Austin Grossman - You

I switched again and it was a clear, moonlit night and you were a tall, gaunt man in a coarsely woven shirt, with a long sword slung over his back and pointed ears on either side of his scarred and ravaged face, its one remaining eye wanly glowing. Even his posture was different, slumped a little but somehow determined.

“…or you.”

It was a good trick, one that Lisa had cooked up, and I heard the murmur as it hit. I flipped back to the initial character, then ducked her into an alleyway. I found a shadowy spot, backed up, sprinted, leaped, and caught the low eaves of a stone building. My feet scrabbled on the wall a moment before I hauled myself up to the peaked roof. Then I was off and running, leaping from one moonlight-drenched slate roof to the next, heading toward a mansion that loomed up in the dark, two stories above its surroundings.

“As you can see, it’s a fully explorable environment. Our mission tonight is a bit of intrigue. A young baron has stolen the exquisite Gem Imperial and plans to return it to claim a reward—the hand of the young and beautiful princess R’yalla of the city-state, a path to the throne itself. Our contact in the Thieves Guild learned of the scheme and our job is to steal that gem from the baron and return it ourselves. Young love!”

Was that—? A flash of color in the street, a watchman running past. I’d done this a dozen times in rehearsal and hadn’t noticed it. But this was an unscripted game—these things could vary. I slipped through an open window of the baron’s mansion, into an empty storeroom, and then into a silent, dim hallway hung with tapestries.

“Your friend in the Thieves Guild promised it would go down easy. Nobody but you knows the jewel is here. And when you get back to the palace, you’ll be able to name your own reward. The source of the information was the Thieves Guild in this case, but it might have been the Faerie Underground or the Sons of Autumn. Cities in Endoria are teeming with rival factions, and your path through them banks heavily on your own choices. You need that gem, maybe to pay off a sorcerer, maybe to court a high-born lady, maybe to hire a mercenary, maybe to feed a drug addiction. All up to you.”

I first knew it was going wrong when I heard a guard shout an alarm, followed by a clatter of blades and a shouted, “Who’s there?” We’d rehearsed this; no AI should be alert at this point. Matt glanced up at me. He held up two hands in a Ctrl-Alt-Delete gesture and nodded toward the computer—did I want to reboot and start again? I shook my head.

“Looks like they’re on to me,” I said. I dropped down into a courtyard a level below. My fall knocked off a couple of hit points. Was something wrong with my pants? I was increasingly sure there was a problem with my pants, but there was no possible way I could check.

The guards shouldn’t be in search mode. I retreated into an antechamber, but it wasn’t empty—an elderly servant was on patrol pattern. He wasn’t a combatant—at the sight of an enemy he’d run off and raise the alarm.

“Okay, I’m just going to—here.” The sound effect was unpleasantly meaty. A woman in the front row winced.

“He’s fine, everybody,” I said, dragging the body into a corner. “Just unconscious.”

We were well off-script, but if I hurried there was no reason we couldn’t get back on track. Out a window; the wall was tagged as climbable. Maybe the second floor was still quiet.

“We’re rendering well into the distance here…” I panned the view out over the moonlit skyline, then instantly regretted it—the frame rate chugged for a second as it tried to draw half the city. But then I was in an upstairs hallway, crouching behind an artfully placed dresser as a chambermaid patrolled past. Silence set in as I waited for her to finish.

“One of our new weapons is the fire arrow—allows you to light a torch from a distance, or set fire to almost anything.” There was an unlit torch in a sconce just outside the bedroom. I swapped inventory, aimed, and shot the fire arrow. The torch lit nicely, as did the chambermaid just crossing the threshold. This time there was an audible gasp from the house.

“So okay, note here that fire is completely procedural, like most things in the game.” The maid was now definitely on fire and had gone into her “Help, I’m on fire” response, which meant screaming and running in a random direction. “The fire will spread dynamically in the world depending on what’s near it—see the dresser there, and the drapes—degrading objects as it goes.

“Which you’ll just put a stop to by—hang on—you can see how the short bow is incredibly effective, even at medium range… and we’ll move on to our main object… the jewel! The house will be mostly awake at this point—we track sound propagation pretty well.”

The maid’s body was still smoldering a little. I sprinted down the hall, a little way ahead of the guards, who had oriented themselves to the maid’s shouted alarm.

“And here’s the baron himself—we’ll see he’s a romantic at—okay, I guess he’s decided to make a stand. Very—one sec—very brave. He’s not really programmed as a combatant. The blood is just a particle system, but we save its location on the textures—spatters pretty well. You’ll see he’s dropped his inventory—gold, dagger, and… the jewel itself. Nicely done. And I see we have some more servants arriving.”

I went to work. By now the audience was actively laughing and applauding as each innocent went down. In a moment the room was covered in blood spatter, bodies, and dropped inventory. It looked like half the characters in the entire level had shown up to make me kill them.

In a dozen playthroughs, this had never happened. When a live press demo is blown, it’s one of the great pleasures of E3; that’s when the dull, overrehearsed corporate presentation transforms in an instant into a high-wire act, then into a riveting theater of cruelty, the hapless developer squirming, every detail of his fear and desperation called out on the video screen behind and above him. The whole room was awake and watching. I was intensely conscious of the video camera set up at the back of the room. Of Matt in the front row, appalled. I looked out at all the pink oxford-cloth shirts and Dockers and BlackBerries and thought, these aren’t even nerds. Who are these people, and why are they trying to fuck me over?

No. No, fuck these assholes and their schadenfreude, this was all going down just the way we planned it, and I’d be damned if I’d admit otherwise. And I wasn’t going to get killed in my own demo.

“Right. So there’s an inventory system?” I said. Using the camera, I called out a few items on the floor. “Aaaand… you’ve got a pair of shoes there, a little gold, looks like. Lots of choices for any player.”

The audience quieted. Not out of any respect, but because there was obviously more fun to be had here. I was fatally off-script now, with no idea how to get back, but at least I knew the terrain. I ditched out the window onto a balcony and climbed back to the roof. Two guards were waiting.

More ad-libbing. “The guards will have alerted the city watch, and in moments the entire city will be in hostile mode. We’ve put a lot of work into the AI.” This was all supposed to have taken us up to the castle. We were supposed to be getting an award from the king, and then R’yalla was going to smile at us. There was going to be a speech. We’d set it up just the way Ryan wanted.

“Some of this is based on a real city in Scotland. You can see where—hang on, still killing this guy—you can see where there’s a northern Gothic feel to the rooftops.”

I showed them some close-up fighting moves from the combat system—by this point in the game you’re a hardened killer, no longer the untrained naïf of the round tower and the forest. I fenced with one of the guards for a few moments just to show I could, then finished him. I still knew the combat system inside and out. I hooked a leg and shoved the other guard backward off the roof’s edge. The interface for this was a sorry, convoluted nightmare that needed fixing—underneath the podium my left hand was holding down three separate keys at once just to maintain the proper combat stance—but nobody needed to know that. It looked fantastic.