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Precision Aiming
When our lead designer Neill Glancy described his idea for Precision Aim to me, I thought the guy had finally lost it. What he described sounded really cool, really Woo, but really damn ambitious. Here’s how the conversation went (the quotes are Neill, the parenthesis are my reaction… in my head):
“What I want to do is let you go into first person…” (make sense so far) “… and time slows waaaay down…” (I’m with ya) “… and as your aim gets closer to an enemy we zoom in more…” (ok, different) “… to let you pick out any spot on the enemy to shoot them…” (uh oh…) “… and then when you fire we go into a dynamic bullet camera…” (whoa…) “… and then when you hit the enemy we show a different scene of him reacting, depending on where you shot him.” (I think that’s when my head exploded!)
At that point in the project we already had our hit detection system working. Each enemy in the game has over 20 different critical hit zones, each causing different reactions, animations, and in some cases different yells when they get shot there. So the prospect of creating over 20 different mini-cinematics for each zone almost sounded like more work than it was worth.
Boy was I wrong.
In what can only be described as a colossal effort between our design, programming, art, animation, and cinematics teams, Precision Aim turned out to be almost exactly what Neill described. And it’s totally awesome. From the first time we ever demoed the feature to the suits, up until just yesterday when the press was visiting the studio, we still get the best reaction from Precision Aim.
Precision Aim is a little bit like carrying a sniper rifle with you at all times. Tequila is just that much of a badass with a pistol – when he really takes the time to aim, he can hit anything from pretty far away. And it’s not just for shooting enemies, when you go into PA some destructible items, like supports holding up a bridge or a particularly explosive item, are “interesting” to Precision Aim, and you’ll zoom in on them – giving you that extra hint that it’s a cool object to shoot.
Probably the coolest thing about PA is that it’s a cinematic experience, but it’s one that’s controlled entirely by the player. Assuming you have enough style points, you can use Precision Aim at any time, in any level, against any enemy. All of the cinematics are completely dynamic, and will take place wherever the enemy is standing. And we didn’t cheat. We never moved an enemy over because his position made PA look bad. We never changed our level design just to accommodate the feature. Amazingly, it just works.
From day one John Woo said he wanted Stranglehold to be like a John Woo movie, except the player gets to direct the action. And I think the Tequila Bombs are where we really got it right. More about the other Tequila Bombs next time…
Patrick Curry
Senior Game Designer
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