The original steampunk theme was dropped and replaced by a grittier, darker, more desolate future. The main character was redesigned from a muscle-bound action hero to a more faceless protagonist in a full body suit, into which Peschel hopes players will project themselves. I noted the similarities between this approach and that of Valve with its Half-Life series, and Peschel spoke on the reasoning for a "blank slate" protagonist but was hesitant to draw too strong a parallel to the iconic Gordon Freeman.

"You've got Gordon Freeman, and it's not believable that a scientist is out there kicking that much ass," he argued. "You're a fuckin' scientist. Then there's the case of the Master Chief [in Bungie's Halo], it's not believable that I'm him, because he's some type of special ops guy, or maybe he's a cyborg under the suit, or maybe there's nothing there at all and it's just the suit. What I hope to accomplish with the TimeShift main character is that you believe, 'If I put this suit on, I could be this person.' That's always what's been fascinating to me. When I read the Spider-Man and Superman comics as a kid, Superman was awesome but I couldn't be Superman. But I kind of secretly believed I could be Spider-Man, provided I could find the right spider to bite me. That's what I hope to accomplish with TimeShift, is that you believe, 'I could be this guy.'"

In an attempt to bridge the gap between the completely wordless Gordon-type hero and the more personality-infused hero seen in Human Head's Prey ("Tommy would say, 'Whoa, that's some spooky shit,' and I looked around and was like 'Who's talking?'"), the time-manipulating suit the player wears in TimeShift is equipped with an AI system called S.A.M., which helps the player assess given situations. Apparently, earlier in development, the team realized that rather than learning to use all three of the game's time powers--slow, stop, and reverse--players would end up harping on the most obvious one--stop--and use it exclusively. To better equip players to use all three powers in appropriate situations, the interface was stripped down and S.A.M. was added as a halfway point to decide on a contextual basis what power fits the current situation best.

"To better explain the suit, I probably have to better explain the storyline," said Peschel when asked about how this mechanic works. "Krone takes the alpha suit, which is the old game suit--I have no problem poking fun at our older version, it's actually the one from that [development period]. He jumps through time with it, and you jump after him in the beta suit, the military-grade suit. It's much more slick. It comes with two primary features that the alpha suit doesn't have. One is auto-recall. If you end up in the Jurassic period and some dinosaur is about to step on you, it sends you back through time so the suit doesn't end up in the wrong hands. The second thing that it has is a really infantile AI program called S.A.M., which stands for Strategic System for Adaptable Metacognition. As you work through, you have almost a co-character in the suit for you. It doesn't talk to you, it doesn't do goofy shit, but something's got to assess who's a threat and how you can counteract that threat, and that's what S.A.M. brings to the table. As S.A.M. starts that auto-recall, it malfunctions. It tries to self-repair, and those attempts manifest as these time shifting abilities that slow, stop, and reverse time. The game is designed in such a fashion that, almost all the time, any of the powers will work, but what I'm trying to provide the user with is these actual different solutions to understand how you can work with the situations. Otherwise, I've found that users become too reliant on one ability over another."

Peschel gave a few examples of such situations. In a dangerous combat situation, it tends to be obvious which power makes the most sense. If a grenade is about to explode on top of you, time reversal is the most appropriate, as it will remove the threat. If an enemy rocket has just been fired, one may want to stop time and shoot the rocket so it explodes at its source. If that rocket is already on its way, you can simply slow time and evade or destroy it before it reaches its target. Unlike the time-controlling ability in Ubisoft Montreal's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (PS2, Xbox, GCN, PC), TimeShift's time mechanics keep the player divorced from the temporal manipulations--while the rest of the game is being stopped, reversed, or slowed, you continue to operate in real time. This allows for unusual strategies such as being able to go back in time to ambush would-be ambushers from their own ambush point, and also opens up some interesting possibilities for physics-based puzzles.

It must be stated that TimeShift's visuals have come a long, long way since the game was shown in demo form last year. Since that point, it went through an overhaul to bring it up to speed for Xbox 360, but Peschel noted that even then the game had a great deal of legacy geometry and textures, and did not feel up to par with modern shooters. It was not until development was revamped again and the entire visual style scrapped that the game began to look truly new. Admittedly, it is somewhat astonishing how much TimeShift's graphical fidelity has evolved. To drive the point home, there was even a video flipping back and forth between the older build of the game and the same scenes in the current build, illustrating massive technological leaps. Peschel then showed off a playable level early in the game that demonstrated the extremely impressive procedural rain effect, which lightly distorts the ground as it falls and which streaks down the player's visor.

"That's fuckin' next-gen rain," boasted Peschel. "I know that other people are all going to start doing this rain too, but I can also slow, stop, and reverse my fuckin' rain."

He then slowed, stopped, and reversed his rain, and it was indeed quite impressive to see it streak up off of the visor and back into the sky in real time.

Along with the new graphics comes a new Havok physics engine, which had to be modified extensively from its stock form to work properly during time manipulations. Interactive objects and rag-doll corpses can be juggled with firepower in an exaggerated slow-motion fashion during stopped or slowed time, leading to the potential of a screen full of floating dead enemies and barrels.

"If we're going to have crates and barrels just like every single other first person game, I told the team we might as well do something fuckin' interesting with them," explained Peschel. "I want you to feel godlike--you will walk on fucking water--but not because it's god mode. Time is the ultimate weapon."

Much like the rain, destruction of in-game environments can be stopped and reversed, but unlike rain this is more than just eye candy. TimeShift has dynamically destructible glass, which allows different areas of a pane of glass to be broken without simply destroying the overall structure; Peschel compared this to Insomniac's lauded glass physics in Resistance ("They said you could only do glass like that on PS3," he laughed). More importantly, it also has destructible walls in many areas. Seeing a brick wall destroyed into its component parts, then seeing that explosion rewound in real time as the wall reassembles itself, is quite a treat. One might destroy a wall only to be confronted with a room full of enemies, then rewind to before the wall was destroyed and seek out an alternate attack route. It is difficult to tell just how much of the game is destructible, but it seems that destructible elements are placed on a case by case basis rather than comprehensively. The game features "completely appropriate destructible environments as needed," Peschel said.

There is undoubtedly a whole bullet list's worth of visual buzzwords that could be cited in describing TimeShift's current form, but the bottom line is that while the game has lost its former more distinctive colorful style, it has gained a significant amount of cohesion as well as a much-needed ground-up visual rebirth. With the darker, grittier look and completely rewritten story, Peschel is hoping to communicate to the player a more engaging and evocative single-player experience.

"As the suit malfunctions, the story malfunctions. As the story malfunctions, the gameplay expands. And as the gameplay expands, immersion increases," he said.

Fortunately for us, and for him, the game seems to have overcome its development malfunctions. Whether it lives up to its impressive promises and potential should become more clear as the game approaches its final release later this year.

Sierra Entertainment plans to ship Saber Interactive's TimeShift for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC this fall.