Loose Cannon Preview

There are games which appear in due time, there are games that are a bit late, and there are games that seem as though they will never be finished. Loose Cannon, unfortunately, belongs to the third group. The development of this game started back in '97, and I have been eagerly awaiting it for about a year and a half now... ever since those optimistic reckonings that it might be published by the end of 1999. Then, they decided to postpone it for a year, and then yet another year, so it seems that we'll spend another summer without the Loose Cannon.

To make the mess even worse, Microsoft had bought Digital Anvil, the original publisher, last year. This small company composed mostly of people who worked for Origin, Rainbow studios and Infogrames, sold all the rights for their projects, but it seems that Loose Cannon had somehow been left out of the deal. Not all seems to be clear concerning this, but the result was that Digital Anvil now has to find a new publisher for their three-year-old-baby. Whatever the case, I hope they will soon sort everything out so that we might fully enjoy Zurovec's new masterpiece.

Tony Zurovec has conceived this game; a man mostly remembered for his two Crusaders games (No Remorse and No Regrets) where he acted as the project leader or Ultima (coding only). As he himself admits, he got the idea for Loose Cannon from a game that appeared in mid eighties called Autoduel, Atari version of Zaxxon and Car Wars, but I guess younger players will just compare it to Grand Theft Auto.

The plot is fairly simple, and we had a lot of opportunities to get acquainted with it in the last couple of years. To cut the long story short - Loose Cannon is an on-foot/car combat simulation set in 2016 in the US (I hope it gets released before 2016 - Ed). The government did not survive the economic collapse and mayhem broke out. You cannot tell who's good or who's bad, you only know there's more people belonging to the second group. The police cannot cope with crime any more and it is massively hiring bounty hunters to do the job. Our hero Ashe, ex-soldier, is one of these bounty hunters in spite of his slightly effeminate name...

You probably already started nagging about "just another stupid game that will make you defend justice", but hey, things aren't as simple as they appear to be. Just like all bounty hunters, Ashe is primarily defending his insatiable greed and if we take in regard that he starts his career only with a wrecked car and a semi-automatic handgun, anything is possible (a bit of a Privateer spirit in there - Ed). Ashe, er, you, that is, will have the freedom to choose both his goals and assignments, and the way to solve them. You will always be able to pull your gun and shoot at some copper, then steel their car, you can help the robbers rob a bank, or spend your free time running over pedestrians... the thing is you can do all those things, but they all count. And it sure ain't easy having the entire police force on your back...

Loose Cannon will take place in several cities in America, like: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, New York... The final version should have nine cities, but the number may be reduced to seven. All cities are extremely big, full of traffic, and sufficiently detailed that you can distinguish a great number of different landmarks. To make things better, the levels are completely open, and the player won't be restricted to wondering around town. You'll be able to exit the city and go to the countryside or another city at any point without having to load up a new level. There will be altogether three regions (California, Texas, and the East Coast region) and each of them should contain three towns and one huge countryside map.

All this has been made possible thanks to a good engine, capable of dealing with big outdoor environments, vast cities, real physical vehicle dynamics, day/night changes and all other things necessary to create a good and verisimilar in-game atmosphere. The authors decided to license the Havok Engine, which had also been licensed by Blizzard for development of cinematic sequences in its future games (including Warcraft III). Anyway, the 50,000 objects per map in Havok should require at least a 500 MHz Pentium III or Athlon with 128MB RAM and nVidia TNT2. I doubt this will pose much of a problem for the majority of players by the time when the game finally appears. It's just that I have this nagging doubt that the requirements will change in time... I can recall that two years ago they announced that they might even implement support for 3Dnow and PIII instructions, and we already need TNT2?! The game is still bound to have controls with which you will be able to increase or decrease visual quality/speed.