quote:
sideshowBob hat geschrieben:On the contrary my friend, after the past weeks it is in fact quite possible that AN3 WILL be made (by Nordic Games, who bought the assets of then-Publisher Jowood who's gone broke)
However as far as we know Halfmann didn't advance the story substantially beyond AN2. That is to say he wrote a fair bunch of pages but didn't get nearly as far enough as to merge the storyline with the events of AN2/1.
Damn, that's too bad. What exactly did Helmut Halfmann die of in 2009? And when was he born? Information about him is difficult for a German-illiterate like me to find. I take it he didn't have much warning, otherwise he would have taken care to write down all he could about his unfinished stories for others to finish after his passing, like the fantasy author Robert Jordan (best known for the
Wheel of Time fantasy series) did.
Mind you, I'm not someone who thinks Herr Halfmann's writing is perfect; a look at the intro to
Aquanox 1 or
Aquanox 2 will see that he, or those at Massive Development who incorporated his writings into the game, had a thing for including
superfluous exposition that often tends to bore gamers (people who are increasingly known for their ever-shortening attention spans nowadays). For example, why do we need to learn about how scientists in Aqua are breeding back extinct aquatic creatures in the Aquanox 1 intro, since that is never touched upon again in the game? Why do we need to learn about the "unspeakably horrifying" golden horseshoe crab (heavily implied to be related to the Schax monsters from AQ1) if they're not touched upon later in the game? Most people don't play video games to read books--they read them to interact with a virtual world in entertaining ways. If Aquanox 3 gets to be made, there will have to be a lot done to make that kind of exposition attractive to players again.
How exactly is Nordic games going to be funding Aquanox 3, then? JoWood's intellectual properties clearly weren't doing well when it collapsed--how is Nordic going to get enough funding for a series that wasn't very popular outside of Germany?