Among the big games at the end of the year, there is one that will be released a little later than the others, it is Indiana Jones and the Circle of Elders. This is Bethesda’s next game as a publisher, but behind the project is the MachineGames studio, well known in the industry for the very nice Wolfenstein which was brought up to date around ten years ago. of years. A few weeks ago, Bethesda organized hands-on preview sessions all over the world, in San Francisco for the Americans and in London for the European press. I didn’t have the chance to be part of the invited media, but I nevertheless managed to get my hands on some new gameplay in 4K that I wanted to share with you. Twenty minutes of completely new images which already set the tone for what awaits us next month on PC and Xbox. And I’m also going to take this opportunity to dissect what’s being said about the gameplay, because there are things that look promising and others that are downright worrying…
Since it was announced and revealed to be an FPS and therefore first-person view game, Indiana Jones and the Circle of Elders has been a divisive game. The gaming community is indeed divided, because for many of them, an Indiana Jones game must be in the third person and not the first. And I’m going to take a position, I quite agree with this opinion. Especially when we decide to rely on Harrison Ford’s notoriety and use it to appear in the game. So of course, as you can see with these 4K gameplay images, the game will offer many cutscenes so that we can appreciate the actor’s face on the eve of his 40th birthday, when he was still in great shape. Because yes, it would be a shame to have paid so much for his fee not to see him in the game. But it’s difficult to say to ourselves that we won’t be able to take advantage of his in-game banter, turning around him with the right analog stick.
FPS > TPS?!
For the creators of MachineGames, it is an artistic and editorial choice. Maybe… No doubt… Why not… it’s a point of view that can be defended, but in reality, we all know that it was for ease of development. Because choosing the FPS view was above all a considerable time saving in terms of production for everyone. For MachineGames, the entire creative process was already in place with more than 10 years of FPS, for Bethesda, it is ensuring a rapid production time, and much less than if the studio had started on a game in the third no one where it would have been necessary to redo everything from scratch. Particularly with the character, the interactions with the settings, the staging, etc. etc. And with what has been done over the past 10 years with Wolfenstein, the studio already had all the tools and even assets already ready, since the Second World War is their hobby, and Indiana Jones and the Nazis are their hobby. It is also something inseparable. So yes, it’s smart, it’s clever, but the speech “We chose the FPS view for an artistic choice”we still have doubts…
Concerning the gameplay, this Indiana Jones signed MachineGames will be radically different from the usual productions of the Swedish studio, since the emphasis will be placed on stealth and hand-to-hand combat which necessarily characterize our adventurer. And among the segments that were playable during this hands-on preview session, there was this infiltration mission in the Vatican, in Bastione San Luca, sorry if my pronunciation sucks, I did Spanish in LV2 when I I was in high school, not Italian. This mission therefore took place at night and it allowed you to hear the enemies speaking Italian among themselves, which is rather great for immersion. What emerges overall from the opinion of the journalists who were on site is that the infiltration is still quite basic. We stay crouched down to avoid being seen, we throw objects like bottles to attract their attention, go around them and knock them out from behind. Sometimes it is even possible to use a shovel, broom or umbrella to stun them more easily. With the umbrella, you can grab the enemies’ balls, which gives rise to funny situations specific to the Indiana Jones atmosphere. Pretty cool.
IA NOT PHOTO
Afterwards, it’s well known and well played, especially since in terms of AI, it seems that the game is one of the bad students in the field. The pattern of lurking enemies is basic, it often happens that the situations are grotesque with almost blind guards with this gauge which even allows itself to fill up before the guards detect you while Indy is standing squarely in front of them. Honestly, such a system is obsolete as hell, it feels like we’ve gone back 20 years, seriously and clearly, it’s one of the points that will have to be improved between now and the release, but given that we’re 1 month away of its release, we might as well tell you that mass is said. Afterwards, a broken AI, we start to get used to it, it’s been like that for decades and apart from The Last of Us 2 where there was a real crazy work on the behavior of the enemies, we always comes back to the same problems. This debate around broken AI was also the subject of a report by the JDG and I invite you to watch it. In any case, making a good AI is what requires the most dev time and time is money… That being said, if you ever blow your cover, it won’t be not game over like in certain titles like Star Wars Outlaws or Tintin from Microids to name just these two games; the alert is given, the guards are shouting in packs, the dogs are even let loose and can attack the calf of our Indy who will have to run everywhere to find a place to hide. Some have even said that these sensations of improvisation of situations are reminiscent of the atmosphere of the films. It’s not false…
Finally, roughly speaking, you understand, you shouldn’t expect a lot of subtlety in this game, especially since it is not in the pedigree of the MachineGames developers to do stealth, they are more used to make the powder speak than anything else. There will be firearms in this Indiana Jones, but it will clearly not be the heart of the gameplay, be aware of the direction taken by the game. Likewise, during combat, you should not expect to neither are real miracles. Indiana can therefore use his fists, he can dodge and even parry attacks, just like his opponents, and if the fight ever becomes too complicated, you can always use his whip to trip the enemy, or even disarm him with it. What looks to be rather cool is the very brutal side of the blows that are given, with impactful sound effects which really give the feeling that the clashes are brutal. There is a rather heavy side to traveling that I personally like and which can have a small effect.
PULP FICTION
In any case, Indiana Jones and the Circle of Elders will focus more on the pulp side of the films, trying to transcribe the atmosphere that we all know. The game will not hesitate to focus on comical situations, Indy’s jokes, his somewhat left side sometimes, and above all, there will be puzzles and a lot of exploration. Documents to collect, keys to find to open sealed doors, walls or gutters to climb, zip line descents, it will be the moment to see our Indy from behind and see that in terms of animation, it’s still very rigid and indeed, it would have been complicated for MachineGames to make a third-person game when we see that these few passages are animated with so little flexibility. Some journalists congratulated the entire immersion, including a visit to Egypt in the Giza market. Personally, I find that it lacks life, animations and that the NPCs are all very frozen. I’m not impressed at all.
Otherwise, the previews focused on relatively nice graphics and it’s true that overall, it’s not bad. The textures are well detailed, there is visual richness, the lighting is also great and it looks pretty good. Well, we’re clearly not talking about state-of-the-art production design, but it does the job, especially since the sound design also seems to be a good positive, at least from what I hear in this gameplay video. Let’s hope that MachineGames has kept other arguments in mind to make its Indiana Jones a good surprise, but it is obvious that we will not be in for a surprising production, at least pleasant to find an adventure game from an era where Lara Croft and Nathan Drake, the spiritual children of Indiana Jones, are missing… A word to the wise…
