The Outsider (video game)

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The Outsider
Developer(s)	Frontier Developments
Release date(s)	PlayStation 3: TBA TBA TBA TBA Microsoft Xbox 360: TBA TBA TBA TBA
Genre(s)	Action adventure
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer
Platform(s)	Playstation 3, Xbox 360

The Outsider is a high-tech thriller video game for next-gen consoles, and will feature changing storylines based on the player's actions. It is set for release in 2009.

[edit] Overview

The Outsider is promised to be a next-generation thriller played out against the backdrop of a living, crowded city based on present-day Washington DC and its environs, including the CIA HQ at Langley, Andrews Air Force Base and Newport News Naval Dockyard. As CIA operative John Jameson, the player has a large arsenal of technology, combat talents and weaponry available to him. The game's opening scenario wrongly makes the player character Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the media and the public, and leaves the player to decide how to continue in the non-linear storyline.

Frontier Developments has been focusing on new game-play elements that are now possible on the imminent console platforms, and emphasise that next-generation graphics are merely the starting point; they alone do not make a true next-generation game. Several key proprietary technologies, which Frontier has been developing for some time, make their debut in The Outsider and bring the sort of freedom of action first seen in Elite up to date.^[1]

The developers claim that the game radically enriches the player’s experience by abandoning the traditional, prescriptive, mostly linear story of current generation games, and replaces it by simulating characters’ motivations and aims. This gives the player genuine freedom to change the story outcomes. The developer promises that each player will get a unique experience rather than simply switching between ‘good’ or ‘evil’.^[2]

The new games consoles like Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 offer a massive opportunity in the future of gaming. One of the comparisons I like to make is with the film industry – we’re at the stage that the film industry was at in 1930, where people had started to tire of effects-driven ‘car-on-a-train-track’ films and wanted something more, just as technology and budgets greatly increased to bring in the golden age of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and many others. A golden age of games is now just around the corner, and I believe The Outsider is one of the first of these

– David Braben (Frontier founder)