Trigger Happy
Outcast is a fine example of the sort of quasi- “cinematic” narrative sweep that a videogame with a three-million-dollar budget can create. The player’s character awakes in a strange alien world, and is identified by the inhabitants as a long-awaited prophet. He must win the trust of people in the game while embarking on a quest to find five religious artefacts. While exploring the game’s gorgeously rendered organic-looking planets, the player may ride a twolegged camel, slap a robed elder, and now and then, of course, shoot enemies with very big guns. Masclef enthuses that such a game should ideally be like being “thrown into a big, exotic movie.” The appeal of this sort of epic videogame is “to be an action-movie hero.” The game’s specially written two-hour musical score was recorded by the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra; twenty hours’ worth of character dialogue was provided by sixteen different voice actors; as a reward for finishing the game, the player is given a full half-hour cut-scene to watch. There’s a lot of story going on in this game, but how much of it is the player’s business?
Our blond Belgian expert insists that a designer cannot simply leave the whole story up to the player. “A totally open world is okay,” Masclef muses, “but if
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