FRACKED: Characters
PLAYER CHARACTER
Although you never see your character in-game, we wanted players to roleplay as a larger-than-life, aspirational, and capable action hero. This is all the more empowering in VR. 80s cinematic classics, with Die Hard being a particular touchstone, all factored into our designs, including everything from VO to character models. Our hero is a retired special forces operative, giving him an athletic build, believable agility, and military know-how. Our weapons and equipment adhere to the same artistic pillars as the Fracked world - maximising the fun factor with their oversized, colourful, and tactile designs, all of which are optimised for VR.
Final concepts for the Player character.
Early internal action poster featuring a more grizzled version of our eventual lead character.
More early concepts where we experimented with a few different directions before settling on our character.
Finch, the dastardly billionaire mastermind behind the mining operation, owner and operator of Finchteq, and initially telegraphed as the main bad guy.
Wilson turns out to be your main nemesis! He went through a wide range of looks throughout the game as we constructed our narrative...
For Wilson, we settled on a character with a military General aesthetic and background. He is a frequent presence throughout the game audibly, rather than visually, but you do eventually encounter and fight him in a climactic battle on the rig.
Like the Fracked enemies, Wilson is also infected/altered visually by crystalline infection, although you really only see it about his face in this shot.
During production, we explored creating a fully crystalline version of Wilson, but that was eventually abandoned.