Jagged Alliance 3D Hands-On Preview

Jagged Alliance 3D E3 gameplay impressions

MiST land - South is creating the newest chapter of the Jagged Alliance story.  In Jagged Alliance, the player is in charge of a team of mercenaries (mercs) whose goal is to free a small African country from the clutches of rebel forces.  Elena Melnikova, PR manager of MiST land - South, performed a demo of Jagged Alliance 3D at this year's E3 in Los Angeles.  The game is in pre-Beta condition and not all of the gameplay has been finalized. While I did not play the game for very long, I did learn the following regarding Jagged Alliance 3D's gameplay.

Communication with NPC's
Instead of the choice of communication styles or moods (Friendly, Direct, Threaten, etc.) available in Jagged Alliance 2, the player will now be given a choice of 3 or 4 actual responses. Your choices in questions will direct the conversation. The available conversation choices will depend upon how friendly you are with that NPC character and your previous responses. If you have done bad things in the game, most NPC's will not like you or want to help you. Sometimes fighting will start if you say the wrong thing to the wrong NPC (much like Conrad in JA2).  So getting into someone's headquarters may be easier than getting out!

Character line-of-sight
If a mercenary can't see an enemy or a NPC, neither can you. When a mercenary sees an enemy, it becomes visible to the player as well. If you turn your back on the enemy, expect him to remind you of his presence with a bullet or a knife. However, the demo I viewed did not have all of the AI installed.  There was a situation in which I had one merc shoot one of two enemies in the back from 1 yard (meter) away. During the same turn, another of my team members (Scope) walked into the hut and was 10 yards (meters) in front of the two enemies.  Both enemies opened up on Scope, even though the merc behind them was the greater threat (having put a bullet into one enemy's back). MiST land told me that the AI was not completed and that the enemies would be at least as self-aware as in JA2.

Camera angles
Unlike JA2, you can change the viewing angle. You can zoom in or out, rotate right or left and change the viewing angle to directly overhead or nearly horizontal. The default viewing angle is similar to JA2's.

Real-time and turn-based
Like in JA2, each mission will start in real-time mode and changes to turn-based when enemies are nearby. Strategy First originally intended for Jagged Alliance 3D to be solely real-time, but the fans were so upset that the combination real-time/turn-based gameplay was reinstated.

Mission types
There will be different types of missions which are more like quests than stand-up battles.  There will be recon missions where you need to get your team to a certain location.

Screenshots
As you can see from the global map screenshot (top shot), Jagged Alliance 3D looks just like an updated version of the Jagged Alliance 2 global map. I'm a little confused by all the different scenes in the upper portion of the screen, but the quality of the map itself is good.  It also shows the possible strategic options for one of the mercs from JA2. The option to assign the merc to a specific team has been removed, but the rest of the options from JA2 look to be the same.

The other two screenshots show the merc and the available inventory (middle shot), and the merc being equipped with same (bottom shot). Even in the 2-D portion of the game, it's clear from the weapons and body armor that the graphics are much improved over JA2 (which is to be expected). I hope the merc's portraits are also updated, otherwise they will seem out-of-date.

Music
MiST land was kind enough to send StrategyCore a sample of the game's music.  Download it and you'll hear for yourself that MiST land was correct when they said, in the first article, that they were proud of their audio abilities.  The music does a good job of setting the mood and is in keeping with the African locale.

Odds and Ends
You can target certain body areas (head, torso, arms, legs), but it costs more action points and you are less likely to hit them.

In the current version of JA 3D, you cannot loot an enemy unless he is dead (no more punch & grab tactics to improve your weapon mix, and no more healing dying enemies, looting the weapon he is holding, and then killing him, you Hippocratic Oath breaking heathens!)

Your mercenaries can run, walk, sidestep, crouch and crawl.

When mercs change out their helmets or body armor, their appearance changes to match. As you would expect, animations are much improved over JA2.

Conclusion
Jagged Alliance 3D is in no doubt a 3D game in the Jagged Alliance universe.  After speaking with the MiST land representatives, I got the very strong impression that they want to please (or pacify, depending on how you look at it) the fans of the Jagged Alliance 2 games.  The fan-directed change back to turn-based combat was a good move, but few fan requests have equal merit.  I get the feeling that MiST land has been constrained in adding new features to the game for fear of upsetting the most vocal of the fan-base.  I played the original Jagged Alliance game back in 1994.  I loved the game and so looked forward to Jagged Alliance 2 that, even though I don't know German, I bought the German version since it came out a couple months before the English one. I've played most of the English language fan-created mods, and some of the German and Russian ones as well. But if the fans of the original game were as insistent on keeping Jagged Alliance 2 the same as the original game, Jagged Alliance 2 would never have been the hit that it was.