month.
As for the levels themselves (the likes of which you can learn more about by reading our TGS preview), they were broken up into two types: a tutorial and a bridge battle. The tutorial uses PilotWings' loops to teach players how to control their dragon with the SIXAXIS (tilt left and right to bank, forward to descend, backward to rise), and eventually you'll learn the more advanced moves too -- harshly tilting left and right allows you to dodge, while slapping X beats your dragon as if he was Gerry Cooney so that he moves faster.
When locked in air combat with another winged lizard, players can then use any of the four face buttons to initiate different combo strings or solo attacks (you can use lashing motions with the gamepad as well). Once the screen turns red, this means that it's time to initiate "Killing Moves" that require you to hit a button every time there's a red flash to play out a scripted death scene (example: a rider jumps to an opponent's beast and stabs it in the head before leaping back to his own mount -- as seen in the trailers). Admittedly, the combat is a little on the simplistic side right now, but Sony reps mentioned that because of how early the build is, that a lot of the battle mechanics are still placeholder. Fleshing out the fighting techniques will come at a later date.
Speaking of placeholder, the only onscreen HUD right now is a morale meter similar to that of Dynasty Warriors. Your side (the Asylians, colored red) and the other side (the Mokai, colored Blue) struggle for morale dominance by killing each other's soldiers and monsters; once the bar is made up of just one team's color then the battle is over and it's on to the next area -- where it's expected to happen again. Factor 5 will eventually implement a health bar as well, but what kind of form it will take is unknown. Sony also discussed with us the possibility of your dragon taking visible model and texture damage as he's injured, but that is still a feature being discussed and it may or may not make it into the game.
But even without real-time lizard damage, Lair is still looking pretty impressive. Thousands of ground soldiers with high detail are displayed at once (though their animations are a little on the passive side), while dragon fire itself offers its own ambient light in real time. A number of other impressive visual effects grabbed our eye as well -- from the shadows and dragon animations, to the details of the environments and the extremely realistic-looking water. As our dragon swooped down over the water at high speed, the resulting physical effects looked fantastic.
For the sake of being completists, we also pushed Sony for some details we may not have touched on before. There are three different dragon types in this demo, for example, and they include the Flame Dragon (yours), The Ice Dragon, and the Dark Dragon. Giant bull-like creatures known as "Tauros" made appearances as well, and apparently there will be plenty of other monsters and critters revealed over the coming months.
Other tidbits: if you want to eat enemy soldiers to replenish health you can; tapping square shoots fireballs, while holding square down initiates fire breath; there will be some form of player progression that affects how well your dragon handles over time, and possibly also its strength; and finally, it's acoustic layout supports up to 7.1 uncompressed audio.
So what's the outlook? Good, so far -- though, as we mentioned earlier, the combat is still pretty basic and animations for ground soldiers are somewhat flaccid, so we'd definitely like to see an improvement there. The real trick, it seems, will be balancing the aerial brawls properly with assaults on soldiers. Even so, Lair has a lot of promise, and of all the full-on PS3 games we've played so far, is one of the most dedicated to using the tilt function of the SIXAXIS controller.
