Poetry in Motion

What's the story?

Nocturne is broken up into 4 unrelated Acts, each of which has 4 or 5 chapters to break them up. The recent Nocturne public demo was actually chapter 2 of the Texas Act. Our press beta included the entire Redeye, Texas act, which gave us a very good taste of what to expect from the full game.

Yikes, werewolves!

Stop eating my barbeque!

The first chapter is set on a moving train, which happens to be infested with werewolves. These particular werewolves are quite annoyed because you (the Stranger) nearly wiped out their clan years before. You have to fight your way off of the train but this is difficult because the huge lycanthropes can absorb quite a bit of damage from regular bullets. Legend has it that silver bullets take down werewolves quickly so you'll need to find them somewhere on the train. After you pass the train you end up in the zombie infested town of Redeye where you must rescue the surviving residents. Moving past this, the final levels take you down into a haunted mine where you find and deal with the source of the zombies and strange phenomena.

Hmmm...3D?

Yup, it's 3D - the shadow bends

Seeing is believing

Nocturne blew me away with its detailed graphics. One of the highlights of Nocturne's vaunted graphics engine is the lighting and shadows. They're totally dynamic - if you move your flashlight over and around an object, the resulting shadow will grow, shrink or bend realistically. Ditto for any other light source in the game, as objects move around. The animations in the game are quite fluid but what really takes the cake is the developers' use of cloth modeling! That's right, loose pieces of cloth like the Stranger's coat or curtains will flap according to a real physics engine (check out our Nocturne interview for more on this). It sounds frivolous but seeing the cloth modeling in action showed us how big a deal it really is. When the Stranger draws and puts away his weapons, or simply runs, you can see that the way his coat folds and flaps isn't just a canned animation.