Road to a Weird Kind of Immortality

During the gap between when our PCs became capable of running large-scale open-world games, and developers became capable of actually programming them, there was this. True fans called it Xenus, but Atari’s marketing division called it Boiling Point: Road

XENUS or BOILING POINT: ROAD TO HELL

DEVELOPER UKRAINIAN OUTFIT DEEP SHADOWS. RELEASED 2005 NUTSHELL Wander an open world managing your reputation among no fewer than six factions, upgrade your skills, meet RPGs, lose hours of progress thanks to terrible bugs, and maybe become part of a small but loyal fanbase that has persisted for nearly 13 years…

Games released in the second decade of the 21st century are spoiled by technology. And it’s not just that they run on incredibly powerful and increasingly standardised hardware. More than that, developers now have access to a huge pantry of renderers and physics engines, APIs and plugins.

But Xenus was built in 2005 by a bunch of dudes in Ukraine, and so it had its own engine - the Vital engine! That engine did its best, but alas, the job Deep Shadows expected it to do was… well, it was substantial.

Were the game being promoted today, we’d think oh yes, how very Far Cry: Edgily-bald protagonist Saul Myers receives an urgent call from his mutantbreasted daughter. Things are going bad in Columbia! Or, after Atari picked up the game, the fictional Columbia-like country of Realia! Fortunately Myers is a veteran of the French Foreign Legion, so he immediately gets himself to Realia where nobody cares that an ex-member of one of the world’s most feared elite multinational fighting units has just walked through customs only several months after his journalist daughter.

Anyway, Myers makes his way to a 25km x 25km valley filled with tropical jungle, two major cities, and dozens of camps, outposts and “Indian” villages.

There, much as he would were he a Far Cry hero, he must pursue various leads and gain more and more map-control by doing odd jobs for the game’s six factions (plus the CIA).

So: 25km x 25km map, fully open world, drivable vehicles, RPG mechanics, scripted missions and random events, dozens of NPCs with dialogue trees, persistent world state, and six factions. All this running on 2005 hardware, using 2005 software.

Just to remind you: back in 2005 Nvidia had just released its 6-series cards. And I don’t mean the GeForce 680, I mean the GeForce 6800, which had been engineered for AGP and only had PCIe prongs soldered to it at the last minute. It had 512MB of RAM, and supported DirectX 9. Truly, it was the dark ages. So Xenus was really a dancing bear: that it ran well should not be important: the real miracle was that the game ran at all.

Even so, when you pay $100 for an open-world game that lets you be a French Foreign Legion badass while championing male-pattern-baldness, it is reasonable to expect that when you trigger scripts, those scripts actually, you know, trigger.

On release, Xenus was the software equivalent of a giant ball of rubber bands into which has been embedded hundreds of mousetraps. Do you dare to poke?

A massive 2.0 patch addressed many of the most common problems, including such minor quirks as “landscape not rendering when flying plane” and “prisoners get stuck in walls when delivered”. Grenades were updated to bounce off walls and explode rather than

that it ran well should not be important: the real miracle was that the game ran at all

stick (next to the prisoners), the money promised to the player when taking on a mission actually gets paid, boats no longer appear to be filled with water, and perhaps most importantly of all: dogs finally get shadows.

Charmingly, the translated-from-Ukrainian chang-elog refers to NPCs having improved “IA” - which presumably stands for Intelligence Artificielle, on account of how Myers is ex-Foreign Legion.

“Characters move when hooting [sic], adapt their behaviour according to the situation”, “flowers in Granny’s hands” and “too big Moon has been readjusted” are also patch notes for the ages.

Xenus is obviously a very easy game to make fun of, but I actually reviewed the thing for PCPP back in 2005, and while I saw the bugs - oh boy did I see the bugs - I also saw an incredibly exciting future for the kind of scope PC could let game developers achieve.

Sure, GTA San Andreas had come out on console in 2004 and hit PC in 2005, but that worked through fakery.

You can go anywhere in GTA (after you unlock the whole map, remember that?) but every actual activity is a matter of you triggering an event and then following the prompts.

Xenus kept the PC-like complexity we demanded from games like Morrowind, but added in lots of tasty FPS stuff. Weapons, weapon proficiencies, driving, flying, and of course the dynamic faction system.

That extra layer of complexity made it more X3 (also a 2005 release, also broken on launch) than Far Cry 2. Xenus was a game with stats and numbers, but also a world-simulator. It took the abstraction of a RPG and boiled it down to a believable setting. It had the potential to make you realise what “Strength: 13” really means.

Unfortunately, something went wrong in the boiling process. It’s all too easy to blame the technology, but at least a few fingers should be pointed at Atari. It’s a boring accusation, but a true one: the publisher jumped the gun and forced Xenus onto the world with nothing more than a tenuous marketing link to The Mummy star Arnold Vosloo (Myer’s model is based on him), and a name change, to Boiling Point: Road to Hell. While the first wave of reviews excoriated Deep Shadows’ life’s work, the developer ignored the building social unrest in Ukraine and diligently provided the afore mentioned 2.0 patch. Reviews from after the patch were much more positive, excited even. It wasn’t enough to keep Atari interested in Deep Shadows. The relationship ended. Even so, the developer kept on working and released Xenus 2 within the Commonwealth of Independent States.

An English version was digitally-distributed for a while, but it had to be tough, working in a territory that was, you know, collapsing into war.

And yet, even today, there are still fans of both games. So in the middle of all the coups and publisher betrayals, Deep Shadows must have managed to do something right…