After yesterday's enigmatic announcement of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Creative Lead Adrian Chmielarz, formerly of Bulletstorm (in)fame has added some new details. Most notable amongst them that there will be no combat, at all. None. Which is a bit of a U-turn considering how heavily Bulletstorm relied on it. I bet that was a shock huh? A game called Bulletstorm having lots of shooty death in it. With a name like that, who'd have guessed? Hopefully this also means they'll veer away from the gratuitous dick jokes as well. But I digress. The long and the short of the, relevant, information is that, as yesterday's announcement suggested, the emphasis is very much on an immersive, narrative and tone driven game.

"It's not about shooting monsters. Not that there's anything wrong with that. After all, I did design Painkiller and Bulletstorm and I enjoy grinding meat with bullets as much as the next guy. But I wanted to make a different kind of game for a very long time, and now it can finally happen. The focus of the game is its escapist factor: the immersion, the exploration and the discovery. But it wouldn't make much sense to play as a detective if you weren't doing any detecting, would it? So there's a little bit of that, but again, the focus is not on mind bending puzzles, but on unsettling discoveries. Take Dear Esther, add gameplay, murder and corpses. That's the closest to what The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is. A few amazing games like The Walking Dead or Journey have already proven that third-person can work perfectly fine for emotions, but I think that when it comes to immersion, it's hard to beat first-person perspectives. This may be just me, but I get a better sense of presence in the virtual world if it happens in first-person. And that sense of presence is exactly what we are after. We want the players to feel like they're really there, shiver when it's cold and lower their heads when it's windy."