D2


Developer: 

Warp

Publisher: 

Warp

Players: 

1

Release Date: 

Early 1999 - Japan

Platform: 

Dreamcast

Style: 

3D Adventure




D2 is Warp's newest Real-time 3D Adventure game for the Sega Dreamcast.



Story:

Canada, Christmas 1999. This horror story begins in the sky, where Laura's aircraft has a strange encounter. She experiences a mysterious vision of a gigantic meteorite falling from outer space to earth, and then sees men who look like terrorists firing off their weapons. Her aircraft is hit by a meteorite and crash lands. In a flash, she is involved of a major accident.

Laura is rescued by a woman called Kimberly, and wakes up in a hut in a snowy mountain, where the two see dreadful mutants, or monsters. How did this accident happen? Why did the people turn into monsters? As the mystery is unveiled, a horrifying story and tragic destinies emerge. What does Laura see in the dangerous mountain?


Point of the game:

Warp, known as to possess great technology of CG, is trying to express the colour "white". There are more than 30 words to describe "white" in Inuit, and it is hardest colour to be described by CG. Warp will produce the world of white with the tragic story.


Graphics:

For [D2], the emphasis is on describing nature. Depicting nature in real-time 3D is a difficult task, because it uses a lot of polygons and effects, unlike the CG of artificial items such as buildings. Snow is a good example. It snows a lot in [D2], with up to 3,000 snowflakes, requiring such large memory volume that a normal game would start and finish with just the snow. And depicting people like Laura and other characters as well as enemy monsters with a quality that does justice to the realistic background requires 5,000 polygons for the characters alone.

Ultimately, the game uses a total of million polygons per second, including the characters, the backgrounds, information display, stage effects, and the rest. And different effects are added to create realistic and natural computer graphics the likes of which no-one has ever seen before.

And [D2] is not a mere action game. In this game, the actions and facial expressions of Laura and the other characters are elaborate, since they have great import for the story line. We aim to show not only exaggerated gestures using the whole body, but also subtle facial movements or complicated facial expressions. This technique is only possible when we can afford to allocate 2,000 polygons for the faces alone.

What we want you to note first of all in [D2] is the remarkably realistic graphics. This is the "realistic graphics" that we at WARP have been trying to achieve not in movies but in interactive screen in real-time, since our establishment.

We would like you to enjoy that exciting, thrilling and adventurous feeling that you had when you played family computer RPG for the first time. With realistic, not symbolic presentation - this is the [D2] challenge.

We believe that we can only convey something to you by pursuing realistic graphics. And it is the [D2] software that achieves this for the first time.


Music:

The music in [D2] has two major attributions: the "Trio-side" composed using the trio of piano, cello, and violin, and the "Rhythm side" composed from percussion instruments such as drums and base.

In the game, the "Trio-side" and the "Rhythm side" will be associated with the real-time movie part, including events, and the interactive part respectively.

While a major orchestra was used in previous games, [D's dinner table] and [Enemy Zero], we used the simple arrangement of piano, cello, and violin, because we wanted to create a fine, edgy sound. To dramatise the human drama set in the "world of white" of snow-covered mountains, we needed the delicate sound of the piano, the deep and heavy sound of the cello, and the tense sound of violin.

In [D2], we spent a long time composing and arranging the music. It was no easy task to compose the phrases for the violin and cello, not to mention piano, and to imagine the entire ensemble. But we believe that the music is something only those involved in the planning are capable of composing.

We have completed composing and arranging the basic music for the game as a rough sketch. Our next step is to compose the final melody in line with the progress in producing the game. We plan to return to our usual Abbey Road studios for the final recording.


3D Real Time Action:

"More realistic action for players." This is the reason that [D2] chose the genre of real-time action rather than action adventure. While past WARP games are based on movies and set inside buildings, [D2] is a real-time game, that achieves our wish to freely explore the natural outside world.

[D2] is the sequel to [D's Dinner Table], created with the concept of a "game for everyone". The presentation and the techniques of [D2] are complicated, but playing it is going to be fun for all, just like [D's Dinner Table].

Basically the active part of this game is divided into "travelling scenes" and "fighting scenes". In short, like in RPG, enemy monsters appear while the character is travelling, and then shift to fighting sequence. We reused this idea because we realised that it becomes most horrifying and exciting when we dramatise the appearance of the enemies.

For this reason, [D2] will not simply turn into a fighting sequence all of a sudden, with a screen effect screen similar to that which you see in RPG. It will smoothly shift into a fighting sequence to increase the tension for fighting. For example, when you are walking, you feel the signs of the enemy's appearance, and then the enemy emerges and the fighting begins.

To make the fighting more realistic and thrilling, the scenes take the players as the subject perspective. A monster that attacks the player is depicted not objectively but subjectively for the players, so you can enjoy a more realistic fear. All parts of this game, including parts similar to adventure games in buildings, are in real time. When changing the action from travelling to operation or check, the camera will change its viewpoint from the subjective to the objective, to create the effects needed for a realistic adventure.



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Preview by: Ryoni Schouten

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