In a recent interview with Gamespot, Binary Domain producer Toshihiro Nagoshi tells that the player's AI companions will need to be actually spoken to through a headset to keep them on the ball.
“There are interactive elements utilising the headset where you essentially more or less engage in conversation,” he said. “Like maybe there might be some back story that you can explore with the NPCs, that can essentially be done using the headset.
Nagoshi wants the game to be told to players through interactivity, via both voice commands and in-game choices the player makes to build relationships with the NPC companions.
“All the players will have a base level of behavior, patterns of how they act, but depending on how you interact with them – say, you might betray them or they might betray you – they’ll have actual cause and effects in the game’s progression. So based on that based on that you can have some interesting immersion experiences in the game.”
While all of this certainly sounds awesome, I'm rather quick to assume that it really isn't going to be as amazing as he says it will. These days Japanese games tend to have stories that don't make any sense at all (see Vanquish, Shadows of the Damned for recent examples), and while this feature certainly sounds awesome, I expect it will actually simply break down to individual spoken words at specific times like in a Quick Time Event. Nevertheless, it sounds neat, and the game looks awesome, so whatever. It certainly sounds more interesting with the feature than without.
Thanks, VG247!
