GamerNode: Columns - Time + New Developer = Change?

Time + New Developer = Change?

If you've seen the Max Payne 3 screenshots and various other tidbits of information this week, you're probably wondering what exactly happened to the dark, angry man with a bit of stubble and the ability to slow down time, and who this fat bearded man staggering around Brazil is. I don't know about you, but that looks like design blasphemy to me, and to those who followed the cop down the dark path in the first two titles it may seem like Link suddenly changing gender and using an Uzi to take out Ganondorf from a Harley Davidson.

Duke Nukem Forever had a thirteen-year gap between the last title and the now-cancelled one. But, by taking a close look at the demo reel that finally showed up only weeks before the game was completely cancelled showed a Duke that, by and large, hadn't really changed at all. This return to form was the main reason the Duke community seem so up in arms about the fact the game has been cancelled; they saw a teasing glimpse of a character who had remained unchanged while a decade of change in the videogames industry had gone past, and they clung onto him for dear life.

It's not a fear of change, as such, it's simply a gamer becoming attached to a character who means something to them, as they take this character through ten, twenty, a hundred hours of gameplay, buying them new items and showing them new places. When you've helped Mario save Princess Peach a hundred times, and all of a sudden he turns up with a water gun strapped to his back, you've got every right to feel confused. It's not Mario, to you, because his strength lay in the fact he never needed equipment to match the physical capabilities of his various antagonists. Personally, I loved Super Mario Sunshine, but I'll be the first to admit that it was a relief to see him without a backpack in Super Mario Galaxy.

So what's going on with Max, then? According to the details we have so far, it could be various things, but I'll give you the biggest clue: it's being developed by Rockstar in-house, and not by Remedy, this time around. Change developer and you change staff, more often than not, and you risk losing the vital cogs in the machine that make games what they are, and their characters who they are. Mario games would be horrendous if Miyamoto had no input whatsoever, and for all their immature female costume disasters, Ninja Gaiden may see significant changes after the departure of Itagaki.

His relocation to Brazil is questionable at best, the shanty towns we can see in screenshots both official and scanned from Game Informer seem to indicate that the developers are taking more cues from Resident Evil 4 than the previous games in the series they're supposed to be propelling forward into the future. To quote Rockstar's VP of Development, Jeronimo Barrera; "some people say ‘Max is a noir game and has to be black and white in new York,' but noir is not necessarily saxophones and big dark shadows. It's looking at the world in a bleak way. That's what we're doing."

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