Want to See the Research Behind Max Payne 3?
Well of course ya do!
Published: January 9, 2012
Rockstar Games is getting into this whole blogging thing in a pretty heavy way, it seems. On the heels of last week's peek into Grand Theft Auto III, they've gone and readied the first of a few peeks into the whole R&D process behind Max Payne 3, a game that initially scared the poo out of long-time fans of the original game's concrete jungle noir feel. After all, a big-gut, bald-headed Max chilling in São Paolo, Brazil is pretty much the farthest thing from how original developers Remedy Entertainment had set things up, but it's clear Rockstar wants to assuage some of those fears that the franchise is in trouble.
Head on over by clicking here, if you'd like, but know that it's pretty obvious the whole R&D process is not your normal blog fluff. This isn't as much a carefully orchestrated marketing technique (though it is, clearly, well-designed to inform as much as hype) as it is a rather exhaustive sea of underlined links explaining just how much the dev team is trying to capture authenticity in the locales around São Paolo.
We'll be honest: it's normally policy here at TotalPlayStation not to link to other blog posts -- though that's usually reserved for the guys that take other stories, slap a few paragraphs of extra text on 'em and throw a link to the original source waaaaaay down at the bottom of their 100 word blurb -- but this isn't just stuff straight from the source, it's a frighteningly intricate set of links to official news stories from outlets like the BBC, and Wikipedia articles in the native tongue, which adds up to something that feels almost more like an alternate reality game (or, we suppose, something of a homework assignment) than your usual run-of-the-mill, buzzword-laden series of paragraphs.
There's some genuinely interesting stuff at play with Max Payne 3, and if the linked videos Rockstar provides to their own trailers don’t help allay some of those fears that the series is going in the wrong direction, the actual text just might. It's one part geographical lesson, one part sociological treatise, and, yes, a report on the game itself -- most notably how that noir feel isn't quite as lost among all the loud shirts and bald heads as you might think.
Head on over by clicking here, if you'd like, but know that it's pretty obvious the whole R&D process is not your normal blog fluff. This isn't as much a carefully orchestrated marketing technique (though it is, clearly, well-designed to inform as much as hype) as it is a rather exhaustive sea of underlined links explaining just how much the dev team is trying to capture authenticity in the locales around São Paolo.
We'll be honest: it's normally policy here at TotalPlayStation not to link to other blog posts -- though that's usually reserved for the guys that take other stories, slap a few paragraphs of extra text on 'em and throw a link to the original source waaaaaay down at the bottom of their 100 word blurb -- but this isn't just stuff straight from the source, it's a frighteningly intricate set of links to official news stories from outlets like the BBC, and Wikipedia articles in the native tongue, which adds up to something that feels almost more like an alternate reality game (or, we suppose, something of a homework assignment) than your usual run-of-the-mill, buzzword-laden series of paragraphs.
There's some genuinely interesting stuff at play with Max Payne 3, and if the linked videos Rockstar provides to their own trailers don’t help allay some of those fears that the series is going in the wrong direction, the actual text just might. It's one part geographical lesson, one part sociological treatise, and, yes, a report on the game itself -- most notably how that noir feel isn't quite as lost among all the loud shirts and bald heads as you might think.
