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Republic: The Revolution - First Look Preview
Chris Leyton
08/04/2003
We take an extensive look at the most ambitious title ever created...
Housing some of the greatest minds in AI, founded by a man who became a Chess Master at the age of twelve who went on to co-develop Theme Park alongside Pete Molyneux at the age of seventeen; itâs fair to say that a lot is resting on the first title to come out of Elixir Studios doors.
Despite being in development for the last four years and without doubt being one of the most ambitious computer games weâve ever seen, Republic: The Revolution looks like being well worth the wait.
Strategy fans may have been following the painfully slow progress on Republic over the last few years, despite fancifully displaying the âInfinite Polygon Engineâ in action many years ago, specific details on the game have been hard to come by. Thankfully TVG recently attended a presentation of the game in action from Elixir Studios founder Demis Hassabis.
First the good news, Demis claims that the game is ânearly finishedâ and that the team are weeks away from alpha; despite a few bugs and omissions the game looks to be at a near complete stage, leaving time to move onto the crucial balance and bug-testing phases.
To bring those who havenât been following the progress on Republic, the game is set in the fictional Republic of Novastrana â“ an offset of the former USSR. Players assume the role of a small-time faction leader, who must use any means possible to overthrow the corrupt regime of the current President. Starting with a single loyal follower, a tiny secret HQ and a very small base of local support, you must build up a nationwide faction powerful enough to overthrow the President and run the Republic of Novastrana.
Demis took us through a playtest of the game in action, whilst the user interface and various menu screens are simply placeholders and are going to be changed to radically improve the ease of use, it certainly gave us a better understanding of how the game works, what we can expect to do and why this should be on the lists of strategy fans across the globe.
Starting from the beginning, Demis displayed how players create their own character or avatar for use in the game world. At present this came in the way of selecting values for four key areas â“ Presence: You physical prowess within the game, Charisma: Indicates how persuasive your character is, Control: To determine your management of other characters, Power â“ The rating of your prestige within Novastrana.
In the final game this feature will be carried out through a range of psychometric tests, used in real-life to determine your personality. In keeping with RPG fashion, all characters within the game gain experience points and âlevel-upâ gifting them greater strengths and more actions.
Once youâve created your character, youâre left with the crucial decision on which ideology you wish your faction to adopt. Three choices exist Force, Money, Influence and encompass the Middle, Upper and Lower classes respectively; although a choice has been made, the player is free to change his ideology throughout the game via the actions that you choose to carry out.
Having carried out these functions, itâs into the game-world where the emphasis initially appears to involve enlisting a total of six members to your team. At this point the sheer scope of the game emerged, everyone from clerics to tramps can be found getting up to their everyday actions in life â“ the illusion of a fully simulated society is a million miles away from anything weâve seen in a videogame to date.
Itâs during this phase that we actually learnt what is involved with the actual gameplay, every character within the game has a number of âactionsâ open to them; for example, clerics can perform charity work in poor areas, whilst a salesman might carry out a leaflet campaign to promote your cause. There are over 180 of these actions within the game, ranging from military coups to peace-protests, from bribes to brainwashing, from newspaper scandals to assassinations!
The actual game involves selecting a character, selecting his action and then a person or area to carry out the action; each day within the game is split up into three timeslots, two of which can be used to carry out an action. Itâs a hard concept to describe but a deceptively simple process to carry out; enlisting the first follower to your cause saw us selecting a âbribeâ action, selecting the character that we wanted to join our cause and then selecting a secretive location to carry out our nefarious activity. Having joined our team, the character is then added to the team list and he can carry out actions in a similar manner. There are nine different character classes within the game, each capable of 'levelling-up' to stage 10; as you'd expect different characters have different actions, however it's entirely possible to have a priest carrying out a terrorise action for example (it just probably won't be that efficient).
The actual actions are carried out via a real-time cutscene of the action in progress, however the player has a certain amount of control over the way that the action is progressing; for example, following the bribe action our character had the Novastrana police drag our poor man into a back alley, where a conversation mini-game allowed us to determine the outcome of the events. Once youâve reached six team members, the game appears to involve a careful decision of which actions to participate in as you can only watch one of these at a time. Demis claims that watching and interacting with an action can have up to a 50% increase in your chance of success in some circumstances, which gives a nice balence to the level of interaction chosen by the player.
Each character within your team will have three actions to begin with, increasing to a total of nine; along with your character these âlevel-upâ as well between three levels, so a bribe at level 1 might involve a meeting at a bench, whilst a bribe at level 3 might see the police being involved to really intimidate the victim. Each action within the game requires a certain amount of âresource pointsâ to carry out the action, players gain these depending on their popularity within each of the districts that make up the town. At the end of each third day your popularity is calculated and points are given to you to spend, in a set-piece known as 'Event Day'.
Because you need to know the area that you're going to perform the action in beforehand, youâll find yourself having to research various areas within the different districts, opening up new areas for you to work and also giving you crucial information about the support in that area. This action once again displayed the âtweakâ system of watching the action unfold, as players could command specific buildings to be researched or particular alleys to look in.
In fact researching and surveying appears to be an integral process to progression in Republic, players will want to carry out surveys to gain a crucial understanding of the district in question and the people that inhabit it. Naturally the response to your actions are dependant on the ideology that youâre following, so an army draught may get better results in a middle-class district, whilst a charity event would be better in districts with a lower-class. Youâll also uncover âhot-spotsâ in the location marked by a bold â?â mark, these highlight you to an activity going on in that other area by another faction; so in the example that we saw, a bribe was being carried out, because of the characters within the squad, this was promptly reported to the media and a scandal began!!!
Neatly displaying the scope of the game once again, Demis displayed how characters can talk with anyone of the 10,000 + civilians that populate each town; perhaps the most impressive aspect of this feature is the fact that every person is different, no clones, no following the same patterns, some will provide you with key information such as whatâs been happening in the area, others can simply waste your time with a comment about the weather!
Mentioned briefly before, conversation comes in the way of a mini-game used to determine the outcome of numerous actions. Demis likened this to a game of poker, as two characters talk your choices construct the dialogue of the conversation â“ good choices grant you big points, bad choices cost you points â“ if you reach a certain target before the other character, you âwinâ the conversation, otherwise the other character will snub the purpose of the conversation; as with everything in Republic, itâs all related so the similarity between your ideology and that of the other character, will determine how many points youâve got to score before a successful outcome.
Whilst it would have been very easy to release the game as a technical showcase, Elixir appears determined to ensure Republic doesnât stray down the unpopular path of giving the gamer too much freedom. To this extent the ambitious claim of having multiple cities to conquer has been scaled down to three â“ a town, a city and the capital of Novastrana. Theyâve also been keen to ensure a definite structure remains with the game in the way of three short-term objectives to complete in each location, although the solution to these problems is entirely up to the player. Surprisingly once you oust the President and take over the capital of Novastrana, the game will end, no carrying on to see your regime in action, finito, kaput â“ itâs a brave decision and one that we certainly admire, despite free-flowing gameplay giving us a sign of the future, itâs all too easy to get caught up and loose the reason that you were playing the game to begin with!!!
Whilst a lot of your time will be spent on your faction, you need to be aware of what the other two factions are up to within the different districts; zoom into the street level on a district that youâre loosing support in may reveal that another faction is carrying out a military draught (if your research of the level is up to scratch), gathering information on this will allow you to plan a counter-action to thwart their campaign and take control over the area once again. The other factions will automatically adjust to the level of skill shown by the player, so a less skillful player will be targeted less by the opposition and the President's regime. However as soon as you become a threat you can expect to feel the strength of the regime, inlcuding assasination attempts - one of the few ways to actually die in the game.
The game also offers the scope for powerful âaction combosâ; here players could combine a leaflet campaign with a protest march to have a greater effect on the people for example; the number of actions within the game, suggests that many of these linkable actions will be crucial to success later in the game.
We've only begun to scratch the surface of Republic, and it's this aspect which proves to be the games main strength and potential pitfall. It's fair to say that at this stage the experience looks a daunting, however the actual implementation appears to remain relatively simple with a layer of depth big enough to get sufficiently stuck in. On first inspection the merging of multiple genres plays out almost like a board-game with an unparalleled layer of intensity and immersion.
Elixir claim that the final game will take between 12-15 hours to complete, although itâs highly likely that a fair amount of what Republic has to offer will remain hidden at this stage; the sheer variety and level of options available to the player certainly suggests that the game will hold high in the longevity stakes and once again the similarities to a board-game ring true. Unfortunately multiplayer wonât make it into the final version, although it is an area that the team are looking on for the future.
