It has been a non-stop competition for developers to create "The Bloodiest or
Goriest Game Ever". A competition that was started way back in the Wolfenstein
3D & Doom days and still carried on in such recent games as Kingpin.
Developer and creator of the Heretic titles, Raven Software, is now throwing in their bid into this increasingly
brutal competition with Soldier of Fortune. Raven hopes to touch upon an area of
first-person gaming that has yet to be completely and seriously addressed, Realism. From
such realism will spawn the effects of what your opponent's corpse will look like as you
riddle it's body with machine-gun fire or how much blood gushes from an open wound
depending on which weapon inflicted it. While this may all seem a little much to be
placing in a computer game, Raven has focused on realism from day one on the Soldier of
Fortune project. Their goal is to simply portraying exactly what real weapons would do to
a real human body.
 For those that are wondering, yes the game is
lightly based off of the magazine and TV show by the same name. In fact, the TV show's
creator John Mullins is on-board the project to offer advise and guidenance for the game.
Mullins is a retired soldier of 19 years in the U.S. Military's special forces. His advise
has led to the game receiving a more militaristic look and feel to it, however the game
still keeps it's first-person edge instead of becoming a strategy/tactical game like Delta
Force or Rainbow Six.
Soldier of Fortune will be using the Quake II
engine, but with some severe modifications to it, Raven calls these sets of mod's, GHOUL.
GHOUL will consist of tons of little and not so little modifications to the graphics
engine, game AI, character skins, game physics, and network play. To keep the realism
factor consistent, Raven has completely re-written the  game AI. Enemies will lean around
corners, duck, roll, run for cover, trip alarms, take hostages and even turn and run once
severely injured. Cinematic sequences have been set up to give the game a movie-style
action theme. Character movements (player and computer) are all done by animators instead
of programmers to make them look more fluid and real. Items, such as helmets, glasses,
backpacks, and other various objects, can be added-on to the characters as seperate
objects which will allow for more variety in the appearance of enemies. Damage will all be
location-based, there are 26 different target area's on each enemies body and enemies will
react and be hindered by which area's are hit. This location-based system will allow you
to disarm enemies by shooting weapons or other such items out of their hands. Pain
sequences and death animations are also tied into the location-based system, so enemies
will react realistically when hit. New network models have also been designed to lower
latency and bandwidth requirements when playing on the Internet.
Soldier of Fortune is being planned for
a late 1999 release and due to it's content will contain "Mature Audiences"
warnings on the box, as well as a "Mature" ESRB Rating. Raven will also place a
parental lock feature in the game to turn off the blood, gore and guts if it is so
desired. Even with these precautions, Raven and Activision are still likely to take some
flack about the game's violence when it hits store shelves.
Soldier of Fortune
by Activision
RELEASE DATE: Q4 1999 |
