Ravenprose said:I'm not sure how I feel about this game yet. With the exception of Wolfenstein, I dislike WWII games (the setting just doesn't appeal to me), but I have to admit the use of color is an interesting gimmick.
It's more Indiana Jones than Call of Duty and throws realism to the wind. 
"No multi-player? No endless brown fields? No battle-chatter? Saboteur certainly won't be welcome in the WW2 shooter Gentleman's Club. No. This is the kind of shooter you'd find smoking a Gallois cigarette in a stylish Parisiene cabaret, and that's precisely why it looks so promising."
This game has taken forever to get finished. I wonder what the delay has been?
Anyway, I still don't know if this game will be any good. Pandemic has been struggling lately. Mercenaries 2 and Lord of the Rings Conquest didn't hit homeruns so I'm a little cautious on Saboteur.
I think the idea is good and it's there with lot's of potential for great stuff...but let's hope the game design is just as good.
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Now Playing: Golden Sun Dark Dawn, God of War Ghost of Sparta, and DKC Returns
Holy crap, a giant ASS. A fiery ass even. Wow.
Or perhaps they are two giant balls of fire. Balls, Balls, Balls, Testicle!
This is just the sort of game that catches my eye. It's sort of mainstream but with a twist, WW2 but with a twist (not an alien twist) 
It sounds smart and intelligent but not too finnicky to play. And it plays like a combination of a few games I know. The black and white thing catches my eye, but I like that its not po-faced serious. If it has the Indiana Jones style to it then its going to have a ccertain swagger and sense of adventure about it. If you read the full PSM3 preview it mentions wanted levels and giant zepplins chasing you and the mission structure sounds tailor made and more structured. I hope it comes together.
ASK, some of those aren't the newest pics but I dont see much difference between them, Gamersyde said that the very first screens were pre-renders.
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3173905
Last year, we innocently asked a producer (who shall remain nameless) to describe Pandemic's upcoming open-world sandbox action game The Saboteur in just eight words, and he replied, "Nazis f***ed with the wrong Irishman: Sean Devlin."
Sean comes up again during a recent demo of The Saboteur by lead designer Tom French. French talks about how the real-life Grand Prix racing driver/Special Operations Executive agent William Grover-Williams is the historic inspiration for Sean (in that Sean too is a race car driver who finds himself a part of the French Resistance) -- and how in practice, Sean is a pastiche of Indiana Jones, Steve McQueen, and John McClane. French also points out that Sean's Irish non-soldier background "separates him from the war," and makes him an atypical WWII game protagonist that gets swept up in the Resistance due to a personal tragedy in a storyline focused on personal vengeance.
Click the image above to check out all The Saboteur screens.
After all the talk about the Sean's conception, French finally shows Sean in action. The first mission French reveals is an early one where Sean has to escape from a Doppelsieg (the game's version of Mercedes) factory. The context is that Sean races for Team Morini, and Team Doppelsieg is his main opposition. While the two teams actively feud with each other, something Very Bad happens and Sean ends up captured in said factory. Sean's "stealth" translates into being able to sneak up behind an un-suspecting Nazi and then instantly snap his neck. French points out that stealth is a tool, and not a necessity; if the Nazis spot Sean, it's not game over. That's when it's time for Sean to exercise his brawling skills; he has a decent array of moves and punches performed via just a few button presses.
Sean is also quite adept with guns, and during the demonstration, he smoothly moves from cover to cover. Whether it's a traditional WWII firearm like the MP40 or the slightly-more exotic rocket launcher, Sean does a pretty good job of firing it. The Saboteur's cover system is dynamic, in that the player doesn't need to press a button at a specific cover spot; just pushing Sean up against any reasonable spot will put him in cover, and backing away moves him out of cover.
More impressive than Sean's sneakiness, fighting, shooting, and cover skills is his ability to climb pretty much anywhere. When he's not driving or saboteuring, he's taking correspondence courses from Assassin's Creed's Altair. Pretty much any wall you run into, Sean can scale. The only real danger arises when Sean makes a particularly harrowing jump between two buildings. But otherwise, if you jump towards it, Sean will grab and climb it.
Click the image above to check out all The Saboteur screens.
Sean's impressive dexterity becomes apparent once he escapes the Doppelsieg factory, and French transitions to showing off a mission in the main gameplay location: Paris. Paris lends itself to Sean's climbing skills -- its architecture and city planning make it a particularly "crazy jungle gym" in French's words. Not only is The Saboteur's Paris designed to be an interesting place to navigate and platform about, but it's also a decent replica of the real deal; it might not be an exact meter-by-meter replica, but major landmarks like the Moulin Rouge, Sacré-C?ur, Palais Royale, and Eiffel Tower are where they should be.
Paris' general atmosphere also influences one of The Saboteur's main gameplay elements (besides the "playing an angry Irishman on anti-Nazi missions" mechanic): the Will-To-Fight. As Sean undertakes more missions, completes sidequests, and even stops the occasional random event (French pointed out an instance of Nazis coldly executing some Parisians on the street), he inspires the populace to fight back. While the gameplay aspects of the Will-To-Fight weren't shown, the visual style was. French points out that occupied Paris, for the most part, is rendered in black-and-white -- commenting, "We wanted to give the exact opposite feeling of how lush and vibrant Paris is." As you inspire the populace, the region you're in becomes more colorful (giving you an instant read on whether the area you're in has been liberated or not) -- think of it like Okami, but with Nazis.
In addition to visual style, the color palette serves a bit of a gameplay use; French cites Frank Miller's use of color in Sin City as an inspiration for providing visual feedback for the player. The same way Miller uses red or yellow to highlight specific characters against the monochrome page, so do details such as Nazis, their flags, or their gigantic zeppelins, stand out in stark contrast to the general occupied landscape in The Saboteur.
Click the image above to check out all The Saboteur screens.
French uses a later mission, where Sean has to destroy a massive Nazi cannon, to show off more of the navigation and combat gameplay. While the Doppelsieg factory consists of a fair number of corridors with occasional windows and other spots for Sean to climb, the cannon mission takes place almost entirely on Parisian rooftops -- with Sean scaling walls, terraces, overhangs, beams, and awnings. This also demonstrates the sandbox gameplay from Pandemic's other series, Mercenaries. Should Sean stealthily navigate his way to the cannon, or rush in headlong with submachine guns blazing, or maybe sneak to a roof and snipe Nazis from afar? Whatever path Sean takes, he needs to do it quickly before the verbal countdown the Nazis are blaring reaches zero and they fire the cannon. Though, if Sean takes out the Nazi scientist at the base of the cannon, that countdown is terminated -- effectively removing the time limit. Once the cannon blows, the blacks and grays in the neighborhood wash away and the area becomes a typical, vibrant Paris -- though scanning the rest of the city reveals many occupied areas locked in the bland color palette.
This is the first time I've actually seen The Saboteur since its announcement a couple of years ago, and I now have a much better idea of what it is. The decision to literally have a boring, drab Paris become colorful in response to your performance looks pretty neat, and the game seems to have solid controls and action. Though, it simply just looks good to see Sean grasp and climb his way around Paris. He does seem to be the wrong person for the Nazis to f*** with.
More pics:
One thing that puts me off is that you play as an Irishman. Nothing against the Irish, but I'm in Paris, fighting for the resistance, hello? Make me French.
SteelAttack said:I want this game. I have wanted this game even before I knew it existed. Looks like it will have everything, guns, explosions, free roaming, missions, nakedness, love interests, giant firey ass/testicles and nazis. Let's hope they don't pull an Ass Creed and fuck up with mission structure.
The preview says:
Where Saboteur lifts itself above the common shooter is in the freedom it hands you. Although this is a Pandemic game, it doesn't run on the same engine as Mercs 2 - the emphasis is on using the environment instead of detonating it, so the up-close detail is more impressive.
When you're in Paris, you can climb any building and race across the rooftops. You can even scale the Eiffel Tower. Climbable ledges are highlighted in yellow (very Mirror's Edge), and the animations, as Devlin scales brick-faces like an Irish spider, are seriously impressive.
Grand Theft Tank
The mission structure's more focused than most open-world games too. We were shown a demo of Devlin escaping from the Doppelsieg factory. It started off linear - Devlin shooting guards from cover and running down corridors.
Then he was outside, with miles of countryside between him and safety. Legging it is an option, but Devlin opts to dive into a car, Mercenaries 2 style. During the explosive chase he's forced to change cars and shoot his way through barricades, but he finally makes it to the French border.
It's a great illustration of how Pandemic gives you freedom to explore your surroundings, but will always point you towards the next objective or try and hook you up with a side-quest. Another example is the way message couriers will run up to you with letters from characters that need your help.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
And new E3 trailer inside
The Saboteur is a slick-looking, fun open-world game, though there are definitely some issues that concern me. In the current build, a lot of the enemy AI is unresponsive. And having seen a few missions now, it's unclear if these will start to have a "sameness" to them that gets old over time. But if Pandemic can tighten these things up the AI issues and the missions prove to have some greater variety, this will be a fun title. Plus, it has boobies. Female boobies.
Ace.
Because everyone is deftly ignoring me on GGWeekly, I decided to make a thread about this promising game. It even takes inspiration from De Blob
As you can see from the images and trailer, The Saboteur doesn't look like any other game. It's in black and white, for one thing. But don't think the B&W is some lame gimmick. It actually serves a function. When The Saboteur begins--and the Nazis have yet to goosestep into Paris--everything's in color. The black and white elements are representative of the occupation. The people's morale has been sapped from these places and the French Resistance ain't resisting anything in these areas. But give the people hope and you'll see the black & white washed away by color.
PSM3 mag:
Saboteur isn't your average World War 2 shooter. If anything, it's the antidote to the WW2 malaise that has been setting in since Call of Duty 3 highlighted how generic the genre has become. How so?
Saboteur puts a new spin on old themes, making them feel fresh and different. It's something that's threaded through everything from the game's stylish art-direction to the genuinely deep and interesting lead character and backstory.
It all starts at the concept stage. During our exclusive look at the game, Pandemic lead designer Tom French explained that instead of looking to the usual suspects like Call of Duty and Saving Private Ryan the team found inspiration in quirky French film Amelie, the Indiana Jones movies, and the Parkour-lead game Assassin's Creed.
Sensibly, Pandemic made the choice early on to shun historical accuracy in favour of slick gameplay and a great story.
However, the most striking part of Saboteur is the visuals, and the way the game uses colour. All the Nazi controlled areas of the game are rendered in black and white, whereas the liberated regions all buzz with vibrant colours. When Devlin liberates a section of Paris by completing a specific mission the colour will bleed back into that district as the Nazi oppression is lifted.
The action itself is a pleasing mish-mash of Freedom Fighters, GTA and Assassin's Creed. For the most part, Saboteur is a shooter, and Pandemic has confirmed there will be 24 weapons in the finished game, including run-of-the-mill armaments like MP40s and Lugers, through to more unusual items like flamethrowers and specialist sabotage explosives.
There is tons more good stuff in that preview and previews below. It looks like a fun WW2 game, the art is lovely, with colour and it plays very differently to how you would expect it to. So far I'm tracking this game in a big way.
Saboteur: From Paris with love Gamersyde