Republic: The Revolution Preview

Months have passed since we first time heard about this game, and Lead Designer Demis Hassabis and the crew at Elixir Studios have been working hard on making Republic as intricate, involving, and complex as possible, while still maintaining enough simplicity in terms of mission goals and interface to make the game appealing to casual gamers. Ever since I first heard about this game and its original concept, I've been wondering if the design team will have enough brain power (erm, most of them graduated from Cambridge) to tackle the hardest task of them all, and that is to make a multifaceted idea appear simple and easily accessible to everyone. Luckily, from what we've heard from the lads and seen of the game, Elixir Studios seems to be on the right track here.

Now, I could go on and on about how cool the general concept is, without ever telling you its basic premise. But, I guess that wouldn't be fair to our readers who've never heard of the game before.

Hm, those transports look suspicious.

That's what you get when you don't pay your electricity bill.

In a nutshell, Republic: The Revolution has you as a minor faction leader bent on overthrowing the ruling power in the fictional Russian republic of NoviStrana - a 1984-inspired Orwellian government. The game's story begins with the break up of the former USSR. In the midst of total confusion, dozens of autonomous countries spring from the crumbling remnants. It is into one of these, the Republic of NoviStrana, that you enter the fray as a minor faction leader. The player is set to rule through subterfuge, riot, persuasion and networking. You can persuade, hire and recruit all manner of specialist characters to your cause or use less ethical methods such as brainwashing or blackmailing to achieve your aims. These characters range from army generals to TV film stars to archbishops. You can bug people's phones, take snap shots of them being bullwhipped by a 220lbs East German love mistress, (OK, I made this last one up, bit it'd be really cool if you could do that.) and use the most effective weapon of them all - the media: "The player can bury or expose pieces of information from other factions during play. This is achieved by first of all discovering that the event happened, then finding enough facts out about it to convince people that it is true (allegations don't pay the rent). The player can broadcast it in a number of ways; newspapers, TV radio etc. Although they can't watch the broadcast, or listen to the radio, they will be able to see the newspaper headlines, and can watch the effect of breaking news on the population's opinion."

Either way goes. In fact, it is said that the players can gain power through different, specific schemes: political, military, religious, criminal and business. Similar to that, your faction's ideology is based on eight factors, each with five philosophies:

1. Government: ranges from Dictatorial to Anarchistic
2. Religion: ranges from Fundamentalist to Sacrilegious
3. Political Outlook: ranges from Fascist to Communist
4. Economy: ranges from Entrepreneurial to State Control
5. Morality: ranges from Traditionalist to Criminal
6. International Relations: ranges from Hostile to Friendly
7. Violence: ranges from Blood Thirsty to Pacifist
8. Ethnic Relations: ranges from Nationalist to Cosmopolitan

I'm guessing that we'll choose our faction's ideology before the start of the game, consequently providing the player with a pre-defined number of supporters. You'd expect though that the ideology of your faction would change according to the schemes you're most likely to use: political, military, etc.

You can influence the general populace through your key supporters by using them to instigate actions. Hundreds of exciting and diverse actions to order and orchestrate from vast rallies and riots to rigging football matches to secret police 'hits' to broadcasting news propaganda. In short, anything that has any influential significance can be done. Republic: The Revolution is supposed to simulate a no-holds-barred political deathmatch where only the most ruthless or the smartest competitors stay alive, and in power. But, don't get me wrong, this is not a First-person shooter : Far from it; this is a smart and tactical strategy simulation with high emphasis on the social and political aspects of a fictional Eastern-European country. Briefly, this game should simulate how the circles of power operate in a republic that can hardly be called that. I presume that the game should also teach you that you have to be careful which methods you choose to achieve your goals, as violent revolutions usually lead to rehashed dictatorship regimes and rarely bring anything but pain and suffering to the people.

Comrades! Socialism will live foreverrrr!!

Take a walk on the wild side.

But most importantly, Elixir Studios is on a mission to make the world of NoviStrana completely autonomous from the player! In other words, if you left the stop playing, the game world would carry on changing despite the lack of player input. Every citizen has its own, unique AI routine! In terms of coding the AI, the main challenge for the design team has been one of scale: "... we aim to create an impression of a fully populated city. Whilst this has been done before, because the people in the game represent the most important game resource (namely votes), we have to ensure that all of the agents' behaviors are logically consistent. This means that we cannot present agents just moving around randomly, but rather we have to give every citizen a home, job, favorite bar, favorite restaurant, etc. We also need to give the citizens political opinions that can be swayed by the player and again these all need to be logically consistent. We have a hierarchical Djikstra algorithm that is able to direct the thousands of agents around the city - it is similar to algorithms used in the route-finders you see in some modern cars. We also use a proprietary Behavioral architecture that allows the designers to have complete control over all agent behaviors. Other than that it's just good old-fashioned hard graft."

Undoubtedly, Republic: The Revolution is one of the most ambitious projects currently in development. It's a very elaborate game, and hence very deep. So how do you take this idea and mold it into something that is accessible to a vast population of gamers? That has to be one of the most challenging tasks; well, besides bringing to life the country of NoviStrana with the use of cutting-edge AI routines and 3D code. Elixir Studios is looking to achieve this goal in two ways. One way is to simplify the game's interface (which is currently an ongoing process), and the other is to set clear the attainable objectives for the gamers to accomplish: "We have introduced a plot device to help the player make progress more easily - it is only a bit of guidance, but will help enormously." However, even though the game will have specific objectives it won't be necessary to take any kind of linear approach to achieving them as "players will still be free to a certain extent to try anything they feel like doing at any given time (if they can afford it ;)."

In the end, it's the methods you'll use that will decide the character of your future state. For example, you can try using force on someone, or you can try bribing him/her. Depending on that someone's ideology and the faction he belongs to he'll react differently to different kinds of stimuli. So, if we were to beat up a member of the church, he might not back down, as his is the kingdom of heaven. But if you offer him a hefty bribe, he just might see it fit to look away if the church is in need of some funding. Then again, you might insist on the violent approach, and even get away with it, so it's really up to the player and the individual AI do decide the outcome of every situation. Note how I've mentioned the AI here, as certain situations will require NPC's to "think for themselves." A cool little variable to put into the equation...

Your main goal is to become the President. You want to rule, one way or the other. So in order to pull this off you'll need to finish three game stages. Each of these stages reflects your overall status in the society and the influence you have over it: you progress from the "town" stage to the "city" stage, and finally make an effort to reach the "capital" stage. Each stage has five distinct objectives, but you'll only have to finish three of them in order to pass through to the next stage. According to Demis: "... there will be some goals that are not directly related to the plot; though the player will benefit from completing them as they may discover a character with a winning combination of skills and abilities that they may not have encountered by following the plot alone. The plot is of course possible without them; it just pays to pay attention ;)"

This also indicates that besides being able to bend the rules a bit when it comes to choosing your methods, you will also be able to decide which objectives you want to finish and in what order. Once you complete an objective, another one will take its place. So you see: on the surface it seems simple enough, but in praxis, the game is about as open-ended as it gets. You can even try to finish the game without ever doing anything outside the law, by using legal methods to discredit the opposition: "Yes, you can be careful to work within the restrictions of the law. Staying 'squeaky clean' gives opposing factions less ammunition to smear you with. However, if you are prepared to plough a lot of time and money digging up the dirt on their unlawful deeds, you can lower the amount of support they get from the poles (temporarily at least, the public are very fickle ;)"

There is so much more to be said about the game's unique gameplay concepts, but I'm afraid that would ruin the fun of playing it, so let's just take a look at the amazing 3D engine used to power the life in NoviStrana. If you can believe this, the engine is capable of rendering an unlimited number of polys! The only limitation to that is the power of your PC, but according to the developers the game is supposed to run fine on a P3 system with something like 64Mb of RAM! Then again, in order to run Republic in its full visual glory you'll most definitely have to have a beast of a system. Or better yet, an infinitely powerful system which can render an vast number of polys! Seriously though, from what we've seen of the game, every character will be pretty much unique, and Elixir even went so far as to render the flowers that decorate the city buildings. Now that's just freaky! The whole Republic of NoviStrana is going to be created in freeform 3D. There will be 50 towns and cities, all rendered down to the very last detail. In addition, there will be over a million citizens in the simulation. So, grab a calculator and try to punch in all the numbers. Let's see; a million times the number of polys per character... Ah hell! That's a lot of polys, folks! Lately, Elixir has been making additions to the lighting - high detail shadows help during the daytime, and mood lighting helps create sinister atmospheres in dark alleys at night. They're now working on various special effects to flesh out the quality of grass, water, and other materials.

Finally, I think you'll agree with me when I say that every single aspect of this game sounds very pretentious. So much so, that I cannot help myself but show some skepticism. Then again, I would love to see the developers prove me wrong. No really, I won't hold any grudges, just as long as I get to play this game any time soon.