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Eternal Darkness
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This dark, melodic Edgar Allen Poe quote is one of the many quotes integrated into Eternal Darkness' presentation. It speaks volumes about the serious design concepts behind the game, but many are still quick to label it as a Resident Evil knock-off. President of Silicon Knights, Denis Dyack, says, "Eternal Darkness is definitely an epic storyline as a lot of our games are. It's a very classic struggle between good versus evil. Whereas the Resident Evil franchise has sort of B-movie plots in its games, we're going for a deeper, more classical approach. You won't see this as a B-movie horror scare. It's a psychological thriller." It is probably most important to note his last sentence, where he brands Eternal Darkness as a psychological thriller. Silicon Knights assures us the development team is doing a lot to play tricks on our minds, to bring us to a point where we're unsure what is really happening and what is not. In essence, perhaps even the player's sanity and touch with reality will be affected.
Features
A Story of an Ancient Evil
The story as Silicon Knights describes it is as follows: Long before humanity
graced the Universe with its ideas, the Earth belonged to another species. An
ancient species -- unbound by physics or nature, purpose or ethic. Through the
shifting of time, the relentless advance of ice and continental plate, this
species was driven into the recesses of the world -- to lie dormant, until such
time as the conditions were right for their return.
The innocent human race, safe in its blind superiority is oblivious to the danger it walks amongst. The Ancients want to reclaim the Earth as their own, and have taken great pains to ensure their reign in the dawn of the new millennium.
Secret Societies, hungry for power and domination, mad with their obsession, seek to restore the Ancients to their former mastery. Over the aeons the sects have been active, scheming and plotting in the darkness, worshipping entities and attempting to summon them, through arcane magicks, blood and sacrifice.
Of these groups, few stories are told. Those who know too much perish swiftly, hunted and murdered to preserve the secrets -- beyond mankind's limited comprehension. An incomprehensible war, hidden by secrets and plagued by death; innocents, who will be tainted, hunted, murdered, martyred...
Out from under this threatening evil, the story of Eternal Darkness unfolds. The fates of thirteen chosen souls come together to decide the destiny of the human race. These chosen ones must fight a war they cannot even fathom. The crusade against the Ancients takes place on battlegrounds across the plane of time. You take hold of a compassionate monk during the paranoia of the Inquisition, a special forces commando deep behind enemy lines, a mourning granddaughter in modern day, a centurion of the Roman army, and more. These thirteen souls -- the chosen few -- find their lives torn apart by the unseen evil, thrusting them in front of their most suppressed fears with the promise of no reward or glory. The extreme sacrifices they come to make pays the cost to save humanity.
What we must keep in mind is that these chosen ones, despite their courage, still rely on the human mind. When compared to the fear-inspiring power of the Ancients it is a weak weapon. All thirteen souls will have their sense of reality altered forever. This is what Eternal Darkness capitalizes on -- our sense of reality. And it is an unforgiving sense of reality, as some of the characters will ultimately fail, while others stand to brave the dangers of their fractured minds. They will experience effects that cross the threshold of what is real, hallucinating at times.
In their fight for evil they will use thick iron swords, laser-sighted automatic rifles, and other powerful weapons enhanced with the mystical powers of arcane magicks. When the time to do combat with one of the Ancients comes, players will find that they have saturated every level of society, and now lurk behind trusted faces, wearing their skins like costumes.
Gameplay
That is the story that Silicon Knights promises to deliver on. The most
interesting part of this adventure is that all of the characters play an
integral part of the storyline, and according to Silicon Knights' president
Denis Dyack, that doesn't mean they can't die. "I don't want to give
anything away, but this is a serious drama -- it's a story about heroes and how
people can unite to fight overwhelming odds, and people die when they do that.
And our content is very serious."
One of the most important aspects of gameplay in Eternal Darkness is the insanity meter. It is an extremely unique idea that alters the world around you. While Silicon Knights has only let the public see what they call "in-your-face" insanity effects, they promise there's a lot more subtle effects that they don't want to show for fear of spoiling the experience. Denis Dyack describes how the insanity meter works, saying, "As players come against these things that are totally unbelievable -- things they have never seen before -- they begin to question what's going on and their ability to deal with things is diminished. That affects gameplay and how the player feels. If your level of sanity becomes very, very low, weird things are going to start to happen."
In the demos we've played so far, one insanity effect suggests your gruesome death. You walk through a door and suddenly your right arm will fall off, then your left arm, your head, and even your torso. You can control your character the entire time, and eventually your lower body crashes to the ground, and in an instant a blinding white flash washes the screen. Suddenly you find yourself still standing in front of the door, gripping the handle; you never entered the room, and you certainly didn't die. The gruesome death was one of the more "in-your-face" effects. At E3 2000 Silicon Knights demonstrated a slightly more subtle effect where you opened your items menu and everything you had spent painfully collecting was gone. You exit the menu in total disgust, in pure abomination of it. Shortly after the blinding white flash flushes the television screen. If you connect the two things and go back to check your items you'll find they were never missing. You merely thought they were. This is a slightly more subtle effect, and hint at what's to come. It seems that if you want to succeed in Eternal Darkness, you'll have to learn to trust your instincts instead of your mind and eyes.
Control
Eternal Darkness features an up-close and personal combat system that enables
very deep fight sequences. You attack the enemy with the A-button. Pressing it
rapidly will perform a quick, but weak attack that often pushes the enemy away
from you, giving you some time to gather yourself. For more powerful moves you
use the R-button to target specific limbs of the enemy's body, which are
highlighted in a transparent white. Using the control stick you can select which
limb or part of the body you want to hit. Right now this includes the left and
right arms, head and torso. When multiple enemies are in the room you can use
the digital click feature on the R-button to switch from enemy to enemy. For
example, holding down the R-button you could shoot the first zombie in the
torso, by letting off the digital click a bit leaving it in the analog motion of
the button, then depressing it back down through the digital click you'll
highlight the next zombie. It sounds confusing, but it is as simple as pressing
the R-button without completely letting go of it. When an opponent falls to the
ground, you can finish them off with the B-button. In the midst of all this you
need to pick your fighting arenas carefully. Swinging a broad sword in a narrow
hallway isn't going to be too productive, and will even dull your blade if you
strike the wall too much. And, you'll have no trouble discerning when you hit
the wall as you'll hear a loud clanking sound followed by a shower of sparks.
Navigating the worlds is relatively easy, despite the semi-fixed camera angles. The ability to slowly creep, walk, or jog with the analog stick is pretty fluid. Though, currently making quick turns and adjusting to the proximity of walls and objects seems to still be coming together. If you want to run quickly, you can hold down the Z-trigger.
What's most impressive, though, is the camera angles that would usually cause some major problems with a third-person game like this have been somewhat resolved. The camera has been completely changed from the N64 version of Eternal Darkness. So much that the new system is one of the most impressive camera systems we've ever seen for a third-person game. Instead of suddenly switching angles the camera almost always swoops around corners, or provides a smooth overhead view while climbing down a tight spiral stairwell. It is such an advanced system that depending on the whether enemies are in the room or not, the camera will actually perform different types of panning. For example, in one room the camera will stay relatively close to your character until you defeat it. If you were to come back to that room later, sans enemies, the camera actually swoops up into the rafters above for an extremely dramatic experience. This is only the tip of the ice burg, though. Eternal Darkness' new camera system inspires a sense of drama and mood like none before. We're not saying it's perfect, as it will occasionally cause you to have trouble placing your character in between two objects such as a piano and a table, but in comparison to what's been done in other games, this is way ahead of the competition.
Graphics
Graphically speaking, Eternal Darkness is one of the best-looking games on
GameCube to date. It features extremely detailed character models of at least
5500 polygons a piece, which is evident by the intricate armor seen on Pious the
Centurion. Everything is real-time lit, reflection-mapped, bump-mapped,
dirt-mapped -- you name it, it's probably in there. All the characters have
their own shadows, but it doesn't seem they really change in real-time. Perhaps
this is still something being worked out, as we've seen amazing shadowing in
Luigi's Mansion for example.
All the environments are exquisitely detailed, and accurate to their time period. The mansion is dimly lit with small, antique lamps that cast a deep yellow glow on the walls. Which, by the way use radiosity-mapping to bring a more realistic touch to any light that is absorbed by the dark walls. And did we mention volumetric fog? Silicon Knights has added in real fog that rolls over objects and down stairs. In one scene they increase the speed of the rolling fog to near light-speed to increase the intensity of the mood.
Character animations are also very nice. Silicon Knights is able to use thousands of different animations if they please, and has implemented a reactive animation system. Reactive animation has your character actively take part in the world around them. They look at zombies as they come around corners, take note of important objects like ladders, and even turn to look at torches as they pop beside them. It definitely makes the character seem more involved in the world around them. Our only hope right now is that Silicon Knights smoothes out the interpolation between animations. Right now a character can go from a beautifully animated one-handed cocking of a rifle to running and the change is very noticeable. Hopefully that will be more fluid as the title progresses.
Sound
Eternal Darkness is filled with top-notch voice acting, sometimes even in real
Latin or other dialects! And the world around you is presented in full Dolby
Pro-Logic, at the highest bitrate possible. Needless to say it's all extremely
crisp. In one scene the Centurion falls to the ground and you'd swear they used
real Roman armor when they captured the sound of the metal scraping on the
floor. The moody soundtrack as well is already beautifully composed, and Silicon
Knights is still working on upgrading it with real orchestral pieces and other
mixes. So far the sound is the last thing we'd ever have to worry about in
Eternal Darkness.
Outlook
Eternal Darkness is a mature game with a plot that spans across several
centuries, promising to deliver 40-60 hours of gameplay, and that's not even
including alternate paths your characters can take. We're extremely excited to
see such a product come out of a Nintendo second-party. The deep storyline which
is driven by voiceovers in foreign dialects, quotes from famous poets, and an
all-around gorgeous presentation sounds too good to be true. The insanity meter
and the effects that may accompany it are what is most intriguing. Sadly, the E3
demo was stripped of most of these effects and the storyline, so in was more of
a technology demo than anything else. Sure we got to experience an awesome
camera system, brilliant graphics, and fend off some zombies, but we didn't get
to really experience what the real game was about. For that reason Eternal
Darkness is still a great sounding concept at this point. Until we can go
hands-on and get involved in the story, we can only be entertained by the game's
premise.
November 2001. The Darkness Comes. . .