No doubt you’ve heard Icrontic talk about Pandemic Studios’ upcoming stealth action game The Saboteur, which is set during the 1940s in beautiful Nazi-occupied Paris, France. You play as professional Irish race car driver Sean Devlin as he joins the French resistance to fight against the Nazi threat from behind enemy lines. The game is dark and adult in nature, and promises sandbox-style open-ended gameplay.
We got to visit Pandemic Studios and get a first-look sneak peek at The Saboteur, as well as talk one-on-one with art director Christopher Hunt and Executive Producer Tom French. Our questions focused mainly on Pandemic’s internally developed Odin engine, which sports an impressive amount of features and looks to be a new powerhouse on the graphics front.
The Saboteur is a story-driven game, focusing more on character development and storytelling rather than run-and-gun action. Much of the technology used in the presentation of The Saboteur is built around the story-driven nature. Subsurface scattering, for instance, is used on all of the flesh tones on the in-game characters. This technology was used to give flesh a warm, realistic look, rather than the typical plastic look that plagues many games. This helps drive the believability of the characters in a game where their presentation is paramount.
The Odin engine also employs ambient occlusion, which is a technology that has only recently seen the limelight in real-time game engines. Ambient occlusion gives a very natural look to scenes by putting realistic lighting details in even the smallest of places. The developers mentioned that one advantage of using this technology is with in-game cinematics; ambient occlusion allows the developers to use the same environment lighting for both in game instances and cinematic instances, rather than having to create a different lighting pipeline or toolset for cinematics directly.
The use of ambient occlusion came about partly because the art of The Saboteur inspired the engineering. Art direction plays a critical role in this game. The artists, using Autodesk Softimage, realized that they could ‘bake in’ ambient occlusion, which gives the effect in a form that isn’t real-time. This allowed the art teams to push their vision of Paris to a new level, which is the kind of collaboration that helped the art teams get what they wanted out of the engine.
What was the motivation for creating such an engine instead of using existing technology? In a word, story. The Saboteur tells a personal story, not a war story. The protagonist is Irish, and not tied directly to the war by background. Executive Producer Tom French explained that this was to give Sean a neutral stance to the war. The story is one of personal motivation. While the game is not historically accurate, it has been inspired heavily by actual events.
In the early phases, the developers knew that The Saboteur was going to be radically different from their previous titles, such as Mercinaries. France will not be blown to bits, but rather explored and seen from a close perspective. The world needed to be lush, complex, and convincing. New technology was needed to focus on delivering graphics features not just for eye candy, but to help drive the story.
From what we’ve seen so far, the Odin engine has achieved just that.
Check in later this week as Icrontic gets hands-on time with Pandemic’s The Saboteur at E3. Watch out Sunny Los Angeles; there is a Saboteur in your midst.
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