Quantum Leap
Right, now we’ve got the plot, or what I’m going to reveal of it without spoiling it for you, out of the way, let’s get back to looking at the game. If you’re wondering why you don’t just jump back to when you planted the device, your suit cannot do that unless it has a huge amount of power and the time machine to fling you back all those years. As it is, you have a small nuclear reactor on your back, which powers up the suit enough to stop, rewind or slow down time around you, leaving you free to move about for a fair few seconds whilst everyone else is still in their own time which you might have just frozen as far as you’re concerned.
I soon found out how handy this is when nonchalantly strolling around a corner I was confronted by four guards who immediately opened up on me. Hitting rewind I watched as bullets whizzed back into gun barrels, weapons were holstered and the guards turned back to their chat. And while they did that I quickly scuttled back whence I came. But, I had taken a hit from bullet and lost some health. I asked Kyle why this hadn’t healed itself.
You’re in a suit that wraps you in your own time bubble. Time for you is always moving forwards. When you got hit and then hit rewind, the bullet left your body and went back into the guard’s gun…but for you, time hasn’t rewound, so you still have a hole in you where the bullet went in. If you’re a bit of a masochist you can keep rewinding time after each hit and in effect you’ll get shot six times by the same bullet!
Of course, because I had rewound time, the guards had no memory of me being there, so I waited for the suit to recharge and then stopped time. I ran in between the group, left a grenade in the middle and legged it again before my suit ran out of power. As far as the guards were concerned a live grenade had just miraculously appeared at their feet… which then went off blowing chunks of guard all over the walls… nice. Or what I could have done is wlak over, wait for them to draw their weapons then freeze time and grab a gun from a frozen guard, shoot the others with his gun and then unfreeze time to watch him wonder why his buddies are dead and the shotgun that was in his hands has disappeared.
Now you’d be forgiven for thinking that at some point you’re going to have to use your time shifting abilities to solve puzzles and the like, but that’s not the case. Kyle is very keen to keep the gameplay flowing and to allow the player to develop their own strategy for how to use those abilities. That’s why the suit recharges so quickly, to allow you to use it as just another ability that doesn’t need to be saved up for obvious occasions when it’s needed. One example is trying to open a door. It opens and closes far too quickly to be able to make it to the door in the passage after having pressed the switch in the room. You really need to be in two places at once and the time suit will in effect let you do that. You could slow down time and run around, or stop time, hit the switch, run around and drop back to normal time ready for when the door opens. Or you could even hit the switch, run around then rewind time back to when the door opens and get through that way, the choice is yours.
Graphically, Time Shift is looking very nice, making full use of Shader Model 3 and all the graphical bells and whistles that brings. Flames have a very nice wobbly heat haze over them and the textures look great with quadruple triple filtering pixle underpass parallax thingumejigs giving them a very realistic look that are light sensitive too. Kyle pointed out a thing called Spherical Harmonics, which shows up particularly on the weapons which reflect light and shadow in real time. The Spherical Harmonics are in place all throughout the game, it’s just easy to see them on the guns as they’re right in front of your face.
Time Shift uses the SABRE 3D engine, which allows all this graphical goodness but also builds physics modelling too, so you’ve got the usual array of ragdoll effects, barrels getting blown about and all. Of course, being to control time, you can affect the physics on and object to some extent. You could blow a guard off his feet, freeze time, run over and pump a few shots into him as he hangs frozen in mid air. Start time up again and the body will now change trajectory as the forces you inflicted upon it all come to play at once…. Poor dude. And yes, it’s very satisfying to blow someone into little chunks, freeze time and run through the shower of pieces hanging there motionless… nice
Though the game is essentially a single player experience, there will be a multiplayer side to things too, but Kyle is keeping tightlipped about this at the moment. He did hint that the time shifting aspect will be available in multiplayer, but other than that, he wouldn’t be drawn. The code I saw today was pre-alpha and the game is already looking good so we might reasonably expect great things from Time Shift. As soon as we hear more will let you know, but for now you’ll have to be happy with Time Shift appearing in March 2006 for the PC with an X-Box version showing up in early summer that year too.
