Face of Nation : As if seeing Keanu Reeves in person onstage at the recent E3 Expo in Los Angeles wasn’t enough, I also got the chance to play as his iconic character John Wick — and it was good.
John Wick Hex is being developed by Bithell Games and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment.
The game has an innovative movement and combat system that’s hard to succinctly define, but will make sense to anyone who has played a tactical game like XCOM or the Shadowrun games.
At the top of the screen is a bar, reminiscent of a video editing tool that which will show how long a particular action will take (say, firing a gun or moving somewhere) while a bar right underneath it shows when your enemy’s actions (moving, shooting back) will happen, allowing you to time your moves accordingly, such as interrupting an attack by shoving someone out of the way then ducking for cover to avoid incoming fire from a nearby enemy and then firing back.
It’s a hybrid of turn-based (in that the action is ‘paused’ while you plan your moves out) and real-time (when you execute a move, you and your enemies do everything simultaneously) and although complicated to explain, I found it worked very well in the context of the game.
Game director Mike Bithell said the system had been something of an evolution, with the first iteration being very similar to a straight turn-based format, but after playing around with it and talking to the people at Lionsgate (the studio who make the John Wick films), they realised it just didn’t feel right or capture the character’s essence.
“We looked a lot at the movies and we talked to the director, the stunt people on it, we did a lot of research and worked with them,” he said.
“And what we found was, the moments we wanted to recreate in the game, they were not John waiting for someone; they were him interrupting something, striking that guy so it stunned him, shooting that guy, finishing this guy off.
“And those overlaps were the interesting part. And we started thinking about that, it’s like, ‘Okay, well maybe there is a better way’ — and in the video editing I did was the big eureka moment of, let’s put a timeline on there.”
The result, Mr Bithell said, is that the player is working both in a geographic space moving around, dodging, shooting enemies and the like, but they are also playing in a temporal space as well, with time being a critical element.
“Between those two things, you end up with something that has that fluidity and that reactive feel to it,” he said.
“You are actually able to do things you’ve seen John Wick do in the movies. You can actually build a fight sequence of your own around them.”
I was impressed by how effectively a fight scene would come together when I played the demo, at least after getting familiar with the controls.
There were several instances where I was able to do something very cool like take down an enemy with a jujitsu move, using the momentum from that to dodge an incoming attack, put two rounds into the nearest enemy, run into an oncoming foe to interrupt his attack, double-tap him, throw my empty gun at someone who had just appeared in the door to buy time to get behind cover, pick up a pistol from the ground, then shoot the new enemy.
Mr Bithell said he had received a huge amount of support from Lionsgate throughout the game development process, and the John Wick stunt teams had offered some extremely valuable insights as well, especially on the shoving mechanic, which was worked out especially for the game in a LA gym after he dropped in to pick the stunt team’s brains on the subject.
“They start doing it (the impromptu move they had worked out), and practising it, working out how to make it safe and how to push around, and what they would do if that was something Chad (Stahelski; the director of the John Wick films) asks them for in the movie,” Mr Bithell said.
“And then we just pull out or mobile phones, film it from every angle, send it to the animaters and that’s in the game two days later.
“It’s that kind of stuff, that’s how you end up with something that feels true to the movies and feels like it is part of that universe — and I think that shines through in the final game.”
Mr Bithell confirmed the game was set before the events of the first John Wickmovie, even before John Wick met his wife. All those cool gold coins John used to pay for stuff in the movies? This game is set during the time when he was earning them.
While there’s no official release date for the game yet (beyond “coming soon”), the build I played seemed to have quite a bit in it, with Mr Bithell confirming there will also be cut scenes and voice acting in the finished game as well.
“I think it’s coming along well — I think we’ve got a really good thing here and it’s been great seeing people react to it,” he said.
“It’s very weird to finally share it, because obviously something like this you have to keep so secret, because there are hundreds of people whose livelihoods rely on the John Wick franchise moving in the way it does. So yeah, it’s been great to actually be able to have people like yourself play it.”
Needless to say, I was very impressed and really enjoyed my time with the demo, and I also think it will still be accessible for people who don’t know the film franchise too. Suffice it to say I’m definitely planning to take out a contract for this one when it releases.
