A whip-cracking look at the newly revealed first-person adventure
Dial of Destiny might have proved that the cinematic franchise is as dead as Archimedes, but videogames could be the new natural home of Indiana Jones. With no need for CGI de-aging or time travel, GreatCirclecan concentrate on what makes the series great: punching Nazis.
There’s likely to be plenty of that, as the game is set in 1943, between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film in which Nazis were punched, and Last Crusade, a movie that also contained its fair share of fist/nose moments. That sort of thing has to be filed under ‘likely’ for now as we know relatively little about the game beyond the events of the single trailer available and the sparse information released by publisher Bethesda. Hot off the release of Starfield, Bethesda may not be everyone’s favourite software house right now, but the big news is the name of the developer.
It’s MachineGames, Zenimax stablemate of Bethesda and the maker of Wolfenstein:TheNewOrderand its associated sequels. The studio is known for its ability to build games that are grounded in their setting and come with a feeling of weight and power –just what you want if you’re cracking a whip, snatching a hat from under a descending stone door, or rearranging the squashy bits of a Wehrmacht soldier’s face.
MACHINEGAMES IS KNOWN FOR GAMES THAT ARE GROUNDED IN THEIR SETTING
ROUND AND ROUND
And then there’s the title. If you’ve ever flown from Chile to Mongolia, you’ll know that the fastest way to get there, due to the way geometry works on a sphere, is to zoom up to the Arctic, make a fairly sharpish turn, and go back down again. This feels a bit counterintuitive, as surely you could just fly there directly over the Atlantic and Africa, but greater minds than those who write game previews have decreed that this is the way to do it, and that it’s called a great circle. For the mathematicians out there, a great circle is the circular intersection of a sphere and a plane passing through the sphere’s centre point; any arc of a great circle is a geodesic of the sphere, so great circles in spherical geometry are natural analogues of straight lines in Euclidean space. Indiana Jones movies make much of following lines on maps, so could the new game include some form of air traffic control? Unlikely. However, there’s another great circle, and it’s a bit more in keeping with the Indy mythos, which seems capable of sucking in every facet of legend from Christianity to Kali, exploring various interpretations of the word ‘accuracy’ along the way. If you visit the corners of the internet that feature crystals and smell of yoga, you’ll find that there’s a theory abou
