Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth Preview

The interface won't have the classical on screen health-bar and ammo-display. The point of leaving these out was to leave the entire screen to the player to fully experience the atmosphere and the situation. If you want to know how many bullets you have left in your gun, you'll have to rely on your memory, or just check it. Your hit points won't be measured in any visible way, you'll only be able to see how wounded you are by the way and speed you walk, if you are able to aim properly and if you are leaving a blood trail behind you.

I was most happy about the fact that spells won't be used too much: you'll just have to rely on the good old weapons from the twenties. Your primary weapons will be the knife and a .45 revolver, and later you will get to pick up a shotgun, some primitive machine-gun, and maybe even a flamethrower. The game will feature grenades, dynamite and Molotov-cocktails... but, as I said you will have to use the rationally, as there won't be a lot of ammo around (Undying anybody - Ed.). Why would you have to use a gun to kill someone who is standing beside a ravine, his back to you? The few spells appearing in the game won't be offensive. You'll just use them in certain situations (like for breathing under water) and not much as they directly cause the loss of sanity.

The enemies will highly resemble the ones appearing in the original stories and the pen-and-paper games. Some have been left out because they simply couldn't fit into the story (like the ones that would kill the player simply if he looked at them). We're sure in for a variety of monsters, as the game will feature a large number of Frankenstein-looking hybrids. Some of the creatures will have "soft bodies" and will be able to perform the Terminator/X-Files tricks with changing shape and passing through narrow openings.

Call of Chthulu will use a damage system like the one in the Soldier of Fortune, which means that different parts of body react different to bullets. If you shoot your enemy in the arm in which he's holding his weapon, he won't be able to shoot at you; if you shoot him in the head, he'll fall flat dead. The same goes for you: If somebody hits your leg, you won't be able to run and you'll leave a blood trail... In the worst case, when you survive a bullet that hit you in the head, you won't be able to aim properly as the blood will keep pouring into your eyes, and if you don't find some bandages, you may even bleed to death... Sounds scary... If it's any comfort, there will be zones in which the monsters cannot touch you, and you can use them to heal yourself and rest, or possibly even get some morphine to ease your pains...

I'd love to say something more on the AI, but at this stage of development, that issue has not yet been dealt with. All is within the standard work-frames: make enemies attack in different smart ways depending on the surroundings, make them be able to trace your blood-trails, etc.

There, that's the single player mode... There is a possibility that the game might ship with an experience/story designer that would give the players a chance to create and exchange adventures. The multiplayer mode has not been given a lot of attention by now, but I guess it's going to be pretty good as they announced both an action Counter-Strike-like mode (programmers admit that they themselves really got hooked on it, so I can imagine why Simon the Sorcerer 3D is this late ;) in which one of the teams is trying to summon Cthulhu and the other team strives to thwart their attempt, and a cooperative mode in which several players join forces to solve the campaign.

Call of Cthulhu uses NDL NetImmerse 3D engine for rendering graphics combined with the Havok physics engine. The programmers said that they did not want to develop the engine from the scratch, as they wanted to devote all their attention to creating the actual game. This is why they fully rely on a third-party engine, which relieved them from any responsibility for the technical aspects of the game. Their long expected Simon the Sorcerer 3D is using the same engine...

The Havok engine should take care of the game physics, and create a real-world-like environment... I've read a lot of good things about it recently, and it will be used in a couple of upcoming titles I can hardly wait to see: Digital Anvil's Loose Cannon, and Blizzard's Warcraft 3 (for pre-rendered cut-scenes). So, Havok will have to provide a large number of moveable objects with their own, individual physical properties. I have no doubt that this will immensely boost the atmosphere... Just imagine: You're crossing a suspension bridge over a chasm, your enemies are right behind you, and each of the planks on the bridge is vibrating her own way... Or when you break a window and the win starts playing with the curtain... Not to mention things like realistic floating in water, realistic explosions which influence surrounding objects in a logical way, and so on...

The engine will also contain a detailed damage system, and it should work perfectly on a PIII @ 500Mhz and a 32MB graphic accelerator which is fully compliant with Direct3D or OpenGl.

As for the music, it is still being experimented with. The guy who is in charge of making it has had experience with making music for the movies. The game will rely more on sound effects, as the music won't be present all the time.

Even though the developers are barely half-done, the good storyline and their self-confidence make them sure that they will come around to creating an entire serial of Mythos games. We can only wait and see how this will develop, if it's going to be more of a classical adventure, RPG or an action game. If they only finished that Simon the Sorcerer 3D and focus all their resources on Call of Chthulu... Lovecraft fans (and not only they) can hardly wait for this one.