Master of the game: developers fight for the mantle of first next-generation game.(Gaming)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There's a war erupting in the video game world, one as intense as the fiercest firefight between Halo's Master Chief and the dreaded Covenant. But in this war, the foes are not polygonal characters, but game developers, bell-bent on claiming the crown of the first truly "next-generation" game.

The flasbpoint for the fight occurred on August 27, when game designer Ken Levine introduced the world to a spectacular vision of a dystopian underwater city called Rapture in his game BioShock. With its Art Deco style of deep-sea visuals and disquieting Orwellian story line tinged by themes of lost innocence, BioShock garnered almost every Game of the Show award at E3 2006. By this past September, the title had sold more than 1.5 million copies, sending shares in its publisher, TakeCI'wo Interactive, soaring by nearly 20 percent.

Accolades from the mainstream media were unprecedented. The New York Tinges waxed rhapsodic: "Intelligent, gorgeous, occasionally frightening....Anchored by its provocative moral ity-based story line, sumptuous art direction, and superb voice acting, BioShock can hold its head high among the best games ever made." Meanwhile, tire Los Angeles Times proclaimed: "It also does something no other game has done to date: It makes yon feel." And finally, The Chicago Sun-Times called it: "The rare, mature video game that succeeds in making you think while you play." In response to the game's overwhelming critical, commercial, and artistic success, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick declared that the company now considered the game part of a franchise.

Surely, then, BioShock had to be the standard-bearer for a next generation title. Not so, according to highly regarded game designer David Braben, owner of Frontier Developments. "I loved the 1930s to 1950s atmosphere of BioShock. Overall, the whole game was beautifully executed, but the gameplay itself was not 'next-gen,'" he claimed in a recent interview. Braben also refused to bestow the "next-gen" anointment upon Halo 3, which he called "great fun, but also a little disappointing. Although there were a few nice touches and improved graphical fidelity, it hadn't moved on that much from Halo 2." Braben's comments ignited a firestorm of controversy and debate in gaming forums the world over.

Obviously, as a rival developer, Braben has an ulterior motive in criticizing these games: to draw attention to his forthcoming title The Outsider (with an anticipated release of late 2009), about a fugitive CIA agent, accused of murdering the president, who chooses between exonerating himself and seeking vengeance against those who incriminated him. According to Braben, The Outsider will be a proper "next-gen" game that will outshine both Bungie's Halo 3 and Levine's BioShock. By his definition, a proper "next-gen" game will give players the means to affect the story line more deeply than merely choosing the "good path" or the "bad path."

Indeed, given the power of next-gen consoles, Braben's expectations are not unjustified. Through advancements in Al programruing, crowd simulation, and animation breakthroughs such as NaturalMotion's Dynamic Motion Synthesis, massive numbers of nonplayer characters (NPCs) are now capable of reacting to the environment and the player more intelligently than ever before. This is occurring with nnscripted and uncanned movements that not only make the gameplay unpredictable, but also create an infinite potentiality for the story line--in effect, individualizing each player's story. However, collating all these newly acquired gameplay and graphical advancements into a single game has been a feat few developers have yet to achieve.