Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/04/open-world-terminator-game-revealed.html
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The Terminator (a 1991 game from Bethesda) was the first game based on the franchise and basically an “open-world” game before that term was even coined, allowing the user to explore Los Angeles in all its low-resolution polygon glory.
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I played a lot of Terminator: Future Shock back in the day and it was that semi-open world design that was available for the time period.
I suppose this game is just on the same progression as the Terminators. It doesn’t matter if it is a T-600, T-1000, or T-X, it is still a Terminator.
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Ah, but does it also have microtransactions, loot boxes, and a live service that’ll get terminated in 6 months when people are waiting for the rest of the “AAAA” experience? /oppressive sarcasm
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The first two movies are still the only part of the franchise that had any cultural staying power, and neither of those were about creating an immersive fictional world people wanted to see more of like Jurassic Park or Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe. They were about a fast-paced survival-driven narrative set in (then)-contemporary Los Angeles with one or two killer robots thrown into the mix.
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Great trailer. Gasoline goes bad in 3-6 months; diesel in 6-12. And I’m sure there’s a compelling reason the first thing the hostile AI does is determine whether the target is male or female.
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It’s just notes for the tight five he’s working on.
"You know me, I’m killing the female humans like. ‘Brap-tat-tat’, but the male humans I’m killing like “Tat-tat-brap’.”
Anyway, this looks very meh. Yes, if there was a Skynet etc, I am sure escaping to the wilds and hiding out would be the thing to do. But when I hear open world Terminator game, I think of fighting and hiding out in the rubble of Los Angeles.
As a side note, if you want a decent Aliens experience, Aliens Fireteam Elite is pretty fun. It has a story line that you then replay missions to level up and augment your gear, but I think it captures the feel of the movie pretty well. It is a one trick pony, but I quite like the trick, and play it occasionally.
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One thing a lot of these games and spinoffs never seem to get right about the premise of the Terminator movies is that humanoid robots weren’t supposed to comprise the bulk of the machines. They weren’t used as infantry or hunter-killers or shock troopers. Most of the killer robots were flying drones or giant tanks with laser turrets or whatever, not androids carrying guns meant for puny human hands.
Terminators were designed as infiltrators, meant to slip undetected into human strongholds and destroy them from within. More of a secret agent than an agent of destruction. That’s pretty hard to do when you’re walking around without any freaking skin.
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It’s weird to me how a lot of long running series don’t understand their own mythos
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Like I thought the point of the original Jurrasic Park movie was that even the CEO realized by the end that having a park of cloned dinosaurs was a bad idea. By Jurassic World, they build a new park and surprise, surprise, it doesn’t go well there either.
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Weren’t there skinless Terminators shown walking around shooting dual laser guns as early as Terminator 2? I agree they’re probably overused in spin-off media but you see a whole bunch them used as infantry literally within the first few minutes of T2.
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I don’t think that the creatures in Jurassic World were even dinosaurs anymore.
They did have this nice quote, which was probably a sly reference to the crazy requests that the producers were asking of the effects guys:
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They didn’t make a lot of sense in that context either, but I figured it was a “Skynet’s last stand” sort of situation where the machines were deploying whatever hardware they had left as the humans were launching their final offensive.
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One of the things I loved about the “World” series is how regular character Dr. Wong just comes out and says he’s a “mad scientist” who works for purely mercenary purposes.
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Or it looks painfully generic because the license isn’t cheap - either the upfront costs are so big, they don’t have the money for anything better, (and/)or more likely they’re making it as generic as possible to get the biggest audience to pay for the investment in the license (and make up for whatever percentage is going to the rights holders).
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It seems like sort of a half-fit for Terminator: on the one hand the franchise’s plot is just riddled with people whose kid will turn out to be pivotal to the events of the future being specially targeted by Skynet; but on the other hand Skynet seems to adhere to a ‘great man’ theory of pest control, rather than seeing a focus on driving down net reproduction rates, rather than just trying to brute force body counts, as a tool for long-term management.
Given that the preview gives no indication that the scavengers are people who particularly matter to the timeline, though, it is definitely odd that whoever put the video together would have a rando patrol terminator focused on that.
There probably is a Terminator-adjacent story to be told where the bots are just treating humans as an integrated pest management problem, rather than the implicit respect of ‘plucky insurgency’ status; but it would likely be an unmarketable combination of tedious and grim.
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On the other hand, that dystopian world does coincide with the kind of setting people apparently want to play games in (or at least developers want to make games in). I mean, just how many grim, post-apocalyptic games that involve fighting robots are there? More than I can count.
(I’ve long felt that the game industry in the '90s/'00s was not just hugely influenced by, but actively trying to recreate, a small number of '80s sci-fi action movies - chiefly Aliens, but also Terminator/Terminator 2. To such a degree that it seemed like these were the only cultural references some devs had. It’s a lot less true now, but you still see an over-sized influence.)
And because of that we have to have people walking great distances in post apocalyptic movies. Why? Because, we couldn’t show them cycling on roads free of cars and trucks. That would spoil the mood. Cycling in movie language is carefree and effortless.
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One thing that these games and the later movies failed to get right about Terminator is that the experience of the future was never the point. It was always about ensuring our best chance for the future in the present day. It was never about fighting waves of Hunter-Killers and Terminators. It was about protecting a primary asset, that being John Connor.
I’d be open to expanding on that premise and maybe having more than just “the chosen one” who needs protecting. Make it multiple people. Make an open world-ish game in which you’re one of several people whom humanity desperately needs to survive, but a damn T-600 keeps popping out of the woodwork as you run through your neighborhood, your local mall, the movie theater, the woods behind the house, etc. until you wear away at the thing’s health and just shuts down. Or keep it on rails a bit and take some queues from Alien: Isolation.
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That was also a clever way of defeating arguments of the sort “well, actually, Velociraptors looked quite different in reality as compared to their movie versions” – if the animals shown weren’t 100% genetically like the historical ones, that’s okay.
