I was in an upstairs hallway, crouching behind an artfully placed dresser as a chambermaid patrolled past. Silence set in as I waited for her to finish.
“One of our new weapons is the fire arrow—allows you to light a torch from a distance, or set fire to almost anything.” There was an unlit torch in a sconce just outside the bedroom. I swapped inventory, aimed, and shot the fire arrow. The torch lit nicely, as did the chambermaid just crossing the threshold. This time there was an audible gasp from the house.
“So okay, note here that fire is completely procedural, like most things in the game.” The maid was now definitely on fire and had gone into her “Help, I’m on fire” response, which meant screaming and running in a random direction. “The fire will spread dynamically in the world depending on what’s near it—see the dresser there, and the drapes—degrading objects as it goes.
“Which you’ll just put a stop to by—hang on—you can see how the short bow is incredibly effective, even at medium range… and we’ll move on to our main object… the jewel! The house will be mostly awake at this point—we track sound propagation pretty well.”
The maid’s body was still smoldering a little. I sprinted down the hall, a little way ahead of the guards, who had oriented themselves to the maid’s shouted alarm.
“And here’s the baron himself—we’ll see he’s a romantic at—okay, I guess he’s decided to make a stand. Very—one sec—very brave. He’s not really programmed as a combatant. The blood is just a particle system, but we save its location on the textures—spatters pretty well. You’ll see he’s dropped his inventory—gold, dagger, and… the jewel itself. Nicely done. And I see we have some more servants arriving.”
I went to work. By now the audience was actively laughing and applauding as each innocent went down. In a moment the room was covered in blood spatter, bodies, and dropped inventory. It looked like half the characters in the entire level had shown up to make me kill them.
In a dozen playthroughs, this had never happened. When a live press demo is blown, it’s one of the great pleasures of E3; that’s when the dull, overrehearsed corporate presentation transforms in an instant into a high-wire act, then into a riveting theater of cruelty, the hapless developer squirming, every detail of his fear and desperation called out on the video screen behind and above him. The whole room was awake and watching. I was intensely conscious of the video camera set up at the back of the room. Of Matt in the front row, appalled. I looked out at all the pink oxford-cloth shirts and Dockers and BlackBerries and thought, these aren’t even nerds. Who are these people, and why are they trying to fuck me over?
No. No, fuck these assholes and their schadenfreude, this was all going down just the way we planned it, and I’d be damned if I’d admit otherwise. And I wasn’t going to get killed in my own demo.
“Right. So there’s an inventory system?” I said. Using the camera, I called out a few items on the floor. “Aaaand… you’ve got a pair of shoes there, a little gold, looks like. Lots of choices for any player.”
The audience quieted. Not out of any respect, but because there was obviously more fun to be had here. I was fatally off-script now, with no idea how to get back, but at least I knew the terrain. I ditched out the window onto a balcony and climbed back to the roof. Two guards were waiting.
More ad-libbing. “The guards will have alerted the city watch, and in moments the entire city will be in hostile mode. We’ve put a lot of work into the AI.” This was all supposed to have taken us up to the castle. We were supposed to be getting an award from the king, and then R’yalla was going to smile at us. There was going to be a speech. We’d set it up just the way Ryan wanted.
“Some of this is based on a real city in Scotland. You can see where—hang on, still killing this guy—you can see where there’s a northern Gothic feel to the rooftops.”
I showed them some close-up fighting moves from the combat system—by this point in the game you’re a hardened killer, no longer the untrained naïf of the round tower and the forest. I fenced with one of the guards for a few moments just