Ultra Ultra is currently working on a new sci-fi stealth action adventure game, ECHO, and has released the first screenshots and a debut gameplay trailer for it. ECHO is powered by the Unreal Engine 4 and looks quite interesting.
In ECHO, players take the role of En who finds herself in the Palace. The Palace is a strange sentient building which creates Echoes as a means of security. Your job is simple. Escape the Palace.
What’s really interesting here is that your enemies learn from the way you play the game. As the game’s description reads:
“The [Echoes] behave like you and only do the things you do. So the way you play the game shapes your enemy. If you run, soon the Echoes get faster. If you sneak, they will get stealthier. If you shoot, they will start to shoot back. The game constantly reacts to your every choice and input.”
In other words, the Palace monitors your movements and implements them in your enemy clones. In order to do so, the Palace has to reboot its system which results in blackouts. The good news here is that players can take advantage of these blackouts. During the blackouts the palace is blind, giving players the freedom to act without consequence.
“This is the time to run and gun and do all the things you don’t want the Echoes to learn.”
As we’ve already said, the game’s concept seems quite cool. Here is hoping that it won’t be another tech demo with some cool gameplay ideas, and that it will have an interesting story to tell.
ECHO targets a 2017 release date.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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will be fun for 2 hours or so.
Cool concept, kinda like MP bots.
Keeping an eye on this one.
🙂
interesting concept, strange face of the lady.
I like the concept but the rubber banding AI type, not so much. Yeah making them do what you do sounds nice on paper, but because no one has designed a Skynet level AI for a game yet, we’re instead left with very super basic AI that simply mirror what you do in order to appear as if they are truly learning from you.
I’ll be waiting to see how it develops but I do wish for a dev out there to crack down on making a decent level of AI that can actually learn from a human without resorting to cheating into being godlike or virtually mirroring the player’s actions. I’d love to see an advanced AI that can question it’s logic, question what it should and could do and then act on it.
+1 What he said.
Y’know, back in the earliest days, the Quake Bots used to learn from your own actions.
It took them a few rounds to fully get stuff down, sure, but if you were the bunny-hopping fast-pacing type of player, they’d pick that up & start using it against you.
I know. It just seems like we still haven’t evolved from those days where we *had* to make our opponents mirror us in order to stand against us.
I just wish we had an AI that could think for itself or at least acknowledge our existence and surroundings in a way that it can use those to it’s advantage. Most AI these days just instantly now you are the primary target and they know exactly what you are doing at all times while also having powers up it;s sleeve that it never earned.
After watching this trailer again…it seems like the game want us to play total stealth during light so that the palace cannot learn our moves to use against us… and play kill-em-all during dark as that is when the palace won’t learn our moves. So that’s it! They already ‘model-ly’ fixed the gameplay for us.
Of course anyone can play it the opposite way.
QTEs. I’m out.
Interesting meta wasted on a dull, boring main course with your basic Gears of Splinter Effect movement and combat topped off with goddamn quick time “melee” cutscenes. If they show more varied level design this concept might have mass appeal on consoles, but I lost interest the moment I saw the third person cover and shooting mechanics.
Cool concept!
But the game won’t be much fun after a few hours of play…