The developers of SOE, VIS entertainment, and the publishers, Rockstar Games, decided that the target demographic for the PS2 more closely fitted with the target audience of SOE. During the pre-production period on SOE, Sony announced the development of the PlayStation 2 (PS2). It was also decided to change the lead platform.
However the gameplay was not engaging enough, so the style of game was changed to a 3rd person action game, rather than a mix of two quite different genres.
This demonstrated the gameplay, but not the graphics. SOE's target audience more close fitted the PS2's target demographic than the Dreamcast for which it was originally planned.Ī 2D prototype of the game was produced. The core feature of the game, namely the number and complexity of the characters contained within it, would simply not have been possible on previous generations of consoles. Development on SOE started on the Dreamcast, the intention was that SOE would be a game that was truly "next-generation". The game would be a hybrid of the strategy and action genres. The player would control hundreds of characters, who in turn, could fight hundreds of other characters. The original concept for State of Emergency (SOE) was that of a riot simulator. The article also shows that different high and low-level optimizations were required make SOE work on the contrasting architecture of the Xbox, and to achieve higher levels of performance. The resulting Xbox engine is capable of displaying the same number of characters as the PS2 version, but at 60 frames-per-second (fps), as opposed to 30fps. In particular, the code that previously had utilized the vector unit processors.
This article shows that the approach taken was to develop a very specialized Xbox rendering engine that was optimized to perform extremely well in areas of the engine that had relied on the high-performance of specific PS2 hardware.
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