Introducing LucasArts' Fracture

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Hyrdras – spooky, Bangalore-wielding Pacificans who can leap huge distances and only attack from high ground – are dealt with by riding a grenade spike to their level. Platforms are created by placing tectonic grenades under crates, the bridge fixed with a gigantic version of the spike that enemies wear down with their weapons. In one sequence you’re attacked from the top of a slope with large, bouncing, explosive hydrogen balls – a ludicrous weapon that justifies its existence purely by being so much fun to deal with in context. You can use the Black Widow to pit the slope and disrupt their path, tectonics to create a ramp to send them over your head, or (in Gregg’s favoured method) spikes, to start a gigantic, deadly game of pachinko.

It can be an unreal world that Fracture presents, the better to exploit the chaotic fun of its terrain deformation. But it’s one that Day 1, under LucasArts’ guidance, is working hard to ground it in recognisable themes and thorough detail.

Cinematics director Peter Krygowski (Thorley prefers to call him the ‘emotion director’) is the man tasked with humanising its pop-up playground. He’s worked out a careful future history to get us from here to there, including an opinion-dividing genetic engineering disaster towards the end of the 21st century, and a cycle of climate-change disasters that inspire the technology and create the familiar-yet-alien US landscape that the game plays out in.

“Wikipedia’s a lot of fun,” says the studious Krygowski drily of his research into the weapon technologies. “The Bangalore, for instance, is based on liquefaction technology. The terrible earthquake that hits the west coast of the United States is a horrendous blow to the US, but they learn a lot from it about how earthquakes work, about how sound works, about how liquefaction actually makes the earth soft underground.”

“I kinda geek out on thinking about how this stuff could really work,” agrees art director Josh Nizzi. If all this detail can be communicated alongside Briggs’ traditional (and as yet under wraps) personal narrative, it could give Fracture’s world the scope and tone of literary sci-fi rather than film fantasy, a rare feat in games. It’s already provided, if the re-imagined Bay Area is anything to go by, some striking locations: “We use both familiarity and unfamiliarity as tools,” explains Nizzi.

As much as LucasArts producer David Perkinson likes to stress how strong his company’s emphasis on story and character is, and how closely it’s working with Day 1 in this field, it’s where Fracture currently has the most to prove. The setting is fascinating but the presentation is a rather conventional dystopian future, all stressed concrete, dustbowls, hulking Atlantic vehicles contrasting with organic Pacifican tech.

Fracture doesn’t play like any other shooter but it looks like quite a lot of them: can it really meet LucasArts’ president Jim Ward’s demands for mass-market accessibility when, outwardly, it seems aimed squarely at the infamous ‘core gamer’?

“Certainly those are discussions we’ve had a lot throughout the development of the game,” confirms Perkinson. “We’re very sensitive to making the game appeal to too narrow an audience. We are constantly charged with keeping the experience open to all levels of gamers and just last week,  Jim said: ‘I will not ship this game if I can’t finish it’.”

A strong, distinctive self-image is what Fracture needs if it’s going to capitalise on the irrepressible innovation in its gameplay, and do what LucasArts wants and needs it to do: give it a major success in original IP to sit alongside its priceless but overworked movie properties. “There was a perception that we do Indy and Star Wars. And there are people there who feel like the company is able to do a lot more interesting things,” says Perkinson. “George has made it very clear that LucasArts is going to be one of the main pistons firing in the engine for generating revenue for his company, and the best way to do that is for us to have new IP that is going to generate a lot of interest.”

Thorley is unsurprisingly full of praise for his new paymasters. “We’ve worked with publishers that would really clamp you down to milestones, got to have this, got to have that. At LucasArts it’s a little bit different, it’s like, you’ve got to innovate, innovate, innovate. Iterate and have fun! Also, because they do less titles, it gets more focused at a much more senior level. It’s kind of unique because it’s really good feedback when you’ve got people like Peter or even Jim that can give you really viable input.”

“Our organisation is pretty flat,” agrees Perkinson. “So we will present individual story bits all the way up to the president of the company. Mr Lucas has made a few comments on the game,” he adds. “How  cool is that? That is so cool,” bellows Thorley. “It’s also pretty scary,” says Perkinson in a small voice.

As much as this sounds like corporate back-slapping, there is clearly an unusual rapport between Day 1 and LucasArts. The publisher’s considerable financial backing and insistence on technical and design innovation has set this developer free to really start riffing on its simple, earth-moving idea, and the sense of excitement and of liberated conceptions is palpable in Day 1’s offices. Fracture, with over a year left in development, is looking remarkably solid, playing well and setting itself apart from its rivals and Day 1’s past games.

But it’s still flexible enough to accommodate the good ideas that are still being dug up, on a daily basis, from its ever-shifting, gloriously unpredictable landscape.

Provided by Next Generation—Interactive Entertainment Today