This is what hacking looked like during the Cold War … I think.
Expeditions: Conquistador was one of my favourites of 2013, so learning that Logic Artists are now doing an asymmetric, Cold War co-op spy game is great news. For a start, Clandestine’s existence suggests the Kickstarted Conquistador sold well enough to fund this next game. That makes me happy.
Apparently I should read IncGamers more, because Tim covered the initial announcement but I either forgot about it or didn’t notice. That’s a bit rubbish of me.
Anyhow, Logic Artists are name-dropping some classics when discussing this title in more depth with RPGWatch: Thief 2, Deus Ex, Hitman: Blood Money and, yes, the delicious Alpha Protocol (presumably for setting more than anything else) get a mention.
Clandestine appears to have started life as some sort of spy agency management sim, but subsequently morphed into an asymmetric co-op title in which one player does third-person sneaking while the other deals with hacking duties, guiding the spy and providing information. If co-op isn’t your thing or you have trouble making friends, Logic Artists add that “It’ll also be playable in singleplayer, where you’ll play as the spy but some of the hacker stuff is available if you physically access a PC … The AI and scripted events will take over a lot of the hacker duties in singleplayer, and you’ll be able to request certain actions of the AI with a command wheel”
The stealth will be “a damn sight more robust at stealth than Alpha Protocol” which I interpret to mean you won’t have a skill that turns you invisible and allows you to sequentially choke everybody in the room without anybody really noticing.
Combat meanwhile is said to be “chaotic and unforgiving,” which is my favourite type. Running away is going to be smarter than engaging large groups of security forces.
In the same interview, Logic Artists pretty much confirm a follow-up in the Expeditions series: “The heart of the Expeditions series, as we hope it will become, is the idea of setting out into the unknown with a small group of people under your command … The next Expeditions game will take place in a different time and a different part of the world than Conquistador, but it will maintain the core gameplay of its predecessor.”
More news about Clandestine will be sneaking out of Gamescom, next week. Here’s one of the more recent developer videos.
