The meaning of life and everything else + immersion in the game

General Discussions
#1

Hi, after playing a little of HL2 I got some very interesting philosophical questions, maybe you can help me answering them:

  • Why the Freeman guy (Gordon Freeman? I never seem to remember) doesn’t have one of those night vision googles in that suit of his just like the Splinter Cell guy? All he has is a cheap flashlight that runs out of battery very quickly. That’s ridiculous.

  • What’s with crates? Do you see that many crates when you walk on the streets of any city?

I thought of some other thing but I forgot now. I will post it when I remember.

About the immersion thing. I noticed while playing HL2 that I didn’t want to check every corner out. By playing games for 20 years now I got used to verify almost every corner of the level, and since the graphics were simpler that was easy, but with HL2 graphics + physics everything is more detailed so you could use like a million things, closer to real life (far from it still, but closer). It seems that it makes the systematic approach I have been used to unattractive and makes me go with the story more easily.

My point is, more stuff on screen that has nothing to do with the game, make the whole thing more credible. Like real life. Imagine when we get games to have very high detailed graphics, like you are able to grab a pen on a desk and write your name on the wall, then it will be more immersive because we know we can do it if we want, but we won’t because it has nothing to do with the goal in the game. The player will feel more free than simply following the predetermined path from point A to point B that the developers created.

Maybe for the sake of cost feasibility pre-made cities could be used in many different games. Building high detailed stuff like that for every game would be too costly I think. A big metropolis could be used for virtually any game and still have unexplored areas.

I still don’t like games whose goal is to shoot everything that moves, but from the FPSes I think HL2 is the best because it makes the gameplay better than a some other expensive versions of Safari Hunt (it was a game from Master System that used that pistol, you had to shoot birds and other animals flying on the screen).

I played the NSF Carbon, it looks more like a expansion pack to Most Wanted, but EA managed to make it worse.

#2

The reason you no longer want to search every inch of every level is 42.

-Chris

#3

I can’t wait until we get photorealistic graphics (not far off now seeing screenshots of stuff like Alan Wake) because then game developers can stop worrying about getting photorealistic graphics and maybe work on some decent AI instead. No matter how much the graphics have evolved since Pac Man first appeared, the AI seems to still be at pretty much the same place.

#4

Hey - fixed that for ya :wink:

#5

Now look here, 640k should be enough for anyone ;D

#6

if a game isnt realistic, it needs more crates.

#7

If I’ve learned anything from the games of the last five years it’s that there is no problem that can’t be solved by crates. I’m amazed they haven’t become the standard unit of global currency by now.

Also good: barrels of stuff that explode when shot…

#8

crates are a good way to add extra objects/cover/stuff to play with, since they are easy to make and low on polygons :slight_smile:

#9

I played for a few hours and all I saw was a freaking boat and river with dirty water, it seemed like a version of River Raid from Atari 2600 but with (a little) better graphics. I think they wanted to show the gamers “look, we have this cool water effect with these floating barrels (crate’s cousins), and you can also see the bullets if you are under it”.

Now I have been playing for hours in some creepy city with a lunatic priest yelling “Hey brother, being cautious is wise… aim for the head!”, and all the game play seems to have been designed for hamsters (or by hamsters). All I need is to pull a switch somewhere in order to activate some door/gate/elevator/trap in order to get me to the next part of the maze. I think hamsters must feel like I feel after playing HL2 for some hours.

#10

I remember an article by one of the original quake/quake2 level designers saying how proud he was of his level design that worked just like that. “It’s exactly what players like doing”. Argh. Makes me want to claw my eyes out :).

#11

Worth a read. :slight_smile:

#12

I did think the driving sections, especially the boat, ended up being a bit Tony Hawks’ Extreme Post-apocalyptic Gunboat particularly the end battle there.

I enjoyed HL2 - many things about it were great, but there was something about it that seemed like a Transparency to me- I could see through the game to the gameplay mechanisms too easily.

Funnily enough something that has a lot of the same ideas along with charm and genuine brilliance is Beyond Good And Evil, a beautiful and brilliant sci-fi/zelda type game that i would recommend to pretty much anyone. It really is on a par with the Nintendo games, even bettering them in some respects. When I played Half Life 2 there were a lot of places I was noticing stuff that I’d seen done before in that.