Several gameplay videos debuted today for Portal 2, perhaps next year’s most anticipated sequel. One video shows the first footage of the game’s new two-player cooperative mode, while trailers highlight specific new features of its high-tech environment that can be exploited by the player.
The original Portal was short but widely celebrated for its innovative conceit and intelligent approach to narrative. Instead of asking the player to shoot enemies, the game offered a “portal gun” that created temporary new openings in the world. A heightened understanding of three-dimensional space, rather than fast reflexes, thus carried players through Portal’s antiseptic mazes. Meanwhile, players built a love-hate relationship with the omniscient AI narrator GLaDOS, who was at turns sympathetic, deceitful, and openly antagonistic.
Like a proper sequel, Portal 2 will expand on its predecessor’s gameplay and story. An earlier video shows the player (as silent female protagonist Chell) being guided through the ruins of the first game’s Aperture Labs by a harried “personality core” named Wheatley, whereupon they encounter a newly awakened GLaDOS. According to Valve, Wheatley—voiced by English actor Stephen Merchant—plays a major role in the narrative, as do other cores.
The trailers released today suggest that Portal 2’s gameplay is considerably more complex. Whereas the original puzzles were largely based on moving oneself, weighted cubes, and balls of energy through well-placed portals, Portal 2 offers new ways to move through space.
Among the most entertaining elements of the game are the messy, colored gels that spurt out of large pipes. Blue repulsion gels”act as springboards, and red propulsion gels”radically accelerate the momentum of moving objects. These are appear to be products of a new programming team from the DigiPen Institute of Technology that Valve recently recruited. Its 2009 student game, Tag: The Power of Paint, was another first-person puzzler in which players fired similar gels from a gun.
After seeing Portal 2 and getting to know the team, the decision to combine their tech with Portal 2 came naturally,”says Doug Lombardi, Valve’s vice president of marketing. Another DigiPen student game, Narbacular Drop, formed the basis of he first Portal.
Other elements include “faith plates,” reminiscent of spring pads in platformers such as Sonic the Hedgehog, that vault the player into the air. Light bridges can be moved and extended with portals, as can “excursion funnels,”columns of light that pull you and other objects in their direction. Energy beams must be redirected with portals and reflective cubes to generate power, and pneumatic diversity vents”(or vacuum tubes) can be punctured to violent effect. While moving through Portal usually meant bypassing the environment, it’s significant that Portal 2 asks players to consider how the architecture can be rebuilt.
But the most heavily requested feature among fans was a multiplayer capability. Today’s co-op trailer shows two players—as a pair of chummy anthropomorphic robots, a former gun turret and personality core—launching each other through portals and working together to reach otherwise inaccessible locations. The co-op levels will be self-contained and feature a parallel narrative to the single-player game, according to Valve. While a multiplayer mode is sometimes thought to dilute the focus of a single-player narrative, Valve may have sidestepped these concerns by giving Portal 2 co-op players unique, and inhuman, bodies.
A bit part of that decision is to allow players to ‘become’ those characters while they are playing co-op, Lombardi says of the robots. In multiplayer games, the best stories arise from the players’experience during the game session. We haven’t given them a name yet, and may not for the same reason.”
They don’t talk, but they do have expressive noises,”he adds. Although many gamers communicate with voice headsets, they will also be able to coordinate their plans with visual icons, as well as give each other hugs and high-fives in the game.
Portal 2 is scheduled for Feb. 9, 2011 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Windows and Mac. You can view the complete trailers at
Valve’s official site.
