XIII

First-person perspective. Cel-shaded graphics. Ubi Soft adds two plus two and comes up with 13. XBN does the math on this amnesiac’s mystery.

Sometimes you get an abundance of riches. The Xbox came charging out of the gate sporting perhaps the finest first-person shooter ever made, Halo, followed by an excellent port of Max Payne and the highly-anticipated Unreal Championship due to be released later this year. So with the bar set that high, how do you compete? Well, if you’re a Paris-based company like Ubi Soft, you push the quality that French developers have always had in spades: Style.

Witness XIII. Based on the most popular graphic novel ever published in France, its premise is a little creaky, but the overall package is looking quite nice indeed. You begin the game not knowing just who your character is (this is the creaky part—just roll with it for now). You awaken on a beach, with no memory of who you are or how you got there, and the only immediate clue to your identity is a mysterious “XIII” tattooed on your chest.

Oh, and the small fact that there’s a group of thugs headed your way who definitely mean to do you some serious bodily hurt might lead you to believe you’re in some sort of trouble.

While the “wake up with total amnesia” motif may have been done before, it still lends itself well to the structure of a game-and the developers at Ubi Soft Paris are doing everything they can to squeeze as much drama and mystery out of the concept as they can.

XIII runs using a modified version of Epic’s next generation Unreal II engine, and plays off of the story’s graphic novel roots with eel-shaded visuals and a heavily plot-driven structure. Make no mistake though, the team is well aware of the pitfalls of relying heavily on the standard gameplay-cutscene-gameplay model (the sort of that nearly swamped Metal Gear Solid 2, for example). Instead, they’re taking a more Half-Life style approach, in which the story comes to you.

As the game progresses, you discover bits and pieces of your identity through conversations with different characters, reading found documents, and experiencing the occasional flashback. In this way the plot unfolds organically as you work through various goals, and will hopefully enhance gameplay rather than pull you completely out of it. Even the flashbacks take place within the game engine and use a black-and-white, over lit and high-contrast rendering technique to make them feel suitably “mental.” The amnesia-driven plot device is being neatly exploited to keep you guessing; allies may turn out to be enemies, and nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Recovering your memory has a distinct effect on gameplay as well. As you gradually learn about who you are, you learn new skills. When you first wake up you can barely hold a gun. Before long, however, you’re discovering that you somehow know martial arts. You’ve also clearly been trained in a number of small (and not so small) arms, from knives to machine guns. Infiltration and stealth skills are on the list too, and you even have a kind of “sixth sense” that enables you to know instinctively when danger is near—obviously, your character is not a waiter.

One of XIII’s more unique and interesting elements is that some of the characters you interact with also affect gameplay: From time to time, Al-driven allies will help you in your quest in ambitiously active, cooperative ways. This is demonstrated during a brisk chase across a city’s rooftops. A female agent named Jones is there to provide covering fire against the many gang members hunting you—and, naturally enough, you have to return the favor. The goal of featuring smart, autonomous allies is something of a holy grail in gaming these days (and again, give the nod to Halo), so this is one element whose progress will certainly be worth keeping track of—doubly so, even, because gameplay is not all run-and-gun action.

Like Metal Gear Solid 2, No One Lives Forever and other recent titles, XIII emphasizes stealth and a healthy dose of puzzle solving.

While the game’s arsenal of 16 different firearms includes such faithful standbys as a Beretta pistol and M60 machine gun, you’re also provided with the aformentioned knives, as well as a (telescopic-sight enhanced) crossbow and other silent weapons. Your character is eminently killable—although items such as Kevlar vests do help—so charging in with guns blazing is often suicidal. Instead, the developers hope to challenge your brain as much as your reflexes, and while the game is intended to be fairly linear, it should offer a number of opportunities to be creative (picking up dead enemies and using them as temporary shields, for one).

Graphically, even at this early stage XIII is top notch. Ubi Soft claims that the Xbox version should, in many ways, be even more impressive than the PC version which we’re being shown, given the console’s fixed architecture. At present, the team is hoping for a total of 13 different levels (each with several goals and sub-sections) offering a wide range of both indoor and outdoor environments, from military bases, to jungles, to cityscapes, to mountain strongholds where snow falls gently from the sky.

Although there’s apparently a bit of a debate going on right now concerning the final overall look of the game, at the moment it seems fairly certain that it will feature relatively realistic-looking scenery in combination with cel-shaded characters. This looks a bit different from the fully eel-shaded approach of Jet Set Radio Future, for example, but is perhaps visually closer to the graphic novel it’s based on; fairly unique, and indisputably engaging.

While the story mode is designed for a single player, XIII will also offer a large number of multiplayer options. Again, with the game this early the exact number and type of multiplayer contests is a bit up in the air. However, along with the expected deathmatch and capture the flag, Ubi Soft will include a number of more stealth-oriented missions, such as sending a thief into an enemy base under cover of snipers, and some form of escort/assassination challenge.

The thing that’s got us most excited, however, is that while there will indeed be a split screen-option, XIII is being designed from the ground up for online multiplayer. This will not only enable online team play and deathmatching, but Ubi Soft is even planing (as its “next step”) to offer special online-only maps and new single-player episodes for download, a feature previously enjoyed by only PC-based gamers.

With XIII almost a year from completion there are quite a few major points still unknown and/or undecided—the exact control scheme, for one, can only be sketchily described as “simple,” and will use both Halo and GoldenEye as “references.” Nevertheless, what we’ve been shown thus far is enough to make any FPS fan sit up and take notice, add it to the list of games to watch, and hope its substance lives up to its already impressive style.

Lucky thirteen? Ubi Soft certainly hopes so, as does XBN.