Examination of "00000002001"

Scientists Concept Art by 3D Realms/Slipgate Ironworks. Taken from Twitter.

I started to notice how my interest in all kinds of games started to slowly increase lately. Current state of Warcraft and Blizzard themselves gets more tiresome day by day, so sticking around them is getting harder. On the other hand, my interest in upcoming 3D Realms releases has really bumped up recently among other things.

At the time of Realms Deep 2020, GRAVEN and teaser of Ion Fury: Aftershock were the things that got all my attention. Now I looked deeper into Core Decay, got to know about Kingpin: Life of Crime more than before (basically nothing) and Rise of the Triad with SiN suddenly grew on me even more. It went from "Oh, neat" to "Would be nice to play them".

Which leave only one unannounced FPS from 3D Realms that's currently titled "00000002001" on their Discord server. Even though there's next to no actual information about it and I might very well end up being not be really interested in this game after its proper announcement, I thought it would be nice to dig up what's known since I like that sort of thing.

Look for Clues.

Major source of information, as previously mentioned, will be coming  from 3D Realms' Discord server. They opened a text channel for this unannounced game on October 14, 2020. After that a few clues were dropped by Frederik Schreiber: its a "big one" internal FPS on Unreal Engine 4 with Chuck Jones and Dirk. A Jones are involved. Playstation 5 release and the name of two maps were also dropped: "Grand Canyon Facility" and "Grand Canyon Chase". Nothing much was said afterwards (not that I could spot), besides "See you all next year" as this game is at early stages of the development. Very early.

They've been looking for voice actors, programmers and animators for an unannounced FPS. Even though only one of them referred to 2021 (before it was added to title in Discord), its possible that other positions are related to a different project and models themselves might be not related to either of titles. What's known is that 3D Realms got two Half-Life modders as a level designers: Urby (The Core) and Mr_Floyd (Decay: Solo Mission). Most likely for 00000002001 as a concept art from 3D Realms was mentioned on The Core's ModDB post and Frederik himself hinted at it under Mr_Floyd's announcement on Twitter.

And if you think that this game will have some strong Half-Life vibes, then perhaps you might be right. We'll go back to that later.

Inspiration Bet.

Some people might point at Motherflakker: a prototype of Ion Fury game that they worked on during its development. It was shown on 3D Realms/Slipgate Tour video among some other unreleased stuff. Even though initially it started off from an idea of "what would first person Bombshell game look like if it was based around 1997-1998 era graphics", later on it moved into 2001 style... I guess? Not sure, really. At least that's how 3D Realms referred to it in a tweet they made as response to community's feedback after release of that video.

More likely candidate is a 2001 build of Duke Nukem Forever that was talked about a lot back in ~2017-2018. An almost finished version of the game that's apparently similar to Half-Life and Deus Ex, which isn't surprising all things considered. Long story short, 3D Realms really wanted to release this version for free, but eventually they hit a "dead end", a.k.a. corporate greed.

Lastly, there seems to be a lot of connections with Half-Life. We talked about that before. Some might say that it had certain influence on Duke Nukem Forever at various point of its development, not to mention the effect it had on industry as a whole. Other releases from the same year include Serious Sam: The First Encounter, Halo: Combat Evolved, Return to Castle Wolfenstein... and Half-Life: Blue Shift & Decay, funnily enough. In theory, they also could've played some role here.

Painting the Picture.

While I tend to believe that it was a starting point for 00000002001, I highly doubt it would something even close to Motherflakker as it was "put aside" after they finished presented demo. If we consider models from previously mentioned hiring tweets to be related to this titles, then you can see a connection to Ion Fury franchise as one of the shown soldiers appears to be a part of Global Defense Force. In this case, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets some kind of a teaser in Aftershock.

Then you could make another point of it being more "modern" from visual side of things: more Bombshell and less GRAVEN. Which isn't really surprising in grand scheme of things as 3D Realms worked on a lot of retro games, so it would make sense that Slipgate Ironworks would wish to get their hands on something different for a change.

"GDF" Model by 3D Realms/Slipgate Ironworks. Taken from Twitter.

In terms of gameplay, I'm inclined to believe that 00000002001 is going to be a spiritual successor to DNF's 2001 build. Since it seems unlikely that it'll see a light of day (any time soon, at least) and 3D Realms can't just leak it after sending various builds to Gearbox, they'll probably take some major inspirations from it. There have been examples when some projects overhauled after companies expressed their dissatisfaction with usage of their intelectual properly (Bombshell, for example): its possible that 3D Realms took similar route here, but I have my doubts. Not to mention that they're definitely adding some of that Half-Life flavor in this title and maybe even a bit of Deus Ex, who knows.

Looking back at the possibility of this game being related to Ion Fury, another thing I'm not sure about is if Shelly would be its protagonist. When I think about it, the idea of playing as different character in the same world could work pretty well: you know, maybe some kind of cyborg mercenary fighting against GDF and stuff like that. It actually could be an interesting topic for "Just an Idea" post, but I wouldn't get mad or anything like that if Bombshell will lead the way in this game.