Shattered Horizon

[Quetzalcoatl]

I have heard absolutely no hype about this game (perhaps for good reason?). It's the first foray into gaming from a new 3rd party developer. The premise is three-dimensional EVA combat in orbit around the Earth. Interesting concept if nothing else. It's set to release on Steam on November 4th.

The Plug
Shattered Horizon is set 40 years from now. Man is back on the Moon and the companies that took him there are reaping huge profits. Their greed soon leads to the largest mining accident in history. A catastrophic explosion throws billions of tons of rocky debris into near-Earth space, its aftershocks threatening to tear apart the Moon itself.

Fragments of the Moon settle around the Earth and become known as the Arc, named after the dramatic shape they draw across the night sky. With Earth surrounded by debris there's little chance of rescue or return for the thousands of people stranded in space.

The International Space Agency's (ISA) astronauts and scientists trapped in the battered International Space Station are given the task of apprehending those responsible for the catastrophe. Weapons are among the last supplies sent to the station before the supply route from Earth is cut. The Moon Mining Cooperative (MMC) finds itself facing serious charges after only barely surviving the cataclysm. Cut off from Earth, they see the ISA as a threat to their very existence.

The two sides are drawn into an armed conflict. Desperate battles are fought over strategic locations and the scant supplies from Earth that make it through the shroud of debris. Control of the Arc now means the difference between survival and death in the cold of space.

The Weapons
One (1). A multi-role assault rifle with variable fire settings, a bayonet, and a grenade launcher. Grenade types are supposedly strategic and not cheap insta-kill.

Linkys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxmKeFPjLy4 - Gameplay Trailer
http://www.shatteredhorizon.com/

So...Thoughts? This being SD.Net doubtless people will soon come in screaming about how this is all scientifically inaccurate and how they coul make a much more realistic game.

[Ryan Thunder]

Ah, now this should be more up my alley. I'm still waiting for a proper replacement for Descent, after all.

[JointStrikeFighter]

it's a real shame the game will no doubt be a horrible gimmick twitch shooter because te jetpack action is so cool

[Darth Wong]

It's from the guys who made 3DMark (the video benchmark), and it's selling for only 20 bucks. I have to imagine that it's basically a FPS graphics demo with little or no story or campaign mode, and probably just as little personality in general. But you never know; it might be fun, and it's cheap.

[White Haven]

Yeah, I can put up with a lot more from a company that's not trying to rape people for full game price. I'll probably pick it up, see how it goes, the concept is interesting enough.

[salm]

Looks like it´s got a lot of potential. It´s going to depend largly on how good the controls are of course.
I´d be interested in a Single Player mode or how good the AI works in case there are bots. I guess making good AI in a game like this is even more complicated because the space the player characters as well as the AI characters can occupy and the surfaces they can use to move on is exponentiated.

One thing i´d like better is if this took place on earth and the characters simply wore some anti grav suit or some such nonsense. Navigating in familiar places by unfamiliar means is pretty cool wheras navigating without gravity in space we´ve seen in hundereds of space shooters. Also, it would probably support the whole 360 degree rotation thing if the player had better visual feedback on where up and down is which is not the case in space besides on the levels that take place on station parts..

[Dooey Jo]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was just someone who sat around implementing one of the many papers describing how to do "realistic" atmospheric scattering (ie. how to add a computationally expensive, way-too-big glow to a sphere), and felt a strange need to make a game around it. There's another project out there, "Infinity", that is basically a programmer trying to shove the hottest technology into a "game". It started with just a procedural planet renderer back in 2004, now they're apparently going to do procedural galaxies. Somewhere along the way they decided to shoehorn some sandboxy gameplay onto the beast. I'm sure it will be cool as hell, for about two hours.