From its humble origins as a PC, Xbox and PlayStation 2 title, The Godfather has built a veritable empire across every current-generation platform save the Nintendo DS -- and aptly enough, sold like gangbusters doing so. So we weren't exactly surprised to hear that EA was creating a sequel.
What surprised, excited, and concerned us was that in that sequel, we weren't going to play a lone soldier who rises up the ranks -- we were going to be Don.
At the 2008 EA Studio Showcase, we got our first glimpse into just what that does, and does not mean for aspiring Godfathers like yourself.
For the uninitiated, the basic Godfather formula is typically described as a blend of Grand Theft Auto's open-world gameplay, missions derived from the famous film, an emphasis on brutal fisticuffs to solve minor conflicts, and Punisher-esque intimidation sequences where your character extorts business owners to gain their respect -- and their greenbacks -- via the good ol' protection racket.
From what we could tell from the pre-alpha build on display, none of that has changed. In The Godfather II, players will performing the very same sorts of activities; only now, they'll go about them family-style... and while keeping an eye on the bigger picture.
This, my friends, is the Don's View -- your map, your completion chart and your strategy-based metagame all rolled into one. Though creative director Michael Perry assured us that the game will have plenty of story-driven missions based on (the Michael Corleone segments of) the second feature film, the game's true objective is to take over all criminal operations in New York, Florida and Cuba while driving out the rival families who would wrest such control from your cold, dead hands. This map is where you plot out your opponents demise, and, as Perry soon explained, where we would defend ourselves against the very same:
“In The Godfather 1, the rival families were entrenched – if you wanted to go take out the Barzini family, you had to go take them out in Midtown. In The Godfather II it’s very different; your goal in the game is to take over all the business and eliminate the rival families – and the rival families feel exactly the same way. They are attacking you, and have to decide which venues you want to guard, where you want to invest your associates.”
Invest...associates? Yes indeed. At a basic level, the Don's View serves as helpful indicator. You can see which properties are under your control and which belong to the game's four rival families based on their color. You can see what type of hidden crime ring does business at a property based on their icon, and perhaps most importantly, you can see the tally of how many guards a family has hired to defend one of their businesses against attack. But at more advanced level, and with the help of your associates, you can use the Don's View to enact operations yourself, sending your men in to intimidate and/or assassinate your rivals while posting your own guards at existing properties to protect the family's interests.
In addition to providing funds to your family, properties can provide advantageous monopolies. By controlling all of a given crime ring -- assuming the other families will let you get that far -- players can unlock useful perks. For example, Perry showed us that taking over four gun-running rings could yield a ammo belt that the Don and his crew would equip for an edge in battle -- but also that our rivals wouldn't let us take it without one hell of a fight, paying for a full 25 guards to man the oil refinery front for the illegal operation.
If you're a board game enthusiast, you're probably thinking this is sounds a lot like Risk, and that we'd be a fool sending out an expeditionary force against a hardened fortress guarded by twenty-five men. (You'd probably be right on both counts.) But the Don's View isn't a separate real-time strategy game mode -- it's quite literally a seamless, integrated part of the experience. In order to properly take over the installation, we simply zoomed in to ground level, and gave the operation a personal touch by having the Don go in guns blazing himself, surrounded by three of his most trusted soldiers.
Aside from the metagame, the biggest innovation Godfather II brings to the table is the ability to create and control your own family, in a manner of speaking. Just as you were recruited and gradually formed into an accomplished capo in the first game, here (we were told) it is you who will do the recruiting and mentoring required to build a team of trusted enforcers, and you who will benefit from the resulting specialties they develop.
In order to accomplish a pair of the game's open-ended events -- and eventually break into the aforementioned arms trafficking oil refinery -- we enlisted the help of three of our Made Men who had (either as new recruits or at the time we 'promoted' them to their current ranks) developed proficiencies at medicine, demolitions and engineering. Perry selected the first man in-person, walking up to him in a Family-owned bar, but assigned the second and third to himself via a new self-explanatory interface in the Don's View, called the Family Tree.
In order to deal with the huge group of men at the oil refinery, Perry used our engineer and demolitions expert to perform some quick and effective subterfuge, first directing the engineer to cut through a wire fence at the back of the compound, and then sending the demolitions expert to plant charges on a nearby oil tank. Subtlety quickly went out the window when those charges set off a chain reaction of spectacular explosions, but Perry had made his point -- there's more than one way to go about things. We do wonder, however, how limited such interaction might be; the few context-sensitive items available for our Made Men to activate stuck out like sore thumbs and made us worry slightly about repetition.
Alerted by either the giant explosions or one of the refinery workers telephoning his "protection" (Perry noted that we could silence them early to ensure a stealthy approach), several rival Made Men showed up to defend the joint, and we witnessed our first major firefight.
Though impossible for us to judge the implementation from a quick glance at a canned section of an early build, we like where The Godfather II is going with their AI. Our soldiers demonstrated some autonomy in battle, but also tended to follow our lead, both here in the gunfight and earlier when we were intimidating the owner of a local diner. They don't escalate the conflict from fists to guns or engage in store-smashing before the Don has done so himself, but seem to do a good job of assisting once you've chosen your preferred method of... shall we say, "conflict resolution." Moreover, they can be directed in the middle of battle with a simple button press, sent to one area to provide a base of fire while the Don engages in flanking maneuvers.
It also seems the AI won't always be at your beck and call, but take initiative for itself on occasion. When Jesse remarked that one of our men had stopped outside a porn studio to talk to a topless actress, Perry asserted that each family member has their own autonomous AI and individual "personalities and characteristics."
While we're not sure to what degree non-Family NPCs have similar artificial intellectual endowment, Perry told us that just like in the movie, there are those would like to be on the receiving end of one of the Godfather's famous favors. “In the Godfather fiction, you do a favor for somebody, and then someday – that day may never come – you get to call in a favor that they have to do for you,” he explained.
In our demo, we met a corrupt district attorney at a porn studio who wanted to frame a local punk, and needed a suitable crime scene -- so we made one for him. In return, Perry told us, he would conduct a sting operation on a rival family member, ensuring some jail time.
At some level, The Godfather II is about managing and controlling resources just like any other real-time strategy game; only here, your resources are your men and properties rather than commodities to harvest. According to Perry, each family has a limited number of Made Men, each with their own unique name, personality and role to play, and by calling in return favors like the sting (or placing hits on rivals directly, or having your men bomb their operations, or bribing police) you can greatly improve your chances at success by temporarily knocking one of the other families down a peg.
What didn't quite jive with us was the emphasis on the temporary. Though we understand a desire to keep NPCs alive who might feature prominently in the plot (see also:Oblivion) the idea of blatantly calling in a hit on a rival only to "put them out of the game for a little while" seems an unsatisfactory, lazy solution to the complex problem of how to allow users to generate their own narrative. When Luca Brasi was killed in the original, the Corleone family lost one of its most powerful members, and if Luca were to rise from his watery grave again and again it would no doubt cheapen the experience.
Similarly, although you can mark members of your own family for death in order to free up slots for new blood, there's no real intrigue in doing so, as your own family members (and even the guards you hire) are loyal to a fault. There's no taking care of family business here -- you'll be a cold, calculated killer in every sense of the word, estimating whether your new recruits have the statistical potential to surpass the existing crew, with no regard for their service record.
Narrative quibbles aside, we were mostly impressed with what we saw, and are looking forward to digging deeper into the game's strategic elements before its slated February 2009 release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.
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