Welcome to the second-to-last episode of our Pitch Archives!
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of YAGER, we are looking at past projects that never really made it.
As usual, we will explain the word “pitch” before we dive into this week’s topic: Eye of the Storm.
What is a pitch?
A game pitch is a great method to flesh out your project and locate the ideal collaborators to help you bring it to life. At YAGER, we enjoy trying new things and making concepts come to life. While some of the projects in this series were stopped “early” on, while others marked the beginning of collaborations with a studio or publisher.
If you want to check the past three pitches, click the respective name:
Eye of The Storm
We look back at 2006, around the same time as Vertical War. YAGER dipped their toes into another Unreal Engine 3 project. Like Vertical War, Eye of the Storm was also meant to be a cover shooter, the genre that emerged during that time and would dominate the gaming market for some time.
Let us dive a bit deeper into the world of Eye of the Storm:
The year is 2050; the city of Chicago became quite the dystopian hellhole and was indefinitely encircled by a powerful hurricane and cut off from the outside world. So the name of the game can be taken quite literally, as Eye of the Storm was set in the Eye of the Storm.
Watch the video to get a better impression of the project:
A military regime ruled Chicago with an iron fist; their tool of the trade are so-called Goliaths, deadly mechs that they won’t shy away to use. You are playing an outlaw, formerly one of the best mech pilots around, now a mercenary working for the rebels to bring the regime to its knees.
During the single-player or co-op campaign, you would have uncovered the truth about your character and the storm. Using cover shooter mechanics, like in Vertical War, would have been the perfect fit for this dark and gritty version of Chicago, as we planned to use some verticality here as well. Furthermore, the mechs would provide engaging and challenging fights. We aimed for the David vs. Goliath feel (ha, the mechs even are called Goliath) and took some inspiration from a 2005 masterpiece: Shadow of the Colossus.
Learnings
As with Vertical War, we learned a lot about cover mechanics and third-person shooters in general while working on Eye of the Storm. Many ideas and learnings actually carried over to Spec Ops: The Line. We continued to play around with the idea of mechs, which will be tackled in our last Pitch Archives episode—Tin Men. And even the motif of the storm made a return in The Cycle and The Cycle: Frontier.
Thank you for watching and reading this episode of our YAGER Pitch Archives. We will be back with the last episode soon!
