![]() They’re actively looking forward to how critical and involved their community will be, and Kickstarter was a natural fit for assembling such a jury. Rob Auten, WriterĪdvanced narrative AI sounds pie-in-the-sky, but juggling the fragile hearts of so many ardent film fans versed in both cinema and videogames means Auten and the team need to execute. We need a process that enables us to have an active and involved community through the development process. “Character and the evolution and evocation of character in computer-driven systems is something that's really interesting to me,“ says Auten, “We're less concerned about really tense machine gun set pieces and really more about characters that feel like they have both the knowledge base and a presence that’s maybe a little bit more eerie than some of the things we've seen before.” “For me, the ability to take that sort of vibe and that energy and transpose that into an interactive one-it's obviously a really ambitious and scary prospect, but that was exactly how saw this, that was exactly what they wanted to do,” he says.įor Auten, such an advancement comes in the form of AI and fluid, evolving narratives that respond to player behaviors invisibly. Auten believes videogames lend a similar leap in immersive, immediate power. It was a powerful pairing, deploying a new technology with such a beautiful, cacophonic, and existentially charged film. Attendees received a playbill, had a moment to read through the cast and crew, and then the movie just played-in 70mm and accompanied by the first mass market use of quintaphonic surround sound, no less. Dubbed the Roadshow Presentation, the film was cut without any credits sequences whatsoever. Apocalypse Now, now?Įven if Auten and company can pull off a morally sprawling adaptation of Apocalypse Now, it’s not clear why videogames are a good medium, and why 2017 was the time to get started.Īuten makes his case, comparing the potency of a virtualized Apocalypse Now with that of its original theatrical run. Maybe there’s a series of choices that leads to an ending with a smiling, happy, physically fit Kurtz orbited by butterflies-and that puppy from the sampam is there too, yipping and healthy. ![]() “We kind of see Kurtz as almost this fortune teller, this oracular figure, and he's spoken about in similar terms in the film and some of the documentation as well,” says Auten, “So, we have the ability to have a character in the end of the game that sees through you as though he knows the actions you've taken and devises an ending that really fits the way the punishment fits the crime.” "Whether you pull the trigger is up to you.”īy giving players the option to react to Apocalypse Now’s frequent morality plays as the central character, there’s even potential for a ‘good’ ending to the story, using Kurtz as a judge of sorts. "You may meet the sampam on the river, but that doesn't mean you're going to have the same interaction with Willard shooting the woman that you have in the film,” says Auten. Whether you pull the trigger is up to you. Whether he does it to end her suffering or in solidarity with his companion’s violent impulse isn’t clear-and in the game, the player will define that motive whether they shoot her or not. Willard, who the player will control, finishes her off in the film. One of the boat’s crew mows down the unarmed occupants of the Vietnamese sampam until only an injured woman and a puppy remain. “Do you use your mouth or your guns? And how does that cause the other members of the boat to feel about you?” he says.įor example, during the film an encounter with another boat on the river needlessly erupts into violence. Auten is hoping to settle for a simpler verb set when it comes to the player making those important decisions. “It's not a conventional war game in any way,” Auten told me, “It's much more driven by relationships and by tension.”Īuten isn’t too sure what the final version will look like himself, but knows that it will primarily entail systems of choice and consequence-though not in the quicktime or dialogue-choice Telltale Games sense we typically see today. Most curious of all is how exactly the game will play. What we do know is that it’ll be in first person from the perspective of Captain Benjamin Willard and that it will feature familiar scenes from the film, but won’t lift the structure and sequence outright. So far, the team has built an early prototype that demonstrates the tone and potential angle for the rest of the game (where some of those screenshots are from), but it's far from representative of the final shape. Apocalypse Now is in such an early stage of development that it’s unclear exactly what those hands are working to create.
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