Fresh details have emerged about the cancelled Steven Spielberg game LMNO, painting a picture of an incredibly ambitious project, canned before it could realise its tremendous potential. The game was to feature an AI companion whose relationship with the player would grow over the course of the game, and whose behaviour and abilities would evolve according to your actions. Read on for more details, and some early footage of the abandoned game in progress.
As described by 1Up , your AI companion was to be an alien creature called Eve, a character on the run from government forces. Eve is a mysterious and agile creature who, while unable to speak, would form a relationship with the player over the course of the game. Her psychic abilities would allow her to affect the player's field of vision, causing storm clouds to appear when she's in trouble, for example. She was designed to be incredible expressive, and she would also communicate with the player using mime and facial expressions.
Depending on your actions, Eve would evolve in different ways. She would become more hostile and combat focussed if left to fend for herself, and would be more co-operative if helped often. The relationship between the player and Eve would culminate in a series of different endings: "some of the possible endings they talked about were like her betraying you and turning you in to the government, saving herself, or you actually at a critical juncture deciding to give her back to the government."
There were also a few more twists planned. "Eve also had an extra joint in each leg, allowing her to move around more nimbly than people like Lincoln, and the idea was players would only spot this briefly early on in the game, when she jumped five meters into the air or crawled through a duct. The spoiler was, as the game went on, players would discover that Eve wasn't actually an alien but an evolved human from thousands of years in the future who had traveled back through time."
There was also going to be a large first person parkour elements similar to those of DICE's Mirror's Edge, which was in development at EA at the same time. The similarities between the projects was one of the factors that led to LMNO's eventual cancellation. The main reason, though, was EA's feeling the idea was simply too ambitious, and would take too long to finish. All that's left of the project now are a few images and the following bit of target footage. Spielberg is still working with EA, but everyone who was working on the original prototype has left the company, so it's unlikely we'll ever get to see how great this game could have been.
