The Real Neverending Story

For the past few years we've been hearing about Discreet Monsters' upcoming adventure title, The Real Neverending Story, with little to go on outside of several screenshots and information promoting the game as the next big thing. Late on Thursday, GameSpot News had a chance to experience what Discreet Monsters is putting together for US gamers by getting a personal tour of a 70-percent-complete version of the title with the company's founder, president and CEO, Siggi Kogl.

The game is based on Germany's second best-selling book, The Neverending Story. Since then, the novel has attracted 6.5 million readers, one of the most expensive movies in European cinema, and an animated TV series.

Discreet Monsters calls The Real Neverending Story a 3D real-time action-adventure and it is interesting to see how the company merges parts of each genre. The company ambitiously hopes to give all gamers a fulfilling experience, as adventure gamers will be familiar with walking toward in-game characters for information. Action players will be able to just run through the game with the familiar first-person view. Real-time elements exist by having some of the game's actions occur even if you're not there, instead of having all the game's events being scripted for you as you walk in.

Another interesting aspect of the game is that it uses what the developers call an "emotion-based dialogue system." Whereas in conventional adventure games, the player chooses a canned response in order to reply to a character, the emotion-based dialog area onscreen rotates a few simple responses to a situation like "Why do I care?". The actual voice dialog is usually longer and more ornate, but the introduction of such a system may be a good way to grab the attention of new adventure gamers or for those looking for an adventure game with a faster flow.

Players enter the world of Fantasia as a threatening veil of darkness called The Nothing envelops the land. To combat this blanket of Doom, you must use all your intellect and imagination to travel through the five lands of Fantasia, from brightly colored festive areas to dark and gloomy nightmares. Your goal is to rid the land of The Nothing and the Queen of Darkness by finding and naming the Childlike Empress. Moviegoers may remember The Neverending Story movie from a few years ago and be able to understand the game's basic storyline. But Kogl believes the movie did a poor job of presenting a world true to that of the world described in the novel - hence the "real" in the game's title. Players will also journey through ten mission-based dreams where they're given tasks to do in order to earn items and clues. So if you earn an item in a dream - you can add it to your inventory back in the physical world.

Graphically, the game attempts to merge an outdoor terrain engine with an indoor engine called the Monsta Engine. So if you're looking at the horizon from out of a window, the world outside is actually generated and not just a placeholder bitmap. And the same thing happens if you're outside looking into a building. Luckily, both engines are equally impressive in the ways that they do their work. Architecture varies from large colorful palaces to large industrial iron and steel buildings with high-quality textured polygons. The game's outdoor engine pulls out the stops with a mesh system that helps create dreamlike terrain. And both engines support 32-bit true color, Direct3D, OpenGL, and various light source technologies. The game uses a cache of sorts to stream scenes into memory for faster load times and an easy transition between the two engines. Experienced gamers will still see the switch from one engine to another, but instead of watching other games that halt while loading entire levels - TRNS only pre loads the scene it anticipates your character will be entering. The result: virtually seamless gameplay.

One interesting fact about the game is that, as the company's art staff tried to come up with an idea about how the main character would look - they kept coming up short. Eventually, the art staff decided to use one of its employees as the model for the main character. So when you see the oddly bearded guy in the screenshots and in the final game - this guy really does exist... odd facial hair, and all.

Currently, Discreet Monster's 85 employees are hard at work on the $6.5 million project, and the company says the title will hit US shores in October 2000. So far, the company hasn't found a publisher, but since the company is already funded by wealthy venture capitol firms ($6.5 million titles don't happen every day), Discreet Monsters is actively talking to prospective US publishers.