Ben Cousins unveils The Drowning, the iPhone and iPad FPS

[wraggster]

Former Battlefield executive producer Ben Cousins has unveiled The Drowning, a free-to-play post-apocalyptic first-person shooter for iOS devices due out early next year.The Drowning is in development at Scattered Entertainment, the new name for Ngmoco Sweden, the Stockholm-based studio owned by Japanese publisher DeNA. It runs on the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad 2, iPad 3, iPad 4 and iPad mini and the iPod Touch 5th generation, with an Android version planned “further down the line”.The story begins in 2011, when a mysterious new oil starts leaking from deep sea drills across the globe. The oil creeps towards populated areas, and those who encounter it disappear only to return a week later as monsters hell-bent on dragging people into the oil. You play as one of the survivors of this catastrophe.The game is set in a fictional series of islands off the coast of Seattle. You're a scavenger who is cornered on a jetty in a harbour. You escape on a boat, but crash on these islands, losing all your equipment. You then explore and build up your equipment while uncovering the story behind the catastrophe.In an interview with Eurogamer, Cousins said the story will last about ten hours or so, but it will take hundreds of hours to unlock and level up all of the weapons. “I would liken it to a single-player RPG where you complete the story but then continue to level up and increase your skills,” Cousins said. “It's not quite as complex as that, but that's the analogy I'm making.”There is no deathmatch or capture the flag multiplayer modes because research showed gamers who liked those modes on PC and console were not ready to play them on mobile. There is, though, a social multiplayer mode that is asynchronous. Players won't play together but will cooperate to complete objectives, with unique content unlocked from them.Of course, first-person games on touch-screen devices have been criticised for their control schemes, with the dreaded virtual joystick often singled out as being particularly cumbersome.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-12-06-ex-battlefield-developer-ben-cousins-unveils-the-drowning-the-iphone-and-ipad-fps-you-can-play-with-just-two-fingers-on-one-hand