Inside Prototype

We know that Alex is more than he appears – literally. He has the ability to ‘consume’ the DNA of others and add it to his own, to increase his power or to shift his form to match that of the captured DNA. This makes Alex a master of stealth.

Along with this, the developer has played with a lot of ideas to take advantage of Alex’s mutated state.

“One of the key aspects we’ve focused on getting right with Prototype is the locomotion and agility of Alex Mercer. When you have ultra aggressive, fast-moving enemies steamrolling towards you in an open-world recreation of New York City, you simply need to move fast and be very agile,” explains Bennison. Radical has managed to achieve what it calls ‘hyper-parkour grace’ by taking into consideration how the AI would react to a superhuman, and getting the animation right so his fantastical movements don’t look out of place. Making sure the controls were simple to understand and use was also a priority.

Obviously, with such a capable character under the control of the player, a lot of insane ideas are likely to be tossed around. On this, Bennison says that selecting the best ones came down to what backed up the developer’s gameplay objectives and ultimately, what was fun.

“One earlier idea that did get cut was the concept of Alex being able to consume animals. It’s definitely an interesting space to explore, though we had so much to consider in just the human-to-human gameplay that we realised this was maybe best left for a different time.”

Radical has stressed that Alex will start off powerful, so none of this levelling stuff everyone else is addicted to. Alex will become more powerful over time, but you’ll be able to throw vehicles, leap from building-to-building and run up walls right from the get-go. You can even combine Alex’s abilities to create extreme setups – like protruding spikes from his stone form so enemies not only have a hard time damaging you, but hurt themselves in the process.



With words like ‘parkour’ and ‘superhuman’ entering the fray, Prototype has been described as a fusion of Assassin’s Creed and Crackdown in the media. Bennison admits that open-world games are challenging to develop, but he also says there’s ‘plenty of room’ for Radical to experiment with the ‘gameplay tools’ both these games have introduced, and Prototype will stand out as a unique creation.

Speaking of open-world titles and the difficulty of creating them, how has the developer approached the design of the game? Especially when you want players to know exactly what they can do and where they need to go?

“The first step is to make it extremely easy to understand and orient to your next objective, your potential secondary objectives and to understand the tools you have at your disposal to achieve them,” says Bennison. “Open-world games definitely face the challenge of larger spatial consideration for the player to deal with – though we’re feeling good with the amount of dos and don’ts picked up through open world games such as Scarface, Simpsons Hit and Run and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. It’s a larger challenge for sure, though there are some very good general principles already established to lessen that challenge for the player.”