Fracture, for the uninitiated, represents an ambitious project for LucasArts and developers Day 1 Studios.
Set in the year 2161 amidst a backdrop of worldwide ecological and seismological chaos, the United States has been split in two by the “Great Flood”. As a result of the polar ice cap melting, the Mississippi River has destroyed the central portion of the United States, causing an ill-equipped Federal Government to fail and literally cutting the country in half. These two halves are left to fend for themselves in the aftermath.
The East, now known as the Atlantic Alliance, symbolic of their union with Europe, puts its faith in surviving this new world in cybernetics, an established yet evolving technology now more than 150 years old.
On the other side of the flooded continent, the Western states, now called the Republic of Pacifica and having allied with Asia, resort to solving their problems at the genetic level, effectively restructuring the DNA of its inhabitants – a method the Atlantic Alliance finds morally reprehensible.
Where Fracture sets itself apart from the rest of the stack of shooters out there is the "deformable terrain" - something we were eager to learn more about. During the media preview, we saw Shara demonstrating how the land can be raised and lowered using your characters weapon, entitled the "entrencher". There were also readily-available crates of "spike" grenades that you could throw at enemies, causing the ground height to alter dramatically. The AI seemed to adjust on the fly to this terraforming, something that had to be seen to be appreciated.
GP: So we've seen the deformable terrain in the demonstration, how open-ended is this? Presumably anywhere you can stand on the ground, you can modify?
Shara: Yes, exactly! So it's kind of like a funny problem - we started where everything was earth, and then you kind of have this weird blank-slate problem, where people feel like it's too limitless. So it became an interesting challenge as to how much earth do you give, and how much concrete, or crates, or catwalks where you can rob people of the terrain deformation. But in most cases there would be very wide areas, or very tall areas, so you can use your terrain deformation in a very expansive way.
GP: You must have had a lot of testing to get all of that right?
Shara: You know, it's amazing; it really is next-gen, it's hard to take such a well-loved genre and add anything new to it, something new in this way. So it really did take a lot of testing, especially with the AI. For shooters, and with Havok, there has always been interactive terrain, but never to the degree that we have here, because usually in a shooter (and I've worked on a lot of shooters!) you really want to choreograph the battle, and when you have terrain that's constantly moving out from under your feet the AI have to be smart enough to look for cover, and react well to the ground slipping from under their feet.
It is a debugging nightmare, it's a programming nightmare, it's very processor heavy, so I really give those guys at Day 1 Studios a lot of credit!
GP: Speaking of which, did you come across any limitations with the consoles?
Shara: I don't think they came across any limitations as such, but going back to the clean slate thing, it's more just how much newness you can give to a player at one time without overwhelming them, so how many generic abilities do we give? How many cybernetic abilities do we give? How many genetic variants are we going to see? There was a lot of weighing with all of that against the terrain deformation, and the newness of what terrain deformation does in multiplayer, where you have to think about all the balancing. So it's really more about giving enough newness to the player without making them feel like it's too much - you've gone too far - it was more that than any console limitation really.
