log

March 31, 2006

Game shots

Cry­tek’s new engine looks amaz­ing. And what bet­ter vehi­cle for it than yet anoth­er first-per­son shoot­er. I hope it’s a bet­ter game than Far Cry, which had every­one rat­ing it 9.5/10 pure­ly because of the jun­gle and water graphics.

Sin Episodes proves that you can take a great engine and make some­thing mediocre look­ing out of it. I remem­ber play­ing the demo a long time ago and feel­ing mild­ly humoured by the graph­i­cal style. This time they’ve tak­en Source, changed the char­ac­ter mod­els and mod­i­fied the weapon­ry. For all intents and pur­pos­es, this game oth­er­wise looks like Half Life 2, giv­en a goofy makeover and big­ger breasts. And mur­locs.

The Rev­o­lu­tion specs were appar­ent­ly leaked yes­ter­day or some­such, and now there’s peo­ple tak­ing sides on whether it’ll be worth get­ting. It’s the only con­sole I’d con­sid­er pick­ing up out of this gen­er­a­tion because Nin­ten­do will endeav­our to make unique expe­ri­ences, and his­to­ry is doomed to repeat itself with PS2 and XBOX, espe­cial­ly the for­mer. The aim of those two is to out­stage each oth­er in mar­ket­ing, not mak­ing inno­v­a­tive games. The only thing that real­ly changed this round was the abil­i­ty to ren­der more poly­gons and pix­el shad­ing; your abil­i­ty to make enjoy­able, dif­fer­ent games is not increased by ren­der­ing or CPU pow­er. We reached the nec­es­sary mem­o­ry and stor­age cap with the last gen­er­a­tion. All you’ve done is pro­vide devel­op­ers with the abil­i­ty to make more geek porn, wast­ing years of devel­op­ment on mak­ing ren­der­ing engines.

Gen­tle­men, it’s time for anoth­er video game crash.

I am in no way say­ing that I don’t like games look­ing good, but we’ve got an unhealthy focus on screen­shots, and thanks to broad­band, game trail­ers. Some­where we have to remem­ber that you can’t play screen­shots. The core game log­ic that runs most titles these days would be lucky to be ten per­cent of the code­base, and prob­a­bly even less than that of the total devel­op­ment time. There are more artists mak­ing high-res tex­tures and UV map­ping than pro­gram­mers writ­ing core game logic.

I loved Half Life 2, but reduce the core game idea down to basic prin­ci­ples and you end up with:

• use vari­ety of guns to shoot ene­mies that block your way.
• occa­sion­al­ly solve puz­zles, some involv­ing physics, that block your way.
• get to the next load point, repeat till end credits.

Inte­grat­ed physics make Half Life 2 stand out, sim­ply because it plays such a part in the game. Con­sid­er the role of the grav­i­ty gun though; what was the first thing you did with it? You shot some­thing with it, essen­tial­ly mak­ing it a anoth­er gun, albeit with toi­lets as ammo. (Con­sid­er how lit­tle gran­u­lar­i­ty the grav­i­ty gun gave you in inter­act­ing with objects. I know this aspect can be improved — move­ment of the gun inde­pen­dant of the play­er’s view­port would have enabled using objects as shields a lot more — but even­tu­al­ly, your inter­ac­tion is still lim­it­ed by your input device.) So you’ve got this great thing that fires ran­dom objects. But does it change any­thing at all, game mechan­ic wise? No.

Read­ers pay­ing atten­tion may be shout­ing, “but it’s the sto­ry­line, the atmos­phere, the char­ac­ter inter­ac­tion that made the game”.

The sto­ry­line deserves to be applaud­ed. It’s great. Very movie-qual­i­ty. Hold on, we’re not play­ing a movie. When did you make any char­ac­ter-defin­ing choice what­so­ev­er in the game? I’m not talk­ing “oh, I’ll walk in through the east gate instead of the north” kin­da choic­es. When did you decide you’d had enough of Alyx, leave her to the smil­ing Com­bine sol­diers, and join Dr Breen for tea and crum­pets and world domination?

Video games have sel­dom stepped out­side lin­ear­i­ty. The very idea of true emer­gent game­play could quite under­stand­ably scare a game devel­op­er to death. It means either a nigh-infi­nite amount of stor­age and art resources or a way to gen­er­ate con­tent on the fly, which could mean a loos­er grip — or even let­ting go — of the the­mat­ic reins. And pre­dictably there’s some oppo­si­tion amongst play­ers who don’t like to have oppres­sive­ly huge choic­es. Tycho from Pen­ny Arcade makes a point about his light case of RPG OCD in the recent game Obliv­ion, and it’s true — God, I’ve stood around in World of War­craft try­ing to decide what to drop. I still haven’t made my mind up as to what leather­work­ing branch to take yet.

I’ve become so accus­tomed to not mak­ing deci­sions in games that when it comes to one, I’m kind of lost. When I’ve cho­sen a path in RPGs it’s because I’ve thrown cau­tion to the wind and gone with what sounds good. The inabil­i­ty to decide is caused by curios­i­ty and the regrets of con­se­quence — what’s going to hap­pen on the path I don’t choose? Will it be some­thing cool­er? Will I miss out on something?

But if you give the play­er enough choic­es, you lib­er­ate them from regret and they start look­ing for­ward instead of back. Their path becomes unique and full of promise. The chal­lenges they face will always have a cor­re­spond­ing ‘moti­va­tion to over­come’ because the play­er has formed their own goal. Choic­es become fun: now you’re doing what you enjoy instead of expe­ri­enc­ing script­ed events.

Back on top­ic. This start­ed as a mono­logue about Rev­o­lu­tion and the lack of inno­va­tion in big-brand gam­ing and some­how turned into a plea for a free-reign game.

I’m all for the new con­troller and the focus on new ways to inter­act with games. At first I thought “God, how will I play Street Fight­er on that?”. And then I realised that if I want­ed to play Street Fight­er, I’ve already got a PC, a Dream­cast, a Sat­urn, a Megadrive, and a stack of emu­la­tors. What use is anoth­er iden­ti­cal Street Fight­er game? Same goes for first per­son shoot­ers; I’ve played through 50 of them. Not many of them were unique enough to war­rant a day’s play.

When the Nin­ten­do DS trail­ers came out, there was a demo of a Kir­by plat­former that blew me away. Kir­by stood on a hang­ing log bridge, and the play­er pulled the mid­dle log down­ward using the sty­lus, and let go. Kir­by went sail­ing up into the air. I rewound the video. Wow. It’s like Kir­by is a phys­i­cal object that he’s inter­act­ing with. That’s some­thing I’ve nev­er felt before.