It’s time to hit the movie theaters en masse to get a good shot of nostalgia. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate disembarks on the big screen to live the fifth and last? adventure of the most famous archaeologist of all time. The franchise starring Harrison Ford It has given us succulent video games, but none looked as good as the one that was presented in 2005.
LucasArts wakefulness the existence of a new installment of Dr. Jones for the, of that, new generation consoles. PS3 and Xbox 360 would host in 2007 the launch of a title that had a plot written by George Lucas himself and that would place us in San Francisco, although it would take us much further to territories such as Sudan, Panama and Istanbul.
The adventure would take us to 1939, a year after the events in the last crusade with a “mystery of Biblical proportions encompassing the world’s greatest holy sites, as Indiana searches the globe for ancient artifacts.” that’s how it was presented Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, the game that would lead us to recover the staff of Moses.
The combat promised, and a lot. The advances shown by the company featured a protagonist delivering punches left and right throughout Chinatown with spectacular sequences. The project, which had the collaboration of Industrial Light and Magic, Pixelux and NaturalMotion, enjoyed a particularity as important as enjoying the Euphoria engine.
Yes, the tool to recreate physics that has become famous in the GTA and Red Dead Redemption sagas was introduced to society animating the protagonist’s blows to the jaw. The artificial intelligence of the enemies was going to really get us into a compromise, because these would surround us, they did not wait for Indiana to attack. Flanking him was the usual pattern and they were rushing in as a group instead of one by one, so it was necessary to keep their backs well covered and use the classic whip to keep their distance.
Of course, the rivals were not stupid. As soon as they saw that their companions knew pain, they thought twice about continuing to attack and were intimidated by the situation. The physics of the objects also promised to be on another level. Digital Molecular Matter was the engine chosen to carry out the work and the trailers left no room for doubt. Virtually the entire environment was perfectly destructible, as wood splintered, glass cracked, metal bent, and so on with a host of materials behaving like real life. “Never the same way twice” was the promise that was made.
During E3 2006, the Indiana Jones game received unanimous applause from the public, winning the award for best technical demo of that year. Despite this, all that glittered was not gold. Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kingsjust like recognize Tony A. Rowe, designer of the work:
“Our E3 2006 demo is a prototype of what we wanted to do in the future. So we show a lot of bodies shaking in weird ways and things exploding and breaking in interesting ways. It’s really us trying to fake it and then another year and a half later we were able to do it for real on The Power of the Force.”
However, everything went down the drain due to numerous internal movements, since even after several years, only 20% of the game was finished. “We started from scratch except for the story. That was the crux of the problem. When we got there, we looked at it like ‘What’s our structure going to be?’, ‘What are we going to do?‘ We changed the camera from being a third-person camera to being an author isometric camera, much more in the vein of the God of War series,” explains a LucasArts developer who was part of a team that almost completely rebooted the game. .
The appearance of Uncharted was also a wound to the morale of the workers. A very Indiana Jones-like adventurer looking for lost treasure, so “I remember playing it in the office with everyone and saying, ‘Oh shit, this is what we’re trying to do,'” acknowledged Brandon Martynowicz, environmental artist. Associate at Staff of Kings.
At the beginning of 2009 LucasArts decided to shelve the matter and GTA IV was the first game that used Euphoria and Star Wars: The Power of the Force that welcomed Digital Molecular Matter. The truth is Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings was on our screens, but in the minor versions that were published for Nintendo DS, PS2, PSP and Wii through external developers, very typical of the time. Of course, with much less quality than what was desired on PS3 and Xbox 360.
In ExtraLife | Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, the essence of LucasArts-style adventure
In ExtraLife | Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Marvel and all the video games based on movies that you should have on your radar
