Preview Max Payne 3 (Part One)

Dear habrochane! I present to you the first part of the translation of the Max Payne 3 preview from the July issue of Game Informer.

The bald man with a beard on the cover of the magazine barely looks like a hero with whom we experienced the events of two parts of this successful game. He became very old after the tragic events of Max Payne 2, he grew stronger and got new scars. If not for the logo on the cover, you would hardly recognize it.
This is Rockstar Games' first experience in developing the games of this series, as Remedy Entertainment was previously responsible for this, but Rockstar bought the rights and now the franchise is on its conscience. “It’s not so easy to work with a franchise that you didn’t work with initially,” Rockstar art director Rob Nelson shared with us. “You must not only preserve the features of the game, but also let the series develop. We are not Remedy, but we respect what they did. ”
“We are trying to preserve all the elements that players liked eight or nine years ago, but our main task is to make these elements affect the player now. This is very difficult, because we need not only to continue the history of the game, but also to create a new world that modern gamers will love. We have in our hands a series from which people expect a lot and, you know, this is a huge pressure, ”Nelson tells us. “We challenge ourselves, we follow our instincts, trust our intuition.” At Rockstar's New York office, we (GI reporters - translator's note) were the first to see the game in action. If you expect to see a banal sequel, then get ready to be surprised. In the third part, Max will be in places where he has never been before, but at the same time, the game will retain its signature gameplay, which made the series reputable.

Urban jungle

Rockstar Games, like no other publisher, wants in its games to be able to feel the culture of the place of the game. Whether it's the crazy Liberty City, the Bully country school campus, or the hot desert being developed by Red Dead Redemption, the characters are almost always the perfect reflection of the setting. The company is known for creating such amazing and well-developed worlds that sometimes they are difficult to distinguish from real ones. Gloomy and depressing New York, the atmosphere of classical noir, cinematography, cut scenes in the form of a graphic novel - these are the first two parts of Max Payne. However, Rockstar Vancouver decided to drop Max as far from the Big Apple as possible - to the fast-growing Brazilian metropolis of São Paulo, with its population of 20 million people.
“Remember movies like City of God and Elite Squad - really tense situations are happening in Latin America, it's an ideal setting,” says Geronimo Berrera, vice president of Rockstar’s development department.
This setting is a real testing ground for experiments. The Sao Paulo Ghetto is one of the most dangerous places in the world. In addition to drug trafficking, one of the most famous urban gangs, Primero Comanda da Capital, settled here. This gang is responsible for numerous prison riots, robberies and kidnappings. Add to this the corrupt police and shocking statistics: every 75th resident carries a weapon. Not surprisingly, killing is the main cause of death among young people. They do not live in Sao Paulo - they survive there, and this makes it a great place to play. “You are waiting for giant skyscrapers with expensive penthouses, standing right in the middle of the slums,” Berrera said. “São Paulo is full of helipads on the roofs of buildings. For the rich, air travel is the safest.Rockstar with its characteristic meticulousness explored São Paulo: more than a dozen workers were sent there to photograph, collect information and “absorb” the atmosphere of the city. They even brought 3D scanning equipment with them, which would allow any little things in the game to look authentic.
“We had a lot of problems at customs with this equipment,” recalls Nelson. “We scanned hundreds of people, worked with casting agencies, we explained to them what we needed and they sent us hundreds of photos. People came in their everyday clothes and we scanned them. ” Berrera believes that paranoid attention to detail is an integral part of the development. “This is exactly what you need,” he says. “Combining key elements together - technology, development, history. That's why our games look right.

A new kind of noir

Many had the question: “What the hell is Max Payne, a former New York police detective, forgotten in São Paulo?” As in any good noir story, it will be damn difficult for us to get to the truth. The developers immediately stopped talking when it came to spoilers, but still we managed to find out something:
After the events told in MP2, notoriety is assigned to Max. Alcoholism and an addiction to painkillers turned him into a completely depressed person. Having lost their jobs in the police, Payne's next 12 years of life turn into a continuous fall to the bottom. The developers describe this period as the "lost years" of Max's life. We don’t know the details, but one thing is clear - this period exhausted our hero spiritually and physically. Alcoholics call their "bottom" their life when it can no longer be worse. Max reaches his bottom in Sao Paulo, the city to which he moves to escape from his "demons" who were chasing him in New York. With the help of dubious connections, he becomes the bodyguard of one of the most influential families in the city. The work throws Max into the dark world of the slums of Sao Paulo, he becomes a participant in a series of events, which may cost him the only thing left with him - life. Immediately very unusual to see the new Max - pumped up, bearded and bald-headed, wading through the maze of streets of Sao Paulo.
This world is definitely far from the rain-flooded streets of New York, but the developers believe that the new setting for a noir game is no less suitable than the one that made previous games so memorable. “Some will say that Max Payne should be black and white and take place in New York,” says Berrera, “but noir is a style, not a place and a specific color scheme. Noir is not only saxophones and big shadows - it is a view of a world that is losing its colors. Here's what we do: we refresh Max »


upd: The second part of the article is here .
upd2: Added some pictures. Everything is clickable.