A big bad rant about a lot of games today...

Karl Hungus

This could be a long one, so go grab a coffee, or perhaps a nice hot chocolate if you'd rather. Perhaps with a marshmallow in it... Wouldn't that be nice? Sitting comfortably now? Well, perhaps you'd like to put on your slippers... Well, let's get on with my tale of disenchantment with certain aspects of gaming without futher procrastination.

I've finished Far Cry there recently, and I went to replay it today, and I found myself rather bored with it for the moment. I started thinking when was the last time I was really engrossed in a game to the point of replaying it multiple times, and the only things in recent memory were Morrowind (& Expansions) and Gothic 2.

So, what made these games so special to hold my attention through so many replays? I should probably point out that I've never even finished Morrowind, yet there's always something in the game to capture my intrest. Well, the main attraction is, that these games created such fantastic and emersive gaming worlds. In fact, the term level design isn't even applicable here, as much as world design.

In both games, there's simply aren't any "Levels" in the classic gaming terminology, and the only thing that comes close is the "Chapters" of the main story. Starting a game of Morrowind, you're simply given a small bundle of coins, and intructions to find some spymaster, but it's really up to you whether you want to go and find him or **** off the complete opposite direction. Ironically, if you decide to find him straight off and get your mission underway, he instructs you to sign up with a guild to get some experience/maintain a cover story of you being an adventurer, but you can just tell him to get stuffed and hand over the orders with all haste!

The great freedom of choice in the games really lends itself to making such wonderfully enjoyable experiences during play. Something that really got on my nerves recently was Deus Ex 2; On the back of the box, it has a lovely little phrase that claims "Every decision you make affects the outcome and creates a unique game experience."

Complete BULL**** in all fairness!
In fact, the total opposite could be claimed, because

1. The two main factions throughout the game, The WTO and The Order are essentially the same faction, making the choice of who to follow completely irrelevant to the outcome either way, and 2. The only thing in the game that actually affects the outcome at all is in the utmost final moments when you have the choice to send the aquinus proticols to the Templars, Illuminati, JC Denton or kill them all... So basically all you have to do is reload the game 5 minutes before the end, and there's your unique game experiences!

Talk about false advertising! And furthermore, talk about killing any and all replayability a game has.

Another thing that seriously pissed me off about Deus Ex 2 was the level design, or rather the lack of a proper game world. What we're told are cities in the game, are nothing more than a collection of alleyways, which in all meaning of the word are just "Levels" pretty much the same as in any old Shoot 'Em Up, and as equally on rails. It's beyond beleif that in this age of gaming that some game genres have failed to mature entirely! So often we play in these so called futuristic worlds, yet we never get to see these worlds, only allusions to how things might look.

Think about it. Imagine a futuristic Judge Dredd style megacity the setting for your game, and lets say your character is some kind of government hitman. Now, you're at the secret headquarters of this shifty organisation, and you've just been given orders to assassinate a traitor on the other side of town. Now, instead of a cut-scene of you being dropped off by helicoptor to some mansion, or apparment styled level, how about you find your own way there? Do you walk? Take a taxi, or the subway, or some kind of monorail suspended above the ground? Maybe there's teleportation stations dotted around the city? Maybe you've got your own car, or as you progress through the ranks, you can get a company car, or perhaps buy one with the money you've earned?

Maybe you don't want to take the guy out right away? Maybe you want to buy some equipment, like nightvision/infared goggles, or a heartbeat sensor? Perhaps a silencer for your gun so you can take the guy out quickly and quietly without his bodyguards even knowing? What if, before you went to assault his place of residence, you stopped by the local power station, and took out some transformers or such that rendered the whole city block powerless. Perhaps this course of action has made security cameras/bots useless? Or were there any there at all? You could wait untill night before attacking, then knocked out the power! Well, I guess that those nightvision goggles you stopped to get at the shop on the way there were a great use! But what if you knocked out the power before you bought the goggles, then you went to the shop to find that they've closed because of the outage, or that they can't sell you anything because the till isn't working! Damn, the only other shop is ages away, and the monorail/teleport station is also out of power! It's take at least another 48 hours for repair crews to restore power, better start walking...

Or maybe you don't even bother going to assassinate the guy? Maybe the hitman profession was only a side-job/mission to the main story of the game? There's probably loads more things you could go and do instead of assassinating the poor guy? Maybe you could tip him off, and join his organisation instead!?

Wouldn't you ****ing LOVE to play that game!?
Now, isn't it just downright criminal that the likes of Deus Ex aren't done in that style? It's all worked so well in Morrowind, so I can't see any reason it wouldn't work in an FPS, or similar style of game. But no... it seems game designers aren't really bothered making a great game world in favor of a few linear level strung together in dull sucsession. I don't mean to pick on Deus Ex here, this pretty much goes for most games today, even in the RPG genre.

Rant over.

Thoughts anyone?

Goodshape

Nice rant.

Mafia on the PC would be the closest I've seen to your dreams... although the story is still quite linear at the end of the day.

Deadwing

Originally posted by Karl Hungus
Deus Ex 2; On the back of the box, it has a lovely little phrase that claims "Every decision you make affects the outcome and creates a unique game experience."

Complete BULL**** in all fairness!
In fact, the total opposite could be claimed, because

1. The two main factions throughout the game, The WTO and The Order are essentially the same faction, making the choice of who to follow completely irrelevant to the outcome either way, and 2. The only thing in the game that actually affects the outcome at all is in the utmost final moments when you have the choice to send the aquinus proticols to the Templars, Illuminati, JC Denton or kill them all... So basically all you have to do is reload the game 5 minutes before the end, and there's your unique game experiences!

Talk about false advertising! And furthermore, talk about killing any and all replayability a game has.

Another thing that seriously pissed me off about Deus Ex 2 was the level design, or rather the lack of a proper game world.

That was so annoying, there really wasnt much of a game world at all. Just a few buildings connected by some alleyways. The level design was seriously lame.
On the point of far cry tho, i have to disagree, i think the level design lends itself to so much replay, i played the demo for months, finding new things hidden in the jungle and new paths id not taken, new ways to take out guards, all on just one level.
I do agree tho, games nowadays are lucky enough to hold your interest for one play through if youre lucky, theres rarely any incentive for multiple plays. The last game i spent playing through over and over was resident evil 2, 2 cds, with 2 endings each, and each ending added more to the actual ending, so you didnt see the entire ending until youd finished the game 4 times!!!

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by Deadwing
That was so annoying, there really wasnt much of a game world at all. Just a few buildings connected by some alleyways. The level design was seriously lame.
On the point of far cry tho, i have to disagree, i think the level design lends itself to so much replay, i played the demo for months, finding new things hidden in the jungle and new paths id not taken, new ways to take out guards, all on just one level.
I do agree tho, games nowadays are lucky enough to hold your interest for one play through if youre lucky, theres rarely any incentive for multiple plays. The last game i spent playing through over and over was resident evil 2, 2 cds, with 2 endings each, and each ending added more to the actual ending, so you didnt see the entire ending until youd finished the game 4 times!!!

Well, I didn't mean to come off criticising Far Cry, that's really more of a start to my little rant as a trigger for setting the wheels in motion in the big juicey thing between my ears. Far Cry is a great game for what it is, and I loved it for that.

I suppose I could ask if Far Cry's excellent AI was applied to game world like Morrowind? A criticism I could make is that Morrowind's enemies have absolutely no intelligence whatsoever, and they all act exactly the same way. Which is pretty naff considering the variety of different races and creatures that inhabit the world.

mr_angry

Yeah, Mafia was pretty close to what you're describing, but without the completely open-ended storyline. The trouble is that computers deal in certainties - 2+2=4. Because of this, its outrageously difficult to program such a system. Your best bet is probably to develop somthing on-line like EverQuest, but with better graphics and stuff - try and make on-line interaction fundamental to new storylines.

It isn't easy though. Stalker is probably the closest thing to an open-ended FPS on the horizon. The storyline makes pretty interesting reading too, but apparently its aimed directly at single-player, and you wont be able to make your own stories on-line, unless somebody makes a pretty advanced mod.

dangerman

As you quite rightly point out, certain games do a great job with freedom; carmageddon, grand theft auto, morrowind all spring to mind immediately as good examples.

I think what your getting at is the idea of the sandbox game.

Your given a problem, a world and thats it. How you go about solving it is up to you.

I don't think there's a gamer anywhere who when playing games like gta 3 for example, says, wouldn't it be cool if you could go into ALL the buildings? or do this? or that? etc. etc.

What you've got is the attrition between telling a story and creating the illusion of freedom at the same time.

What I really want to play, right now, is an fps in a wholly destructive environment. What I mean by that is everything is subject to physics, meaning if you put a tank up against the average wall tank goes through wall but house may collapse etc. Of course this raises serious gameplay issues; as in if player a destroys bridge to flag then game becomes unplayable etc. But I think we're getting to the point now where this should at least be thought about.

The main problem with freedom is you have to program it. For every possibility, you've got to code it, and right now it's just beyond the amount of work the average game development house can do. give it a few years.

Karl Hungus

Originally posted by dangerman
The main problem with freedom is you have to program it. For every possibility, you've got to code it, and right now it's just beyond the amount of work the average game development house can do. give it a few years.

Originally posted by mr_angry
The trouble is that computers deal in certainties - 2+2=4. Because of this, its outrageously difficult to program such a system.

To be honest, I'm not talking about absolute freedom in games, more of greating a game world as opposed to a string of levels.

I don't beleive there's any great difficulty as you make out in designing such games, as it's already been done plenty of times before in games like Morrowind, Gothic and all. Such as in Gothic 2, there's part of the main storyline that you have to get into the upper quarter (It's blocked off from peons such as yourself, and strictly for the upper class people) and there's many different ways you can go about accomplishing this task.

Creating an illusion of choice (Christ I hate that term! Everyone's been throwing it around since Matrix Reloaded) is one thing, but giving the player a goal, and a number of solutions that the player can choose based on their playing style, is another thing. And putting that freedom of choice into a proper, living game world (Like Morrowind) is what I'm talking about.

SantaHoe

Yeah it was the same story with the first Deus-Ex... it all comes down to the point where you send the warning to the french group (silohette or whatever), it comes across as this big moral decision... do you side with Paul or stay loyal to UNATCO?
But there's really no choice at all.
I even managed to escape the ambush in battery park where Gunter is waiting (pushed the blocks with leveled-up strength or jumped them with upgraded speed/jump - I can't remember)
And when I finaly reached the rendevous point where Jock was supposed to pick me up and take me to Hong Kong... HE WASN'T BLOODY THERE!

My hat goes off to Rockstar for opening up things with GTA3/Vice City where you've got some kind of freedom, you can take a break from the plot and do what you like.. and still advance in a way (packages and sub-missions).

Red Faction had nice explodable walls/floors, but it wasn't implemented nearly as well as it could have been.

I know there's a huge workload to try'n put out a game with such width, but like in the case of GTA3... they could make interiors for every building if they opened it up to the modding public, just release a simple map editor and pick from the best submissions, I'm sure most modders out there would be thrilled to have their work included in a commercial release... hell I'd do it!

po0k

Ken, the problem with having huge explorable gameworlds in fully rendered high-quality 3D is the sheer amount of content creation which is required to have even slightly individual buildings, rooms etc. which would require thousands of man-hours to create to a high-enough standard, even with middleware/off-the-shelf textures and primitives.
On possible way around this would eb a random level generator for each game, but where the world layout (as it's created) can be compressed down do a certain string which can be used to recreate the world as it was when needed (similar to public/private SSH keys).
Of course this would require a bit of cpu overhead for the processing and on-the-fly generation, but when we start seeing more SMP machines on the dekstop there should be enouh raw horsepower to pull it off smoothly.

Good post. Deus Ex 2 was targeted at the lowest common demoninator (read: consoles) and as such was limited to the weakest platform it had to run on ie PS2/XBox which both have damn-all memory to hold large levels (~16meg/~48meg usable respectively) so it was never going to be highly detailed on the PC.

dangerman

On possible way around this would eb a random level generator for each game, but where the world layout (as it's created) can be compressed down do a certain string which can be used to recreate the world as it was when needed (similar to public/private SSH keys).

i think this is definately a way forward.

Consider GTA3, if on install, or when a new game was created, spent whatever it was 10 mins 'creating world' - obviously all the key buildings would have been designed, but for the rest of them a few algorithms implemented with a few dozen texture sets to make the rest of the insides of buildings in the game.

Isn't that in a way the same sort of principal that first person shooter in 93k (or whatever it was) doing the rounds? - it literally built everything using algorithms when the game was played.

I never played SoF II, but i heard about it's random level generator, what was that like?

Placebo

very true,
Infact, its weird that i have NOT EVER completed a game and replayed it since my SNES ! Or maybe Zelda Oracine of time and mario kart .
I have a good share of games, but i get bored of them quickly.

Back to battle field !

RicardoSmith

Theres only game I know of with a truely dynamic world is the flight sim Falcon 4. Bacially the war continues no matter what you do. As you fly around the war is going on all alround, and you have complete freedom to do what ever you want.

Thats said it more of a simulation than a game.

Operation flashpoint was pretty dynamic. The story is scripted but you can complete every mission in anyway possible. Every battle is different and only parts of it are scripted. The AI is very good. The only drawback is that theres a few bugs here and there.

BKtje

Last time i replayed a game over and over was Res Evil 2 on the PS.

You fnished the game with npth characters ( do u take the gun or leave it for Leon). Once you finish both characters your told to do it again and this time things have been moved around. Then at the end of this you get a grade. Get a grade A and get stuff unlocked and so forth. B gives u this sub plot to do and all.

Simple and very basic but it upped the re-playability so very much.