A change is underway. The way in which this game will be played has been quite radically altered. To be more specific:
This is no longer a First-Person Shooter
Well, not entirely. There’s quite a large grey area. To explain better, I’ll thrown in a bit of genesis:
On a forum that I frequent, someone brought up an old game called Bioforge – a third-person exploration/combat affair with a good storyline. I liked it a lot at the time, and it’s still worth a play now if you can get the DOS emulation working. Anyway, Bioforge used 3D models for the characters, but pre-rendered backgrounds. The thought occurred to me that TR could look pretty good in that kind of setting, although there’s obviously control issues. In discussion with some peers, it seemed obvious to extend the paradigm. Prior to this revelation, you played as the character that boards ships, does the FPS thing and then leaves. You have an NPC character that “guides” you through, pointing out objectives and telling you plot-advancing things.
Now reverse the roles.
You are the controller. You are sat in your support ship, watching your colleague via security cameras, and advising him. Advice in this context consists of a context-sensitive point-and-click interface. In effect, you’re controlling an NPC in a pseudo-RTS style.
Now the grey area – you, the player, are sat in an FPS world. You can move away from the screen. You can go for a walk. You could even fire guns.
So, there’s still likely to be FPS portions, although these certainly won’t be the main focus. When used, they’ll integrate with the Command mode in a clever way.
Spaceflight is still in. In fact, there’s likely to be more of it now that you’re the guy on the support ship.
So, that’s how we’re changing the game. I’d love to know people’s thoughts on this. Here’s a quick’n'dirty idea of how it looks: