SIERRA GAMER DAY '08: Ghostbusters (Game Play on 360, Physics Demo on Playstation 3)

Ghostbusters (Game Play on 360, Physics Demo on Playstation 3)

John O’Keefe, the studio director for Terminal Reality, showed us the game play demo on the XBOX 360. The game is set in 1991. You play as the 5th Ghostbuster. However, the game does not feature a customizable character for the player to make. The game will feature all the movie actors (except for Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis) voicing their original roles. All the music from the movies, and I mean ALL the music is in the game. Music tracks from the previous movies that where cut are now back in this game. Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd did the writing for this game with Aykroyd saying that he considers the game to be the third Ghostbusters movie. Vigo from the second movie and the Stay Puff Marshmallow man from the first movie will make appearances in the game. The game will also feature the Tobin’s Spirit Guide, the book that Aykroyd refers to a lot in the movies. Every time you capture a ghost, you fill in a new entry in the book. This is tied to achievements and HOME trophies.

During the game play demo, we where shown all kinds of awesomeness. First off, the main character model is extremely detailed. From the suit to the proton back, the character model is down right impressive for a multiplatform title. Another piece of awesomeness is the proton pack. The proton pack is your HUD. No standard HUD is in this game. Everything is on your proton pack. Your health meter is on the pack. If you over use the proton stream, four glowing red rods will eject from your pack and act like a circuit breaker keeping you from over heating your pack. Once it has a few seconds to cool down, the rods go back in. There is even Green liquid that bubbles in tubes on your proton pack as well. Really cool stuff.

The demo took in a sky rise office building. As John walked around the different offices, the PKE Meter went off. Once he activated the PKE meter, the view automatically switch to a first person view with the Ecto Goggles. The Ecto Goggles allows you to see the hidden ghosts. Ghosts can possess objects in the game thus the Ecto Goggles will let you spot them. Once you see the ghosts, let the proton stream rip. When John caught a ghost, he then bashed it in to walls, the ceiling and the ground to subdue it. Then after he knocked the crap out of it, John wrangle it over to the ghost trap and BAM, he caught the ghost.

Now here is the really cool part. EVERY OBJECT IN THE GAME IS DAMAGABLE!!!! Aka everything can break. Even better, it is DYNAMIC DAMAGE!!!! So if you use the proton pack and cut a vase in an X pattern, it will fall apart in that X pattern. If you just slice it in half, the slice mark follows the same path as the cut. Remember that scene in the first movie when the Ghostbusters are in the hotel banquet hall and they trashed that hall. Well that kind of damage is in the game. You leave a trail of destruction across the environment tying to tag a ghost. This destruction is permanent, so if you run back to that spot later in the level, your damage will still be there.

After the first ghost encounter, the demo moved on to a brief battle with the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man. When the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man slaps his hand into the building, the damage is dynamic as well. Debris will never land in the same spot with different play sessions. When John shot his proton stream at the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man’s hand, don’t only does that area where the stream is hitting look like a burnt s’more, but marshmallow goop flies all over the place. This goop will dynamically fly all over the place as well.

Afterwards, the demo went on to a boss battle with two construction worker ghosts. These ghosts will posses air conditioning units and other rooftop objects and then slam into the player. The developer mention that these bosses, as well as tougher ghosts, are so powerful that they will drag your field of vision with them unless you get the help of the other Ghostbusters to wrangle it down. When I questioned them about if there were any squad based commands, they said that there was such commands but they felt that it would not make sense for the rookie Ghostbuster to call the shots, so they took them out. Afterwards, The Stay Puff Marshmallow Man comes at the character again and he is blast him off the building thus ending the game play demo. Then I viewed the tech demo of the Infernal engine on the Playstation 3.

The 360 and PS3 versions of this game uses an advance game engine called the Infernal engine. They built this engine from the ground up for cross platform games. In this demo, Mark Randel, president of Terminal Velocity, created over 100 small metal boxes and had them dropped into a pile. As Mark moved though the boxes, it became harder to wade through because the collective weight kept the metal boxes from moving thus kept Mark from moving forward. The next demo setting was the NYC library from Ghostbusters 1. Here I did notice some shadow issues that I have seen in other games on the PS3. I asked Mark if he would fix it in later builds and he assured me that it would be. I believe him because this game was still in the pre-alpha stage, so there is a lot of time to fix it.

Once in the book room of the library, demo showed the dynamic damage done to tables, chairs, lamps, etc. Then a multitude of people where summoned in the air and they fell to the ground showing the game engine’s rag doll physics. Then about 40 cars, yes cars, where summoned and fell on the tables, smashing them into pieces. To further amaze us, the Mark whipped out a “goo” gun. This goo gun works as follows: you shoot one end of the goo to an object (car, table, person, processed object), once it attaches to the object, you then shoot the other end of the goo to say the ceiling. The object then is lifted into the air and hangs from the ceiling like a piñata. Heavier objects will require more goo shots.

From the library we went to a flooded basement. Here the water physics where shown. Books in the water would move way from the character as Mark walked by them in the water. Mark then summoned all the books together to form a “Book Golem”. When a ghost possesses an object, they can collect other objects to form these “golems”. If the ghost is near an iron drum with fire in it, that drum will be come a hand and do fire damage to the Ghostbuster. If near knives, the ghost will have a knife hand to cut you up with.

The final part of the PS3 tech demo was in a city street. Mark said that this level would simulate a Thanksgiving Day parade with lots of people and big balloons. Out from two doors came 200 characters on the screen at the same time. This was amazing cause there was no frame rate drop at all. So they out numbers the people showed on the Gears of War 2 tech demo. Even better was the fact that people on the screen had their own AI. They would each move out of the way to avoid colliding with Mark and other people on the screen. The developer then ran the city level with 500, yes 500, characters on screen, same time with no frame rate drop. Amazing. He then went on to show how sixaxis motion control works in the game. This was very impressive. It would be the direct polar opposite of how Lair’s sixaxis worked. He demonstrated slamming Slimer into the ground with sixaxis. Then he wrangled Slimer to the ghost trap where he then slammed Slimer into the trap to be caught. I watched the motions as Mark used the sixaxis and could tell that it was very responsive. Just to note, while he was slamming Slimer into the ground, there was still 500 characters on screen.

The 360 and PS3 versions will feature online co-op with friendly competitive modes. The Wii will have a Ghosts Vs. Busters mode. Now lets look at the different versions of the game on the current generation systems. The PS3 does not require any install (mandatory or optional) to run at top performance. The developers are very interested in HOME and want to create great HOME content for their game. I mentioned things like a t-shirt with the Ghostbuster logo on it, a proton pack, or even a complete Ghostbuster jumpsuit for your HOME avatar to wear. Their eyes lit up and with a smile on their face said that what I mentioned “… would be the kind of content we would want to put into HOME”. Of course earning trophies for HOME, be the trophies themselves, or downloadable content from a Ghostbusters’ HOME space could unlock the clothing. It is early to say because they just received updated version of the HOME development kit.

The 360 may require an install because an install would help with the uncompressing of files from the DVD-ROM. Blu-Ray can store all the texture files uncompressed and they can stream them off the PS3 smoothly. The 360 has to uncompress the files first. This slows down machine, thus an install would help keep the 360 version on par with the PS3. The 360 will feature achievements and other XBL features.