Clearly the game's long development time was on Bethesda's mind as well, because our demonstrator, Bethesda's Brian Jackson, reassured us that the game is definitely on track for a fall, 2005 release. He also said that, one way or another; this would be the last E3 that this game would be on display. According to Jackson, all of the game's 16 levels are functionally complete and all the art assets are in the game. Apparently the development team is spending the remaining time before release tuning difficulty levels, tweaking the monster AI, and making sure that the challenges are neither too tough nor too easy. When pressed to give a number, he stated that the overall, the game is approximately 80-85% complete.
The good news is, the areas on display were all brand new, featuring new art, new monsters, and new cut-scenes. One area in particular was selected to show off how the game will combine both puzzle solving and action. The setting was an abandoned church. The player's character, Jack Walker, will have run out of ammunition in the previous scene and be forced to run into the church and bar the door for protection. Now he has to figure out how to get out of the church before the townspeople break down the door and kill him. As the demonstrator had Jack search around the church, we could hear bells going off in the distance, the solution was to ring the church bells in a particular sequence in order to open a secret door. The puzzle didn't seem that difficult, but the tension went way up when you knew you would only get a few chances before the townspeople turned you into fish food.
The next area of the demonstration showed a new "sneaking" mechanic. The setting was a Masonic-style secret brotherhood lodge being patrolled by several men with slow minds but fast trigger fingers. In order to get to the upstairs portion of the lodge, Jack can sneak through the shadows, walk up behind an opponent, and take him out silently. Naturally Jack will then have to hide the body, but the sneaking ability offers players a third way to get through the game beyond puzzle-solving and pure first-person action.
Finally, the game demonstrated Jack's "insanity" gauge. One of the hallmarks of Cthulhu stories is that the things that people see in them have the ability to drive them insane. Every time Jack sees something awful, whether it's a crucified body in a church, or an unnatural monster, or some sort of stimuli that sets off a repressed memory, Jack may have a psychotic episode in which what you see may not be what's really there. During our demonstration, Jack had to crawl through a dank, tight tunnel to escape from the church. Unfortunately, the tight space set off an attack of claustrophobia. Suddenly we were experiencing a flashback of Jack walking through the hospital and running into other patients. The problem was, what we were seeing as patients were in reality monsters that were attacking us. Other times, Jack will see innocent civilians as monsters - attack the monsters and he kills innocent people. That means that players won't always be able to trust what they see. Jack will get flashes of the future that may warn him of enemies up ahead - unless his sanity level is too high, in which case his flash may lie to him, revealing the hall to be empty.
We've been excited about Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth since we first saw it two years ago. It's definitely a fresh, different take on the FPS genre, with a storyline, monsters, adventure game elements, and gameplay mechanics that make it a potential classic. Let's just hope it finally gets out the door this Fall. If we have to wait much longer, it won't take Cthulhu to drive us crazy.
