The first single-player open world game of the post-Playstation era that I ever loved was Saboteur. I realize that may seem to come a little late, but to be honest, if you’re used to the wide open worlds of MMOs for your entire career, GTA and the like actually seemed kinda … empty. After all, MMOs are massive open world games, but with people saying awful things about your mother. Saboteur, on the other hand, hit a primal chord with me.
On the surface, the game design is simple: it’s a GTA-like, but set in occupied Paris, where you play as an Irish race car driver turned French Underground sympathizer. So you can still steal, rob, and blow stuff up, but most of the time, the innocent victims were Nazis, which nicely solved the whole ‘feeling human empathy for the computer-AI driven cops you are running down’ problem that GTA has. Also, you drove a lot of period race cars, and the car radio played cool, period jazz pieces. Which was awesome.
But what grabbed me was the chance they took on the color palette. You see, when you played the game most of the time, it played out in a very Schindler’s List color palette – black and white, with reds and yellows as splashes.
However, when you managed to completely liberate a french district from Nazi control, the game would return color to the land. You can actually see the amazing and awesome effect of it in the video below, at roughly the 9 minute mark. You really did feel like you were rescuing a city, and you could feel the sense of liberation returning to the streets of Paris around you.
You can see a similar effect of the world changing around you in many games – in fact, it was conquering outposts in Far Cry 4 that reminded me of the feature. Far Cry will do a color wash across your screen, and will replace spawners across the map with friendly spawners, creating the sense that you are liberating the world you are an action hero in.
However, I’ve never seen it so drastically done as in Saboteur. If you think about it, its quite ballsy. Your art director is effectively drawing the optimal scene twice, once as an oppressed state, and once in the liberated glory that is a free Paris. Most of the player’s time is in the black and white state, which is a hefty limitation on an art director used to pushing a console’s color capabilities to the limit. The risk of the player being overwhelmed by the grey palette is a risk. There were certain areas that did not feel designed to be played in black and white – these were usually interior areas where the excessive shadows made it impossible to read the scene around you and tell where you could walk or jump. But in most areas, it played marvelously.
Anyway, when I was at EA, I knew Saboteur wasn’t tearing up the charts or anything, but I still held out hope that it was finding an audience. One day, I found myself at lunch with an EA Exec and mentioned that I really enjoyed the game, and wondered how it was doing. The exec, who had some experience in Europe, just sighed. He then said (and I paraphrase), “We made a game about an Irish car bomber who is killing Germans for the French because they’re too helpless to help themselves. So it’s not doing great in Europe.” I take that to mean that we probably will never see a Saboteur 2.
Allowing a player to see the influence they are having on the game world is a much overlooked feature. Most games quickly move the player into a new zone/level and all previous achievement is swiftly forgotten.
The few games that stand out for me:
GTA San Andreas, the first area and the task of taking over areas controlled by rival gangs. When successful your gang members could be seen on the street corners. When the game moved on from this phase it lost much of its appeal to me.
Prince of Persia (2008), after clearing a zone from corruption you had to traverse back out, not difficult but it gave you a chance to see the improvement.
Skyrim, those few quests that actually have visibly noticeable outcomes.
Thanks to yours article, I just bought this game, haven’t tried it yet.
Strategy games are often interesting in that respect. You can play for extended periods in the same world and you see it gradually change. In Civ, cities became more numerous as the game progress, jungle and forests disappears, farms and mines pop up everywhere, roads and railroads expend until most of the world is easy to reach, cities and improvements appearances change. Technological progress changes the units and the style of infrastructure.
I have started a game and my first impression is…not that good. The first mission is at night, a situation that creates low contrasts and the Schindler’s list filter relies on contrasts to convey visual information. It creates a game that may have a visual identity that hiders it playability. The first mission would have been better if it was staged in daylight.
I think it lack of success may be more related to it bad first impression rather than it “french need an Irishman to kick Nazi ass”. This game gives an inferior first impression, especially compared to it competitors like GTA 4, Infamous or Prototype.