Another round of Zero Time Dilemma details have surfaced from a new Kotaku report. We’ve rounded up the various tidbits below.
General
– Can switch between English and Japanese at will
– Set at the mysterious Mars testing facility where things happened
– Set decades in the past before Virtue’s Last Reward
– 9 characters in English – Phi, Sigma, Akane, Junpei, and newcomers: Diana (mentioned in VLR), Carlos, Eric, Mira, and a little boy with a big helmet named Q
– Once again, characters are separated into three different squads
– Switch between the teams as you play through the story
– Each team is trapped in a specific ward of the facility, where they’ve gotta figure out how to escape
– Story will be told through cinematics
– All of the dialogue will be voiced
– Can play without reading
– Trying to make it as accessible as possible to people who haven’t played the first two games
– Every 90 minutes, a drug is injected from the watches everyone’s wearing that causes them to wake up and lose all their memories
– The story can be played out of chronological order thanks to this mechanic, so you start from a ‘floating fragment’ screen that shows you the various scenes in the story
– As you complete each fragment, you’ll see how they fit into a larger narrative chart that you can uncover as you play
– The characters don’t know where they are in the timeline, and neither does the player
– When you complete a segment it goes into the larger decision tree
– This tells you where it actually happens in the story
– Zero will make your characters try to kill one another
– Game tries to miss with both the player and the characters as much as possible
Demo details
– Begins with Sigma locked to a chair while Zero monologued at him
– Phi was next to him locked inside an incinerator
– Diana stood between them and had to make the choice
– Cut-scenes are in 3D
– With the scenes, there is a moving camera and actual in-game objects
– The gun next to Sigma’s chair has 3 live rounds and three blanks
– If Diana pulls the trigger it’ll shut down the incinerator whether or not the bullet is live
– She has a 50/50 chance of killing Sigma
– In 3 minutes, the incinerator will start and kill Phi
– If Diana pulls the trigger, the door will open but Sigma has a 50/50 chance of dying
– They decided to pull the trigger
– It’s completely random what happens
– The game calculates the odds each time
– In this case, the bullet is a blank, Sigma lives and Phi is also saved from the incinerator
– Some of the choices throughout the game will have randomness like that
