Games

Warco's new take on FPS gaming: shoot with a video camera, not a gun

Warco's new take on FPS gaming: shoot with a video camera, not a gun
Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
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Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
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Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
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Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
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Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
4/4
Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
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Warco - The News Game is an FPS-style game in development where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield. Instead of the standard bloody clashes with enemy forces, the game challenges the player to dodge bullets and capture attractive footage. Warco is the brainchild of Australian war correspondent Tony Maniaty and filmmaker Robert Connolly, who teamed up with games studio Defiant Development.

The game will explore the story of journalist Jesse DeMarco, who comes to the fictional civil-war-torn North African country of Benouja to show the world what the war is really like. Initially planned by Maniaty as a journalism teaching tool, Warco is now referred to as a war correspondent sim.

Each level of Warco will be taking players into different scenarios, with moral and ethical questions often being raised. It will include action-packed battlefields, as well as quieter moments, such as the discussing of events with fellow journalists while trapped in a hotel. Potential tasks could also include reporting how troops interact with civilians, or interviewing a hostile leader in a rebel camp. After completing a required level of news-gathering, players will edit their frontline TV news stories and even post them online.

Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield
Warco - The News Game is a planned FPS-style game where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield

"I'm not thinking we can take Call of Duty head to head for sales [but] the success of games like Heavy Rain shows that there's a strong desire for adult narrative-focused play," Defiant Development's designer Morgan Jaffit told Gamasutra.

Warco has been in development for four months, with a 'proof of concept playable' prototype being recently unveiled. Defiant is now looking into finding a publisher for the title. There's no word on possible platforms and date of availability at this point.

Check out the video presenting the prototype's gameplay:

Warco July 2011

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3 comments
3 comments
Keith Kritselis
cool idea... accept for the whole \'let\'s encourage people making snuff films part\'... If it bleeds, it leads...
Konstyantyn Garkusha
i think this is cool, but if they are trying to get away from the whole \"first person shooter\" well its not working hence your watching people shoot others still. plus i don\'t know how many people would actually sit there for an hour filming violence in a video game..
Charles Bosse
What WOULD be cool would be if the video game worked an angle where the main character was an undercover agent whose cover was some sort of cinematographer, where the objective was to collect good footage without getting kicked out of the country or shot. Problem with most FPS\'s is that they take beautiful expansive worlds, highly realistic movements, detailed actions, machinery, and physics engines and boil them down to something that hasn\'t evolved much in 20 years. Meanwhile, the occasional (often wildly successful) game that actually lets you do something interesting (GTA, Assassin\'s Creed, Dragon Age, Heavy Rain, Minecraft) shows how much many of us crave something new. Just holding a camera in a war zone will not be enough to do that - most FPS\'s already have a video capture mode, so unless this game can beat that it sounds like a nonstarter.