Radical Entertainment senior producer Tim Bennison recently talked to Gamasutra all about Prototype, elaborating a bit on its New York City-based "open world thriller" and promising ongoing evolution throughout the game that goes beyond what's been done in open-world titles like GTA in the past:
"I don't know if I'm right about this, but I think it's the first open-world game where not only the player evolves over time - which is pretty standard - but so does the world. The world is not the same at the beginning as at the end of our game. Even in a game like Scarface or GTA, the world is really the same. You've changed, and you've built your empire and whatnot, but that's it."
Bennison also defined what he means by evolution:
"When we say New York evolves in our game, we mean that it's almost like a giant game of Risk. Territorial control ebbs and flows across the map of Manhattan.
At the beginning of the game, it's neutral. There's a few little incidents, and you're involved in them. But as the game progresses, there's outbreak zones that are infected. They're no-go zones that get walled off, and you don't want to go in there, unless you're really strange. There's also militarized zones next to them and trying to control them. That flares. It's almost like a forest fire. There's flare-ups. But as the game progresses, the military declares martial law and locks the media and everything down. It starts to become pretty well one or the other, and it evolves even further."
Sounds ambitious; maybe the developer's large-scale goals for the single-player mode were the reason why they decided to bag multiplayer.
Q&A: Creating Intrigue In Prototype's Open Worlds [Gamasutra]