Introducing LucasArts' Fracture

The inside story behind one of the most innovative games in development

by Edge

If half the battle of launching an original game is naming it, then LucasArts and Day 1 Studios are already halfway to victory with Fracture. “The game was probably the most difficult to name I’ve ever been involved with,” confides Day 1’s affable, sharp-eyed president, Denny Thorley, but the end result is a multipurpose marketing dream.

Not only does Fracture possess the requisite duosyllabic snap, it succinctly sums up everything that makes this ambitious new action epic – due in the summer of 2008 – markedly different from the run of the mill.

The first and most important fracture in Fracture is geological. Many games have called themselves ground-breaking, but Fracture has a literal claim to the term: it lets you break the ground. And raise it, and depress it, and drive spikes up through it, and burrow rockets beneath it, and gather it up into boulders that gouge troughs through it as they roll.

This is a third-person shooter in which almost every weapon you possess can deform the terrain, and not just in the destructive sense. Cover can be summoned at will, paths to inaccessible areas raised or carved, the ground literally whipped from beneath your enemies’ feet. Fracture lets you shape the battlefield yourself.

The second fracture is of a nation, and of ideologies. Set on Earth in 2161, Fracture portrays the outbreak of a war in the US between the east and west coasts, and their respective allies, over the use of technology. The Atlantic Alliance of eastern America and Europe outlaws the genetic engineering beloved of the west coast and Asia, and conflict flares between their respectively cybernetically and genetically-enhanced troops.

The game’s hero, Mason Briggs, is a demolition expert on the Atlantic Alliance side, whose adventure begins at the war’s flashpoint: San Francisco.

These two aspects of Fracture – the terrain deformation that saturates its gameplay and the surprisingly serious and detailed hard sci-fi that is the backdrop for its plot – are strikingly in tune with the mission statement set out last year by a resurgent LucasArts. Gameplay innovation through technological innovation, and a commitment to richer narrative in games, are LucasArts hallmarks of old that the company wants to put back at the centre of its philosophy.

It’s such a perfect fit on paper that it’s almost hard to believe Fracture had its genesis outside George Lucas’ campus in San Francisco. But it was Day 1, the Chicago-based developer of the MechAssault Xbox games for Microsoft and also of the console versions of Fear, that made the pitch after developing the idea and the technology internally.

As Thorley says, it was a meeting of minds. “When we went and met Peter [Hirschmann, LucasArts’ vice president of development] it was like we could complete each others’ sentences, in terms of what we expected. It’s kind of a dream from a developer’s standpoint, because LucasArts has given us the time and the financial resources to create something pretty special.”

Our first introduction to Fracture is what Day 1 describes as a ‘playground’, an open-plan, freeform sandpit – literally – that functions as a demo and design tool. Similar playpens will be included in the final game, possibly integrated into the campaign, possibly as standalone toys. Here we’re shown the weapons that mark this game out from every other of its type, starting with the two fundamental, game-defining tools: tectonic and subsonic grenades.

Tectonic grenades raise a steep mound of earth, affectionately called a ‘loaf’ by the Day 1 team. Drop one in front of you – not too close, to avoid getting caught in the blast radius – and you can use it as cover. Drop one under a broken gantry and you can climb up to it. Throw it at your enemies’ feet and they will be hurled into the air, but be careful, because a short throw results in cover which they can – and will – use.