He turned away from the computer, opened his arms in a gesture of openness and welcome, and asked a trick question.

"What do you know, and what do you want to know, about Prey?"

The question was a mild tease because the articulate designer, project producer Paul Schuytema, is only revealing bits and pieces, preferring instead to wait until the game is released and can generate its own hype. It is all part of his strategy to surprise and thrill players with a completely fresh and unexpected game experience. Still, there we were, an inquisitive group, and there was Schuytema, sitting in front of a computer, and delicious details were bound to flow.

A Novel Approach

Instead of loading the game, Schuytema folded his hands and indulged in a few minutes of basic enlightenment. He told us he was going to demonstrate an action game from 3D Realms Entertainment, the flagship title in a new fictional universe starring Talon Brave. Talon is not your typical "kick ass and chew bubble gum" hero we have become accustomed to in action games; rather, he is a disenfranchised Apache Indian who starts out wanting no part in the events that unfold. When the game opens, he is living in a small, dilapidated shed on a reservation in north-eastern Arizona, and working as a mechanic in a motor pool. He does not want to be there, but was forced to return due to familial troubles.

Talon is deeply cynical, and an important part of the game is connecting him to his tribal heritage. Character growth is a critical component of good drama; the protagonist must be a different person at the conclusion, otherwise there is no reason for him, or the narrative for that matter, to exist. "His great-grandfather was an Apache Shaman," Schuytema explained, "and we are going to have a spirit guide that will teach him things." Through strong character development alone, 3D Realms is taking the first-person shooter in new directions. You will care about who Talon is, feel concern for what happens to him, and be drawn into the game not just through his eyes, but also through his mind and soul. Even more than Kyle Katarn, who Talon is will have a dramatic impact on the game.

You may wonder if I am writing about the same 3D Realms that has been criticized for creating paper-thin ethnic caricatures, and I am. While the direction of one game does not indicate a shift in overall dogma, the developers of this title are going for a more serious tone. To that end, the team is doing extensive, careful research to give birth to a true-to-life Apache, not a bogus Tomahawk. According to Schuytema, the artists are working from a plethora of photographs to get the features just right, in particular the facial ones, and the entire group is researching Apache language, mythology, art, music, spiritualism, and shamanistic traditions to ensure Talon's heritage feels as rich and real as possible.

The game will accommodate an epic narrative of galactic proportions; a dark, violent, and intense science fiction tale Schuytema hopes will give us the feeling of having read a good novel. Although the details are being kept under wraps, Talon will battle a triad of alien species called the Trocara. During the game, the creatures abduct him and take him to their mothership, an immense ring-like ship with a manufactured sun in the center three times the circumference of Earth, and three land masses, each with its own atmosphere, that rotate around the sun. Schuytema said the first third of the game will take place in Arizona, while the final two-thirds will transpire on the mothership.

"The design reason for starting in Arizona is so we can introduce the visuals in a familiar environment," he explained. "Players will say, 'Oh! This is a trailer park!' The high visual fidelity will convince them to buy into the fiction of the game; then, when we throw them into an alien environment, they will trust us. They are going to be much more immersed, and that is important."

In a bit of conceptual irony, games are striving for ever-increasing levels of realism to augment their fictional settings. This hyper-realistic gaming includes elaborate geometry, high resolution graphics, multicolored lighting, intense combat against intelligent enemies, an insane arsenal, high levels of interaction, and much, much more. 3D Realms is working them all into the mix to ensure their game offers a powerful, stimulating experience. After all, the characters and narrative are important, but so is the code that defines the contours of the game and gives it life. Based on what I saw at E3, their approach is unique, and will offer an experience unmatched in the annals of 3D gaming.

Before Schuytema began his in-game demonstration, he explained an important feature the game has been modeled to take full advantage of -- portals. Due to recent applications, more and more people have become skeptical about their significance. Trust me, the implementation is astonishing, and will leave you slack-jawed with disbelief. There were a dozen great-looking 3D games at E3, but one game and one alone offered me visions never before imagined, due to portals.

As Schuytema explained it, portals are rips in space that connect two areas together. Simple as that. However, the gameplay ramifications are mind-boggling. With portals, there is no preprocessing of geometry, meaning the engine does not have to build a BSP tree, meaning the engine does not have to build a potentially visible set, meaning -- and this is important -- all geometry has the potential to be interactive. Instead of static geometries, the game will feature elaborate constructs that have absolute freedom of movement, and, instead of defined space, the game can contain folded space.

Having prepared us, Schuytema loaded the game; however, the scene was not at all uncommon. He stood in a small room, weapon in hand, and was being circled by a small, aerial robot. He aimed, fired, and it crashed to the ground. "What you have seen so far all good 3D engines can do," he admitted. "But have you ever seen anything like this?" He aimed at one side of the room, fired again, and the wall tumbled down. Our jaws fell with it. "I think not," he concluded. Not content with impressing us with a simple demonstration of active geometry, he shot the rest of the walls, avoiding the columns holding the ceiling in place. Then came the show stopper. He shot one of the columns, and the ceiling crashed to the floor in a flawless demonstration of the laws of nature. Need I elaborate on the possibilities? Talon will have a powerful impact on the worlds he explores. Plus, think of the vigorous deathmatches that will take place in levels that can be blown to pieces.

Portals can exist anywhere; in rooms, across environments, even across servers -- imagine looking through a portal at a game taking place on another server in real-time. The E3 portal demonstration, however, is a classic, and forever changed how I look at 3D games. To demonstrate the geometric implications of portals, Schuytema took us to a room that contained three large, concentric rings. Contained within the perimeter of one ring was a real-time portal to another level -- you could see Talon in a small bathroom room, poised for an attack. The rings began rotating, and the bathroom turned as well. Schuytema jumped through the portal, entered the bathroom, then turned a full 180 degrees to reveal the portal had disappeared. Also vanished were my finite notions of what is possible with virtual space. Imagine looking around a corner into another room and seeing your back peeking around the corner at the other end; picture entering a small hut and finding yourself in an immense outdoor arena. Those who call them nothing more than glorified teleporters will repent and convert.

Not certain we were convinced, Schuytema demonstrated one last portal acrobatic. "This will change you," he said, and we looked at each other with incredulous disbelief. He dropped two small gadgets on the floor and stepped back to let them do their thing. Within moments, a rip in space emerged through which he could see, and shoot, himself. The entire audience let out a spontaneous gasp. The fact that you can create and place a portal anywhere in the game will fundamentally change the manner in which people approach deathmatch.

To complete our portal education, Schuytema at last loaded up an actual game level. "Another cool feature you get with portals is you can increase the polygon count dramatically," he claimed. "You cannot do that for an entire level, but in certain areas, you can stuff in incredible detail."

He is in a small living room crammed with all conceivable details; an old television, a tattered couch, an ash tray sitting on a coffee table sitting on a worn-down rug, end tables, a chair, lamps emitting timid light, windows with shades, pictures on the walls, magazines strewn about the floor, and a beer can. The visual fidelity contained in this scene was remarkable; brick looked like brick, and wood looked like wood. Natural shadows and colored light spilled across the room in a manner so natural I almost missed it. It was, for all intents and purposes, a real-time scene that looked like a pre-rendered game. Schuytema zoomed in on the beer can so we could read the pixel-free label. It was getting so hot in the room, I had no troubling imagining what it would be like to pop the top and take a long, deep drink.

The living room and the rest of the apartment did a good job of showing off the lighting, which is among the best I have seen in a 3D game. The engine supports two major types of lighting: precalculated lighting done in the editor, and dynamic lighting, done in real-time. For the precalculated lighting, the game uses multi-pass radiosity lighting, meaning the light bounces around, and all surfaces act as light sources. Schuytema said the game also has ray-traced light, and negative light sources that "suck" light out of the environment. Good illumination enhances even the simplest scenes, which he demonstrated by showing off the smooth, lucid shadows resting on the walls under a staircase. On a larger scale, astounding alien structures will cast the same real-time architectural shadows. Combine this with the high resolution texture art and colored lighting, and Prey will contain unmatched visual prowess.

Schuytema then loaded up one of the alien cities to give us a sense of scale. He looked up from a batch of sun in the center of the ship through the atmosphere, and we could see the rest of the ship looping around the level. He shot a projectile at a looming structure, and it seemed to go on forever before it struck the outer walls. Since the exteriors are consistent with the architecture of the interiors, it will be possible to enter and ascend that building. "Oh," he said before leaving the area. "You will be able to fly out and travel to other parts of the ship, so there will be vehicles and other things to navigate." More gasps.

Pleased with our response, but not yet sure we were sufficiently wowed, Schuytema took a brisk walk to a spacious underwater area, which we viewed through a gorgeous glass-enclosed corridor. "Another cool thing about the game," he said, "is that reflective surfaces are self-referential portals." He looked down to see Talon staring at himself on a polished floor. "This is nothing new, but since the game is dealing with the geometry in real-time, we are not having to reprocess the image that is being shown in the reflection. There are no speed hits whatsoever."

He then looked through the glass at the water. A whale swam past, demonstrating the fluid character animation, and a submarine, which Schuytema said could be undocked and piloted, waited in the distance. He looked higher, through the water, through the city, and into the sun -- it was breathtaking. From the label on a beer can to the vastness of space, the awesome environments feel larger than the confines of a map.

He changed to the third-person view to show off the detail and precision of the Talon model. "We are not calling it a first-person shooter anymore because it can be played from the third-person perspective," he explained. The team is doing something different with the character animation. For instance, the weapon is not a detached model, but part of the character. When in first-person mode, Talon sees the gun in his hand through his eyes, which act as a true camera through which the entire game is viewed. Schuytema spun the third-person camera around to show Talon from the front, then did a weapons change, a fire mode change, and a reload. Each action was rendered with realistic animation. The icing on the cake is you will see all these changes in multiplayer.

"Check this out," he said, bending Talon at the waist and looking around. "His feet are not moving. We are using real-time skeletal deformation and building the model with each frame, so we can do some incredible stuff. For example, point a weapon, and it fires down the barrel; look down, and see your feet."

Up to this point, most of the discussion had centered on the engine and the solo game, with no mention of Internet gaming and end-user editing. However, these all-important features can add immeasurable life to a game, and 3D Realms is doing it right. First, there will be full Internet support, with LAN and modem games also possible. There will be no hard-coded limits to the number of players, though Schuytema estimates the game will be able to handle 128 participants.

One oft-requested feature in the game is migrating servers; if the main server drops out, the game moves to the server with the next-lowest ping time. Also, the game supports heterogeneous connections, meaning a LAN game can connect to an Internet game. According to Schuytema, this is not a vacuous prospect. It is in, it is done, it is gold! Although reluctant to hype something that has not been finalized, he also mentioned publisher GT Interactive is considering setting up a central hub where players can register their levels and place portals to them for all the world to enter. It will be the ideal place for meeting others, setting up games, jumping to other servers, and more. Our hopes for a networked 3D gaming world might at last come to fruition.

For editing fanatics, the final product will ship with the same in-house tools used to create the game -- the editor, cleverly called Preditor, and Skinner, the tool that lets you take 3D content and turn it into game actors. Preditor is a functional tool that will enhance, not encumber, creative efforts. If you have tried one of the cumbersome 3D game editors and given up all hope of creating levels, perk up. While you can configure the program to operate like a traditional 3D modeling package, with front, left, and top views, it offers a much more intuitive full-screen mode. Best of all, you edit within the game engine itself, constructing architecture, placing portals, aligning textures, and lighting the environment, all while moving around in first-person. Plus, forget all you know about brushes; in Preditor, you create geometry where it is needed, and use it where it fits. It is the first editing tool to bring the simplicity and power of Build to the next generation.

"Since Preditor uses the engine, it is WYSIWYG," Schuytema boasted. "Light something, and it will look just like it will in the game. Create some interactive geometry, set it in motion, and you will see how it will act in the game. It is all very intuitive." Another cool thing about the editor running on top of the game engine is it is networkable. You will be able to connect with other users and build levels together, which will be a powerful teamwork and learning tool -- experts will be be able to show novices the ropes first hand. Schuytema even joked about connecting to levels in progress and adjusting the textures while his mappers were looking the other way.

Both Preditor and Skinner read VRML 2, since most users can obtain a program that exports in that data format. Thus, actor models for the game are created within a separate 3D program; Skinner then works with the exported data to create the actor files as well as its own internal editing files. From within Skinner, bones are associated with the model, and the models are textured. While no tool can create an artist, Skinner does put the power of creation in the hands of the user. Other companies either discourage user editing, let people program their own editors, or charge for the tools. 3D Realms is placing the finished tools on the CD for free, and putting forth the effort to make it simple enough a casual user can be up and running with basic operations in a single sitting. This altruistic approach will nurture the industry, and bring new followers to the flock.

Much has been said, yet much remains unsaid, and that is how it should be. Schuytema told us in a recent interview, "Part of my vision is that we surprise the player with this game. We want to make them feel things they were not quite expecting from an action game." To do this, 3D Realms is withholding most details regarding the weapons, creatures, and environments, and releasing a scant selection of screenshots.