A remaster of the cult classic first-person shooter Rise of the Triad is in the works, scheduled for release in early 2023, and it’s a reunion in a way. The developers working on Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition include some of the leading figures from the recent “shooter boomer renaissance” who first worked together on the 2013 Unreal Engine remake of Rise of the Triad.
The developers of Rise of the Triad Remaster are the classic FPS supergroup: Apogee Entertainment created and published the original game in 1995. project. They’ve been joined by New Blood Interactive, publishers of older shooters like Dusk, Ultrakill, and more recently Gloomwood.
New Blood CEO Dave Oshri tells us that the release of Rise of the Triad in 2013 led directly to the games that made New Blood take off.
“New blood [started out] as refugee interceptors,” he says. Danish developer Interceptor, now known as Slipgate Ironworks, developed the 2013 remake of Rise of the Triad, and it’s where Oshri says he learned some important FPS game design lessons. “If there was no Rise of the Triad 2013, there would be no Dusk, there would be no Amid Evil, there would be no Ion Fury, there would be no resurgence of the boomer shooter or whatever you call it.” it’s. East.”
However, Rise of the Triad 2013 struggled. He used checkpoints instead of the classic quick save system, a mistake Oshri said he would never make again. “I learned that lesson one day,” he says. “I realized that while working on Rise of the Triad 2013, I was never really releasing the game and letting people save.”
Another challenge was conveying the quintessential American humor of 1990s camp humor Rise of the Triad to a group of Danish developers nearly twenty years later.
“Everyone who started this, and I hope you’ll forgive me, Dave, was a rookie,” Apogee President Terry Nagy said as he sat down to talk with us after this year’s PAX trip.
Oshri totally agrees. “It was our first project,” he says. “It was the first game we were working on. It’s a miracle that it came out.”
The Ludicrous Remastered Edition of Rise of the Triad, which was shown at this year’s Realms Deep trade show, returns to the original version of the game from 1995, adding support for 4K monitors, frame rates greater than 60fps, backup in the cloud and an adjustable field of view.
Rise of the Triad was a strange game even in 1994: Originally conceived as a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, Id Software eventually sold the concept to Apogee, who turned Rise of the Triad into its own game. It was very violent and endlessly silly, with power-ups like water rockets and Easter eggs like “Dog Mode,” which replaces the weapon you normally see in front of you with a dog’s snout.
Most of the enemy sprites are based on scanned photographs of Apogee employees, which makes playing the original Rise of the Triad feel eerily like looking through a chaotic chat window on Twitch: lots of real people’s faces reduced to one instant . strong emotion.
While Rise of the Triad was never a household name like Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom, it was a highly influential and highly innovative FPS game. Rise of the Triad was one of the first games (along with Bungie’s Marathon, which released exactly the same day) to implement things like dual wielding, rocket jumping, enemies dodging your projectiles, and asymmetric multiplayer modes. There’s a magic baseball bat and a power-up that activates “mushroom mode.”
“I have to pay tribute [creative director] To Tom Hall for putting anything in the original Rise of the Triad,” says Nagy. “I mean, at the time, he was able to convince the core team of programmers to put things into this engine that he wasn’t even capable of at the time.”
3D shooters of this era weren’t fully 3D: they were 2D spaces rendered to look 3D, so in games like Doom it doesn’t matter if you aim up or down. But Hall asked the original programming team to come up with a way for players to walk and roll on floating platforms in Rise of the Triad, which Nagy describes as “technically impossible” given the limitations of the engine in 1994.
Hall achieved similar feats with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom: he successfully advocated for the inclusion of secret areas in Wolfenstein and teleporters in Doom. “But the engine doesn’t work” wasn’t reason enough to remove a cool feature from the game, from Hall’s perspective.
This time, thankfully, the underlying technology is Nightdive’s own KEX engine, which the studio used for the remakes of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Blood: Fresh Supply, Doom 64, System Shock: Enhanced Edition, and the original Quake. The use of KEX means that console players will also be able to experience Rise of the Triad in its original form for the first time.
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition will also include a new level editor, as well as cut content that sat on dusty old hard drives for decades, including old sprites from when Rise of the Triad was first released, created as a sequel to Rise of the Triad. Wolfenstein 3D. . .
The Ludicrous Edition will also include an “Extreme” level pack and two episodes that weren’t in the original game: one is a remake of a GZ Doom fan project called Return of the Triad, which was created by the team that went on to work in Between. Evil for New Blood and the other is a new level collection created by the teams and developers at Apogee, New Blood and Nightdive.
“The thing is, we want to keep not only the original game, but also the zeitgeist,” says Larry Cooperman, director of business development for Nightdive. “If I have to describe Rise of the Triad in one sentence, it’s a shooter that takes us back to when games were fun. If you’ve been playing Rise of the Triad for half an hour and you’re not laughing, you probably need to see a doctor.”
You can expect Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition to launch on Steam in early 2023.
Source : PC Gamesn
