LMNO RIP A discussion on the unfulfilled concepts from StSp

RoyceSraphim

So, Steven spielberg signed a deal with EA a number of years ago to make video games.

We got boom blocks and all was good.

We were supposed to get LMNO but it floundered and died a slow death.



Game Highlights from the article
-Supposed to make you cry
-Escape Gameplay, not unlike Mirror's Edge
-Eve functions as a HUD and teammate, highlighting clues in the environment and serving to aid you in your fight against the MIB.
-Eve's talents develop according to your actions, kick ass and she is support magic. Let her do the work and she becomes Xena
-AI equal to the AI behind "The Sims" powers Eve
-3 hours game time but ideally replayable to get different Eves.



1up has a story about it and seems decent

Early on LMNO wound up being developed right across from DICE and looking a lot like it. It was blessed with great minds and a kick ass executive, but kept running into barrier. After EA thinning the heard, LMNO lived on, as the EA version of Uncharted and Eve....well, this was probably a better fate for her.


3 things that come out of this article,

creativity over ridden by "legacy titles"

Great minds thinking of the same idea and coming up with similar gameplay

Evolve character through gameplay and not a character sheet.

This last one really appeals to me and is something I though about when playing Mass Effect. We all have our ways of playing and while developers have claimed that the enemy will adapt to your playing style, I would really like to see my gorram teammates adapt to mine. If I spend hours with you guy, using a sniper rile, you should get out of the way of my shots.

Take this up a notch, lets say Bethesda's next sandbox game forces you to evolve down certain paths, that you can't be a jack of all trades. You only have you character screen and only your skill points can you control, but your team or maybe just your partner, growing, adapting to you and your mannerisms. You go close quarter automatic weapons while they hit sniper riles and long range artillary.

Okay, please discuss.

NotYou

Mirror's Edge meets Ico? It certainly sounds interesting, but I don't doubt that EA made the right decision in canceling it. They tried something new and it didn't work all that well. And was only 3 hours...

Olivaw

Okay, I can barely understand this post

I guess Steven Spielberg produced a game called "LMNO" that got canceled? And it was gonna be kinda like Mirror's Edge meets Ico? Except the chick would actually be useful and do things that you didn't do?

Sounds neat, but a bit of a one-trick pony

I doubt it would have done all that well

Raiden333

Finished the whole article.

Now I'm really really bummed this won't come out.

Raiden333

Olivaw wrote: »

Okay, I can barely understand this post

I guess Steven Spielberg produced a game called "LMNO" that got canceled? And it was gonna be kinda like Mirror's Edge meets Ico? Except the chick would actually be useful and do things that you didn't do?

Sounds neat, but a bit of a one-trick pony

I doubt it would have done all that well

Under Church's leadership, LMNO became a game that's not simple to describe.

On the surface, it was a first-person action/adventure PS3/360/PC game set in modern times. Players would split their time between light role-playing objectives like talking to characters to uncover information, and action sequences featuring a lot of what the team referred to as "escape gameplay" where the player would run from approaching helicopters and FBI-style agents too overwhelming to fight face-to-face. That meant hand-to-hand combat and leaping over objects with parkour-style movement to get around, but the key to everything was the relationship between the main character Lincoln and an alien-looking girl named Eve.

The player controlled Lincoln in first-person, and he didn't speak much along the lines of Gordon Freeman in Half-Life. As the game began, he found himself drawn to an Area 51-styled military base to break Eve out without really knowing why. From then on, the two would be on the run, "escaping the government, discovering what's going on," according to one team member, with the idea being they would end up in San Francisco.

It's easy to look at what games like Prince of Persia and Enslaved have done with their partner characters -- it's become something of a trend these days -- and make comparisons to what LMNO was trying to do, but the plan for Eve was to make her more of a living character who would react and evolve depending how the player treated her.

She would fight alongside you in combat, use special "psionic energy powers" to do things you couldn't, and make sounds to give you cues about what's going around in the environment to take the place of the HUD. She couldn't speak, making for non-verbal communication that the player could participate in by moving around, offering her items, and reinforcing her behavior.

"It was really about like, 'Oh man, they're coming up the stairs. Eve, go block the door with that thing that's too heavy for me to lift, and I'm going to go and pry off this grate,'" says a former team member. "'And while they're trying to get through the door, we're going to be able to escape to the next area, and then we've got to be quiet to get to [the next one]."

The developers did a lot of prototyping with Eve to make for a strong connection between her and Lincoln. Part of that came visually -- Eve's design was deliberately exaggerated, with large eyes and lanky fingers, to help the animators express her emotions, and she was designed to be sympathetic and sensitive rather than a sex symbol. Part of that came with her abilities -- she could team up with Lincoln for cooperative attacks, or project things into his vision because she had the power to tap into his mind, so things like storm clouds would appear when she was in trouble.

And then the team wanted to play up the implications of how Lincoln treated her, using some aspects of how games like The Sims treated their AI in the confines of an action game.

"The point of LMNO was to basically take all the AI that would go into a normal Sims title, and compress that down into one character that could learn and remember and change the way you play the game on the fly, and not be totally scripted," says another former team member.

Since communication was non-verbal, Lincoln would be able to hand Eve items to heal her, give her additional abilities, etc., or gesture to her to show how he felt -- to reward or discourage her. And if he treated her well and protected her from enemies, she would like Lincoln better and help out frequently, but if he left her to fend for herself, she would learn to fight for herself and not offer help as often. All of this would play into a tech tree that unlocked different powers and combat moves.

"One of the dynamics was kind of 'Who's in charge?,'" says someone close to the game. "It was like the domination dynamic, so if the player was kind of like, 'I rush ahead, I open the doors, I choose what to do, when to go,' then maybe she would shy back and act less on her own. Or if the player was hesitant, or if the player failed a bunch, she might be like, 'Screw you, I'm gonna be in charge here. I'm going to take charge and run over and beat up these guys. And then I'm gonna be pissed at you for not being much help.'"

Bolded the parts that describe the gameplay a bit.

Olivaw

Well that sounds a lot more interesting than that summary was

Very experimental, though. And heavily reliant on the one thing that game developers still struggle with - AI

Combine that with it's Spielberg-ian story and non-violent gameplay and I'm not surprised that this got canceled

RoyceSraphim

Sorry, I was expecting people to read the article.
...hold on, reading your sig...



Yeah that AI angle is still the holy grail of game design because with good AI or enough smoke and mirrors, you can really make a great game. Thats whats sad about this, the fancy AI, StSp story, pacifistic gameplay would get my money in a heartbeat.