Listen All'a Y'all It's A Sabotage

Pandemic Studios (a recent aquisition of publishing behemoth EA) has had this one in the kiln for some time now. Although not much is known regarding core gameplay, Saboteur (X360, PS3) seems to be shaping up as an action-stealth-sandbox hybrid that promises some innovative graphical twists -- specifically, a gameplay element known as "will to fight". From Wikipedia:

Color will be a key-element in the gameplay, and players will experience an Okami-esque style when entering certain parts of the city. In order to make that district colored ("happy") again, players must weaken the German forces occupying the area. In doing so, that district's citizens will regain their hope, characterized by what has been called the "Will to fight" factor. In areas with low WtF, the area is dark, with color being various shades of grey (with the notable and sinister exception of several historically-accurate German Flag types, complete with swastika), whereas in areas with high WtF, the area is vibrant and with full color.

In addition, areas with a low WtF will be portrayed as being suffocatingly dense with lovable Krauts, while in high WtF areas, the soldiers will be far more sparse and mostly concentrated within bases, barracks, and -- if all goes well -- brothels.

It's always refreshing when a developer approaches the visual side of things with more than just an impetus toward prettier, sharper, and more folds per square foot being sported by character models. Given that we're already seeing the first glimmers of photorealistic fidelity in gaming, devs will have to get a little more conceptually creative to be seen as having pushed the envelope graphically throughout the next generation of platforms -- after all, you can't make something look more real than real, not unless Assassin's Creed 2 ships with complementary psilocybin. After that whole near-perfect visual fidelity banchmark is met and we all own GPUs dedicated to rendering water, we're probably going to want to see some risks getting taken.

On a personal note, here's hoping that Pandemic regals us with a little bit of that old-fashioned stealth gaming the likes of Hitman or Deus Ex, and not that craptacular alert-status mechanism made possible by what I can only assume is Altair's pager.

For the curious, Saboteur previews and screenshots can be found over at Gamespot (down, but not out!)