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Vanquish, the latest title from Platinum Games and Sega, also marks the first game in nearly four years with
Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami sitting on the director's chair. "The game is about 80 percent done," he told
Famitsu magazine this week. "The foundation is all together, but we still have to work out details on player and enemy AI and so on. Work's going to be a real slog from here on in!"
As shown in the trailer above (released back in January), Vanquish toes the line between Japan-style action and Western-style shooting. "Vanquish is a shooter, but there's no point making a normal shooter," Mikami told
Famitsu. "So the conceptual focus here is on speed, tempo, and excitement. There are tons of games where you kill people, so with this game we thought we'd try seeing how much fun you could have shooting robots."
What made Mikami want to make a shooter, though? "One big reason is that we've got our eye on the overseas market, not just Japan," he responded. "Another is that we thought a shooter that retains the uptempo rhythm of a good action game would make it feel different from the rest of the pack. I think shooters right now are built up like a simulation game in terms of logic -- you have enemies placed on a map, and the player gets in position and attacks them; you beat an enemy and advance just a little bit further to the next one. We wanted to reset that and create a shooter with an action-game feel, and it's been pretty tough!"
One aspect of this action-game feel is a "boost" feature that lets your hero travel at very high speed for short bursts, letting him close gaps between enemies and scurry behind cover at a moment's notice. "[Boosting] pretty much destroyed the core of our game design when we implemented it," Mikami divulged. "Shooters are built around the concept of killing enemies and reaching the goal point, but with this boost, you could just zoom right to the end immediately. If we made players hide and use cover more instead, though, then there's no point in having boost in the first place. It was a real dilemma for a while, figuring out why boost needed to be there."
Part of the solution, according to Mikami, was designing the game around boost, filling it with large numbers of enemies to deal with at once. "You aren't going to be creeping around in this game," he said. "I didn't want something where you have to hide behind cover for extended periods, either. Speed and tempo are my watchwords here."
Vanquish is due out for the PS3 and Xbox 360 next winter from Sega. Stay tuned for more info on the game very shortly.