Sleeping Dogs to be linear says developer – Video Games Update
United Front Games has stated that they have opted to go for a linear approach with the game’s story so there will be no branching story lines as seen in other third person open world games.
Sleeping Dogs was previously going to be published by Activision under the name ‘True Crime: Hong Kong’. This was not really a true crime game but Activision had slapped on the label because True Crime is somewhat of a known franchise and bringing a new
intellectual property (IP) to the market is risky compared to releasing a game that already has a decent fan-base.
However in February 2011, Activision announced that it had cancelled True Crime: Hong Kong since it didn’t match the publisher’s current portfolio and the quality wasn’t up to par. This left the developer, United Front Games, looking for a new publisher
for their unnamed game.
Enter Square Enix, who picked up the game in August 2011 and changed the name to Sleeping Dogs. The game seems to be vastly improved as compared to when it was under Activision.
“The story we wanted to tell from the get-go was a very directed story. We did not want to bring in a whole bunch of branching with people deciding: ‘Oh, I’m going to do this. Oh, I’m going to do that.’ The story is fairly linear,” said the executive producer
Stephen van der Mescht in an interview with Gamasutra. A risky move, since branching storylines in a third person open world game is preferred by many gamers.
Sleeping Dogs will feature many options to flesh out your character as you see fit by exploring the secondary objectives throughout the game which will add more depth to the main story.
United Front Games understands what fans want from an open world title as the games’ executive producer Stephen van der Mescht states, “People come to the game potentially with two different mindsets. They might play a bit of the story and go: ‘I just want
to s***w around now.’ Then you’ve kind of lost the drama and tension [of the linear story].”
Sleeping Dogs is slated for release on August 14, 2012 for North America, August 16, 2012 for Europe and August 18, 2012 for Australia. It will arrive much later in Japan on September 27, 2012.
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