Warco - The News Game is an FPS-style game in development where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield. Instead of the standard bloody clashes with enemy forces, the game challenges the player to dodge bullets and capture attractive footage. Warco is the brainchild of Australian war correspondent Tony Maniaty and filmmaker Robert Connolly, who teamed up with games studio Defiant Development.
The game will explore the story of journalist Jesse DeMarco, who comes to the fictional civil-war-torn North African country of Benouja to show the world what the war is really like. Initially planned by Maniaty as a journalism teaching tool, Warco is now referred to as a war correspondent sim.
Each level of Warco will be taking players into different scenarios, with moral and ethical questions often being raised. It will include action-packed battlefields, as well as quieter moments, such as the discussing of events with fellow journalists while trapped in a hotel. Potential tasks could also include reporting how troops interact with civilians, or interviewing a hostile leader in a rebel camp. After completing a required level of news-gathering, players will edit their frontline TV news stories and even post them online.
"I'm not thinking we can take Call of Duty head to head for sales [but] the success of games like Heavy Rain shows that there's a strong desire for adult narrative-focused play," Defiant Development's designer Morgan Jaffit told Gamasutra.
Warco has been in development for four months, with a 'proof of concept playable' prototype being recently unveiled. Defiant is now looking into finding a publisher for the title. There's no word on possible platforms and date of availability at this point.
Check out the video presenting the prototype's gameplay:
