The Adversary was a new prototype in development in 2002 for XBOX and PS2 by the same team at Namco USA that worked on Kill.Switch (an average third person shooter, but with interesting and innovative “hide ‘n’ shoot” elements). The project started as another third person shooter with human soldiers, but it slowly evolved into a more complex concept, untill in the latest builds there were even robotic tanks and mechs fighting in a big city. At this time of development, the project took the new name of “City Under Siege”. The game was created with emphasis on multiplayer deathmatches and it seems that a playable multiplayer demo was even available at closed doors at E3 2004. City Under Siege could have been a fun game, but sadly it was cancelled by Namco for unknow reasons, maybe because it was too risky economically.
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Just sending you the full background info behind Kill.Switch from one of the team who worked on it.
Huge thanks to Gil Colgate for the following information and assistance in clearing up a rumoured lost Atari Lynx game…
Gil:Kill.Switch began this way
Namco Hometek had made the game ‘Dead To Rights’. Chris Esaki and Matt Sentell both really disliked the Dead To Rights games mechanics … it was kind of a cross between a point and click adventure and a series of minigames, but thought it would be cool if the game had had real shooting mechanics.
So I whipped up a version where you controlled the Dead To Rights character as a third person shooter. Since the Dead To Rights character had one puzzle where he could take cover, I had an animation where he took cover behind a wall, and could shoot out, so used it. When you were close to a wall you could take cover by holding the button. Chris Esaki was in love with the idea and we riffed off from there and made Kill.Switch. We had low cover and wall cover, and basically introduced cover mechanics to the next generation of games. The hardest part was coming up with the story for the game which went through ten revisions and suffered.
The Adversary from Namco was going to use the Kill Switch engine and a different storyline/world. It was shown at E3. It looked really good. On XBOX we had up to 16 players in a shootout mode, with cover, tall grass that would bend when the player was in it. We were planning to use Mechs (like the later Infinityward game) that the player could climb in and out of. For a while it was called ‘City Under Seige’ . John Munday kept some excellent screenshots of the project. Later I will try to locate this site for you
But our COO put the kibosh on it. He was later fired… I think he couldn’t see a way for him personally to make money out of the project.
Awesome, thanks a lot for the details Ross! :) This was really an interesting project, a shame it was never completed..