"Just the feeling of environment. At the start of the game, you are walking up a switchback road on a volcano, and can look down and see the whole island, and it is totally breathtaking. You can just stand there and stare at it, and look down and see where you came from. "
"For instance, you need to get to the generator that starts the power; you need get to the town to find the satellite dish; you need to get to the radio transmitter; you need to get to the helipad, stuff like that. In order to do that, you have to deal with the terrain, and the creatures that inhabit it. The island is an amazing, decayed empire."
There's also some cool things like how animals were supposed to ambush you in the warehouses, knocking down the scaffolding. There's also mention of a warehouse puzzle where you go after the green keycard using the manifest in the InGen building and end up alerting some curious raptors from a nearby nest. There's also mention of a puzzle in which you open a gate to access the monorail. This preview is clearly from close to the release but prior to PV getting cut (he says there are nine levels). He says they are in the bug fixing phase and sending multiple testing copies to the publisher (EA). That makes it even more odd that he says the game starts at the mountain rather than on the other end of the island.
"Well, as long as you're under there, you can check the breakers," Thorne said. ... "There's a box right behind the front bumper. Over on the left."
"I see it." [said Sarah]
...
"The box is in backward. Flip all the switches the other way. Are you dry?"
"No, Doc. I'm soaking wet, lying in the damn mud."
~Michael Crichton
OGR 7 part preview wrote:Seamus (one of the programmers of System Shock and designers on Flight Unlimited) enters the
room with a Pentium 266 and boots the latest build of the game. We find ourselves standing in the middle of a forest, thousands of towering trees dotting the landscape for as far as the eye can see. "3Dfx?" I ask. "Actually, no," replies, Seamus. "Everything you'll be seeing today is software driven. Right here you're looking at at least 40,000 trees which we can render with ease. We're using a whole bunch of new algorithms to draw the outside world and we're running into some snags supporting 3D cards. We think we have most of them worked out. I went to give a big talk
at Winhack a few weeks ago to basically bust the jaws of the hardware manufacturers and let them know that, yes, it's very pretty to draw interior scenes like Quake - a clipping plane at twenty-feet is great and all, but we want 5 kilometers. The problem is, the cards currently available are constructed to run games currently available, and we don't think the consumer wants that. We feel they want something they've never seen before."
EDIT: Rich Flier said the same thing in the same interview:
Rich Flier wrote:"Take a look at Battlezone, which is a great looking game, or a Tomb Raider which is also great looking, but both worlds are very sparse with objects. We can easily have a setting that has over 40,000 trees being rendered on the fly, in software mode. It's real easy to get lost on our island because the entire place is so choked with vegetation...that's the kind of atmosphere we wanted to create.
You should tell them about that.