Gamasutra again has an article proposing to remove HUDs from games.

Not too different from what I wrote about the “faked dragon”. The article even restates the two fundamental traits I also identified: the immerison and the accessibility.

Immersive gameplay
For many years, game developers have spoken of the goal of achieving a cinema-quality experience in a video game. One of the key ingredients for such an experience is the successful immersion of the player into the game world. Just as a filmmaker doesn’t want a viewer to stop and think, “This is only a movie,” a game developer should strive to avoid moments that cause a gamer to think, “This is just a game.”

The rise of the casual gamer
As video games attempt to reach new audiences beyond the core gamer market, developers are realizing the need to simplify interface design. While hardcore gamers might not be intimidated by numerous status bars and gauges onscreen, a casual gamer is much more likely to feel overwhelmed. Gamers looking for a “pick up and play” experience are not inclined to spend time figuring out what all those bars and gauges are for. The simpler and more intuitive the interface, the more accessible the game can be to non-traditional gamers.

With the difference that it would be so much more interesting to apply those ideas to a mmorpg instead of a single player game. Aren’t those two “hot topics” (and weak points) for this genre? It’s not just about the representation, but about the whole design approach to “render a world”. Or the “simulation of realities” of my definition that tries to be reminiscent of the ideal that started this genre.

Setting that as a goal would already force a revolution.

Oh, come on. Fuck the “more robust mathematical models”.

That idea on Gamasutra is one of the most stupid I ever read. It hits my nerves when I see so many others discussing it and giving it legitimacy.

Now I only wait a mmorpg to implement it so I can point my finger and having a good laugh.

This is the perfect example of control that YOU DO NOT WANT to give to the players. It will jump in the first position as a source of finest-quality DRAMA.

I think that these games have already enough problems with this type of harassment that often can trespass the limit of “a few” players. Give the players more of this power and you are just begging to turn a community into the biggest clusterfuck ever.

With the addition that people play these games to have fun. To pass a good time. Noone would like to feel under constant examination (of fourteen years old) or have other people rating them.

You know what? The exact opposite of the intended purposes will happen.

The players will start to group less and less with players they do not know. They’ll play alone as much as they can in order to avoid that public, now legitimate, form of harassment.

The rate system will slowly have a recursive outcome where more and more players that were branded as “bad” (or “less good”, where’s the difference?) start to consequently drag everyone they can in the same status, or worst.

So really, where is the use? It’s a public guillotine. It’s a tool to create exponential amounts of drama and make even the most solid community blow up. It’s a way to put another barrier between the players so that they have now legitimate tools to harass each other. Even in larger organizations, now.

If I play a game it’s also because I want to experiment with it. I don’t think it adds to the fun if I’m being punished now even by a rating system that allows every jerk to judge what I do. Or the fact that I didn’t read a spoiler site or min/maxed my equipment enough before entering a dungeon.

Really. Fastest way to blow up an entire community. I don’t think that there will be many players that would tolerate such a thing. It’s already hard as it is right now. A system like that would definitely complete the transition: “Fuck the other players. I value my time more than this shit.”

NEVER, ever give the players more reasons to divide themselves. To create differences. To create reasons of hate, misjudgment and prejudice. These things already happen without giving them even more “aid”. The “communal” form of government can only happen under one, fundamental condition: everyone must be equal. This is why it’s an utopia. Because people create divisions and divisions create hate.

Fuck the rating systems. Under every form. The guilds already fuck these communities with all sort of inventions, like ranks, DKPs, 3rd party programs and all the other shit and requirements they impose. We should remove the barriers, bring people in, NOT OUT. Remove those lines and boundaries of legitimacy, pretence and control over each other. Not add more of them.

Not turn every player into a totally arbitrary number. Not remove even that little bit of personal interaction that we have left.

We must free ourselves of this shit. Not sink even more into it.

The conclusion? A system like the one proposed would encourage exactly what it tried to remove: Dishonesty. Theft. Malice. Petty disregard.

This is the most retareded idea I’ve heard in a long while. I hope it wins a prize.

“Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” is another game that I’m anticipating (and I’m definitely not alone in this case) and that should be out about at the same time of Prey. I’m more doubtful about this one, though, it has too many things that sound even too good. The expectations about this game are so high that I’m sure it will finish to delude on some aspects, as it happened with Morrowind and Daggerfall before.

On the boards people are complaining about the recent announces about the lack shadows for static objects or the impossibility to use random objects as a throwing weapon and all sort of fluff. I don’t think that these details will matter and I’m even sure that the problems of the game will be somewhere else. I pray that the gameplay will feel more involving and fun than the bad examples of the previous chapters. And I also hope that the game world will have some interesting living characters and dialogues instead of just “database indexers” as Charles defined them on QT3.

I like a lot the idea to add more content as the game is released. From what I heard Bethesda plans to release mini content packs at a low price that can be downloaded directly from the site. This strategy has a lot of potential and if they commit to release a good amount of high-quality content (and assuming the game reveals to be a solid platform) this could turn into a gold mine. I so love this idea of “ongoing” development even applied to a single player game. I could support these just forever.

Anyway, this video is really, really good and builds good hype. It is so much better than the video released at the E3 and it seems taken from a Deutsche TV or something similar. It’s really worth seeing from the beginning to the end since it shows various aspects of the game, from the environment to the “feel” of combat and the physics engine. The only thing that still looks bad (and only slightly improved over Morrowind) is the animation of the human characters. They still move like wooden puppets. The transitions between different animation states is particularly awful.

I also hope they scale up the weapons models over those in MW. That’s one part that I hated so much. All the weapons look so tiny and even a 2-handed sword looks like a normal 1 hand. While the 1 hand look like daggers at best.

Anyway. I’m still working (slowly) on my “total” Morrowind mod pack. I hope to finish and balance it before Oblivion is released :)

The running time of the video is 5:28

(the video here below is embedded in flash, so it’s not really hosted on this site – if it breaks or if it’s slow it doesn’t depend on me)

EDIT- This is an update I wrote today on Q23, about the other side of the hype:

I just finished to read a preview on an italian magazine and they praised the game a lot (this about the European press preview in London, I don’t know exactly when it was).

But they also said they are worried about the release because in the four hour test the game crashed many times and the engine seems to be rather heavy.

They also said that the shaders 3.0 were still not complete and because of this the game had problems with the light system and even showed graphical artifacts on the scene. In fact Bethesda prohibited to publish screenshots not approved or take photos during the demo.

Still, they repeated that they are confident to solve the bugs before the game is released.

If you were wondering about the delay, these seem to be the reasons. This about the PC version.

They also wrote that the graphic quality of the NPCs, armors and clothes was overall high but also varying.

Prey is one of the few games I’m anticipating this year.

It has something interesting to say on every front: a top-notch engine with advanced features, innovative design and gameplay, the best art that is possible to expect and first quality sounds and music (Jeremy Soule again). Along with many other smaller elements like dynamic elements in the environment (like spikes coming through the pavement), an innovative death system (spiritwalking) and perfectioned light and animations systems for the monsters.

I already commented the previews of the game a while ago. These days 1UP is giving the game a special week coverage and the articles have been rather interesting, confirming that my expectations and hopes were well put.

Today’s article gives more details on the work thay have put on the Doom 3 engine to add the new features that are deeply tied with the innovative game design behind the game. And this is also why I consider it so much interesting. It is trying to revolutionize the genre (FPS, in this case) by breaking up some of the basic patterns to introduce unpredictable elements. By developing specific technology to support their design ideas they can shape up the game to radically change its structure and principles. Their portal system mixed with the variable gravity system and the “wall walking”, promise to open up a whole new dimension for this genre.

So it goes right to the core of the gameplay, to untap a potential that remained hidden or underestimated till today. Demolishing the feeling “on rail” of the current FPS, that too often are limited to more or less pretty two-dimensional labyrinths. In this game all the principles and rules at the base of the genre are broken. The rooms can flip upside down, the monsters can walk on the ceiling and walls, and the portals destroy completely the limits of the perception of the space. Every game starts with a set of rules that the player quickly learns. Here the boundaries of what we have seen till today are broken. The design started from the beginning with the aim to push those limits.

We still have to see if the execution will match the ambition, but the design ideas and the technology behind are rock solid. The possibilities they opened are endless.

One of the original Prey engine’s novelties was a little invention called Portal Technology (PT). The premise was simple: Instead of stepping into an elevator, hitting the Up button, observing the onscreen action grind to a halt, and then waiting for the hard disk to load the next level, Prey teased a braided area system that essentially warped Euclidean geometry (the solid geometry that defines the three dimensional sort of space we live in) by allowing the existence of hierarchical levels within levels.

“Our portal system allows you to move fluidly from area to area, orientation to orientation,” says McArthur, adding that general objects in the world can pass through the portals as well and that the developmental obstacles were manifold. “Several elements in a game need to be dealt with to produce fully functional portals. First, we have to render the scene from the point of view of the destination portal, which is the kind of portal.” In Prey, however, that’s just the beginning. “The fun part of portals is the creation of impossible non-Euclidean spaces where you’re being torn away from the expected,” says McArthur, hinting at labyrinthine, Escher-like conglomerations. “As players of FPS games, we’re used to mapping out an environment in our heads and having these realistic 3D spaces. We’re not expecting spaces to overlap each other or lead back into each other. The most interesting use of portals occurs when you don’t realize there’s a portal at all, where you’re just experiencing an environment that your mind says isn’t quite right.”

According to McArthur, one of the biggest challenges involves getting motion through the portals to stay smooth while the orientations are changing radically. Likewise with weapon ballistics. “Having weapons fire through portals can be troublesome with ray-cast types [weapons fire with only one endpoint],” says McArthur. “Also [troublesome is] getting high-speed projectiles to play well with paper-thin surfaces. All of the weapons in the game are subject to the laws of physics, so shots over long distances will drop toward whatever the local gravity direction happens to be.” Fire into a portal that reorients gravity, in other words, and your bullets could be bending some serious curves.

This also raises the question of noise. Imagine getting sound to flow through a portal so that even though it may be emanating from an object a mile away, you can hear it through the portal as if it were right next to you. “We do that, too,” says McArthur. “The sound system was altered to allow not only audio flow through doorways, but also through portals.” Add AI navigation modeling to the mix–how AI peers through and navigates a portal–and you can see how Portal Technology has a trickle-down impact on every major system in the game.

Gravity and weight are, in fact, central to a variety of gameplay elements. “We can have gravity fields of any shape, strength, or direction, or in all directions as in the case of the local gravity field of a small planet,” says McArthur. “Of course, the projectiles will obey these fields of gravity, which may in some cases make them appear to go snaking through a maze of invisible forces.” These fields can change or be affected by the player as well (Ender’s Game, anyone?), and though the alien sphere in which the game takes place lacks traditional environmental conditions (e.g., weather effects like rain and thunder), the sphere is prone to electromagnetic storms that can produce tears in space and gravity sinks.

Couple gravity with juggling orientations and you get another of Prey’s curious gameplay variants: wall walking. “Wall walking is the ability to walk on marked surfaces within the game regardless of their orientation,” explains McArthur. “We use curved surfaces to great extent, allowing you to travel in directions that would normally require an elevator or ladder, as well as spaces you’d simply be moving through in another game. So instead of walking through a building, for example, you might be walking up its outside surfaces.” McArthur says this is intended to give players a different perspective on areas altogether by allowing vantages from any angle. “Prey’s wall walking and manipulation of gravity required that all our characters and players have the ability to exist at any arbitrary orientation,” continues McArthur. “The combinations of these factors required that the systems be very robust.”

There isn’t such thing as “enough hype” for this game.