The main difference between old and new map design is that the old map design didn't mind open arenas, multiple entrances to an area, and often fairly significant hidden areas. The first level of Duke Nukem 3d is a good example with that one video of one of the designers playing with someone else and showing off some of the shit in the levels he worked on showing the multiple entrances and secrets. Most FPS games have moved away from arenas and sometimes maze-like or at least multiple ways through a small subsection towards highly controlled movement from cover to cover.
It can also be argued that the early FPS games felt more open because they added up and down to the movement. So levels were designed to go all over the place.
Over time, however, it's been distilled back to the basic element: Get from point A to point B. Suddenly the games are shorter because exploration has, for good or bad, been removed. The novelty is gone, more or less. But that also means less general frustration when the player cannot immediately figure out where to go for the next plot coupon.
Nostalgia filters everything.
One of the reasons I like Bioshock and Bioshock 2 so much. Not only can you explore, I really want to.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
DreamWorks CEO Jeff Katzenberg is expanding his portfolio beyond touching our hearts with endearing movies about pandas and ogres to touching our Facebook profiles with invites to games about agriculture. The animated film studio co-founder is now also the sixth member of Zynga's board of directors -- which, according to a blog post by Zynga chief Mark Pincus, came about "after he suggested that the blockbuster of 2011 could be ShrekVille."
We've read that statement probably about 20 times now, and we're still not sure whether or not it's a joke. Like, it seems like a joke -- we're no strangers to the phony baloney portmanteau -- but we're receptive to the fact that a thing called ShrekVille would probably make a berzillion dollars.
So a person who works for a movie company that made mediocre shlock is now on the board of directors for a video game company that makes mediocre shlock.
It can also be argued that the early FPS games felt more open because they added up and down to the movement. So levels were designed to go all over the place.
That would be a pretty terrible argument considering most of them were still pretty much 2d with rooms over rooms being a rarity with most early FPS games.
And then it changed. Early, early FPS games were pretty much just linear collections of rooms. But when they realised they could build up and down, suddenly you were traipsing all over the map to meet the conditions to enter the next area and do it all over again.
Suddenly design seemed to enforce this because they wanted to show off just how 'open' the whole map was. This begins to artificially lengthen gameplay because you spend quite a bit of time backtracking just to unlock a door. Now you've got a 15-20 hour game that would've been half that if they didn't waste your time.
In relation to Homefront, it's all moot anyway. It's clearly a game designed to place emphasis on multiplayer gaming. Obviously the argument can be about how this cheapens the single player bits, for those who want it, but we'd be fooling ourselves if we failed to acknowledge that SP portions of FPS are rarely important in the long run. The people on my friends list aren't playing BLOPS solo.
And then it changed. Early, early FPS games were pretty much just linear collections of rooms. But when they realised they could build up and down, suddenly you were traipsing all over the map to meet the conditions to enter the next area and do it all over again.
Very few of the 2.5d FPS games had much in the way of rooms over rooms. Pulling off room over rooms in those days was a bitch and a half so wasn't used often until the advent of polygonal shooters. The most popular of those didn't have much in the way of up and down exploration either.
All I'm saying is that, like any other genre, sandbox isn't inherently better or worse than linear. That graphic earlier is amusing, but misleading. Ultimately, the Homefront SP experience is considered lacking. That's a dev problem and it wouldn't have been fixed by gigantic, wide open levels with lots of back-tracking.
There's also the fact that game design has to account for people who just want to play games until they see the credits and then move on, with the possible exception of multiplayer. Multiple pathways are wasted if people are only ever going to see one of them, when the content could be collapsed into a single pathway to produce a longer game.
NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
edited April 2011
PC gamer cd back in the day had "Quake done Quick", a demo video that showed a run through Nightmare in 13 minutes. Then about a year later they found "Quake done Quicker" that had 3rd person camera angles and text commentary, which ran about 12:30.
Both ran as demo loops during Quake's menu screen
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited April 2011
What the fuck at that Quake video. I've only just started! I live for these sorta videos though. TAS stuff amuses me too.
Quake done Quick is an important aspect of the Quake speedrunning community. Essentially, it represents a collection of collaborated speedruns in which the game is finished as quickly as possible with special rules and aims. Unlike the normal records listed above, these movies are created one level at a time rather than in one continuous play session; as such, it is possible for multiple people to help create the movie by sending in demos of individual levels, and much better times can be aimed for as the segmentation allows one to easily try again upon committing an error. It also allows runners to only have to focus on a small portion of the game rather than all of it.
That's a very fast speed run, but part of me can't help but think it's coincidentally the worst way to play Duke Nukem 3D. For some games, it's not as bad, but just the essence of Duke3D.....
Duke Nukem 3d is a interesting comparison to modern corridor shooters, as within the first 3 levels the game has trained you to look for secret area's to be able to proceed though levels i.e. the poster in the prisoner cell in the third level. In later levels the secret areas become much more about finding rewards/eater eggs.
It is quite a different experience to find yourself searching through levels rather than being pushed through a scripted corridor. I noticed this on the play through I am doing now with eduke32 as I wait for DNF to come out.
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Brainiac 8Don't call me Shirley...Registered Userregular
edited April 2011
So my family sat down and watched Tangled last night. Am I crazy or has Disney got decidedly more awesome with their animated movies since John Lasseter was put in charge?
Tangled was as close to as I've seen computer animation get to mimicing the classic hand drawn animation of old Disney.
So my family sat down and watched Tangled last night. Am I crazy or has Disney got decidedly more awesome with their animated movies since John Lasseter was put in charge?
Tangled was as close to as I've seen computer animation get to mimicing the classic hand drawn animation of old Disney.
I watched it this weekend, and it was pretty good.
Oddly enough, the studio's 2012 project is based on a short story by... Philip K. Dick. Wrap your head around that.
So my family sat down and watched Tangled last night. Am I crazy or has Disney got decidedly more awesome with their animated movies since John Lasseter was put in charge?
Tangled was as close to as I've seen computer animation get to mimicing the classic hand drawn animation of old Disney.
I watched it this weekend, and it was pretty good.
Oddly enough, the studio's 2012 project is based on a short story by... Philip K. Dick. Wrap your head around that.
Hah, I was going to suggest an adaptation of The Man In The High Castle, then in googling found that the BBC are already on it.
Frustratingly, I've recently had what I believe to be a genuinely good idea for a game based around a Dick short story, but I have absolutely no coding skills. So, that'll just have to lie dormant!
I remember discovering this on my own back in the day. The way the Build engine/map editor works, though, is that they didn't have to make it so the crack could have been opened in this manner. Which leads me to believe that the level designer set this up for gamers who figured it out.
Shadrach Jones is an old man who owns and runs a gas station in the fictional town of Derryville, Colorado, along an old highway fallen into disrepair due to it having been replaced by a modern interstate highway.
Counterpoint: Cars was John Lasseter's pet project and was absolutely the worst Pixar movie.
Plus, he had little to do with Tangled at all.
So really, it's a co-incidence. I'd put more of Pixar's recent success on other people too, like Brad Bird.
Funny enough I went into Cars expecting to hate it, and was pleasently surprised at how much I enjoyed the movie. It's not their best movie (That goes to Wall-e and The Incredibles) but I still really enjoyed it.
On the other end of the spectrum, A Bugs Life was my least favorite Pixar movie (although I liked that one too)
So far I haven't outright hated anything Pixar has done and loved most of it. They are probably my favorite animation company out there. The real test is going to be Cars 2, as even though I liked the first one, I wasn't necessarily clamoring for a sequel.
Well of course. Most people say they want this sprawling dungeon they can explore with their friends, but then data shows time and time again that real players hate that stuff and avoid it whenever possible. They really want that epic scripted dungeon that challenges them just enough so they feel good, but they can blow through it in 30 minutes.
MMO gaming is all about minimizing risk for maximum reward. Strike that, all gaming is about that.
I feel like a lot of WoW's decidedly non-linear overworld can scratch that non-linear dungeon itch. I remember standing up on the castle wall in the ruins of Alterac trying to figure out the best way to get to a house in the middle without getting murdered by ogres.
So my family sat down and watched Tangled last night. Am I crazy or has Disney got decidedly more awesome with their animated movies since John Lasseter was put in charge?
Tangled was as close to as I've seen computer animation get to mimicing the classic hand drawn animation of old Disney.
I watched it this weekend, and it was pretty good.
Oddly enough, the studio's 2012 project is based on a short story by... Philip K. Dick. Wrap your head around that.
Hah, I was going to suggest an adaptation of The Man In The High Castle, then in googling found that the BBC are already on it.
Frustratingly, I've recently had what I believe to be a genuinely good idea for a game based around a Dick short story, but I have absolutely no coding skills. So, that'll just have to lie dormant!
The War With the Fnools? That could make a neat short.
I love dungeons. Like, proper dungeons. With different areas and little stories tucked in corners. A firm mix of exploration, discovery, puzzling and combat. The thing is though, you can totally make an argument that DA2 dungeon design is utter shit because yes, it's a freaking hallway...but mmo dungeons are going to be run dozens if not hundreds of times. The first time you run a proper mmo dungeon it's fantastic, the 70th time not so much.
I hated BRD not because of it's design as a dungeon, but because its design as a dungeon I knew I had to run a shitload of times for various reasons. BRD at least was not LBRS. I got lost there. A lot.
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Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
edited April 2011
Honestly, can't say I cared for having big empty rooms for the sake of big empty rooms, so I'm really not crying any tears over the general change in design.
Well of course. Most people say they want this sprawling dungeon they can explore with their friends, but then data shows time and time again that real players hate that stuff and avoid it whenever possible. They really want that epic scripted dungeon that challenges them just enough so they feel good, but they can blow through it in 30 minutes.
MMO gaming is all about minimizing risk for maximum reward. Strike that, all gaming is about that.
Also, Dire Maul can eat a dire cock.
The setup of WoW's dungeons, at least in my memory, was very discouraging of exploration, because every mob confrontation ended up being a large coordinated effort on the part of the team, and the sheer freaking number of the mobs involved. If it wasn't, there's a good chance that's because you (and the other 14 people in your raid) were already well past needing to do this dungeon, or past getting anything useful out of it, which seriously reduced the likelihood of you being able to find 14 other guys interested.
Of course, there was still a chance that if you wanted to explore, you'd get horribly assaulted by the same mods even if you were doing a cakewalk, because, again, the sheer numbers involved.
Those dungeons really just didn't seem to be intended for exploration.
I stopped playing WoW years and years and years ago. And some of my fondest memories are trawling around Dire Maul at 3am with my guild mates. We were lost, sure, and the place was labyrinthine to absurd levels. But it felt like exploration. It didn't feel like a video game event, it felt like a world to inhabit and have fun in. This applies to a lot of the game as a whole too.
Blackrock Depths. I remember being in an absurd 8 hour run of that with half the server swapping in and out along the way. And yet at the end of it, through the pain and suffering and ultimately the mindset that lead to me quitting the game altogether, it was tremendously satisfying and was an experience you couldn't get in other genres.
Now I've not seen any Lich King or Cataclysm content, or anything really released from 6 months after Burning Crusade onward. But already the dungeons were much less interesting than the vanilla ones at launch, the zones more of a set of content 'arenas' rather than places, and that's why I quit. The mechanics of play never interested me but the meta aspect of being in a coherent digital realm did. And this was eroded over time as the game became more of a game, if you see what I mean.
I've seen snippets of the newer content and they have vehicles and airships and bombing runs and in-game chess and all sorts of nonsense that seems to be making it more of an abstraction, taking all sense of exploration and mystery out of it. It's a corridor of loot, optimised as you say for minimum risk maximum reward.
If that's what most people want to play, so be it. I'm not here to lay out some kind of MMO treatise, just my own opinions. The parts of WoW that I enjoyed most were those ad-hoc groups you formed in the middle of nowhere with strangers who couldn't speak English and you just worked towards a common, mundane goal. And you discovered the dungeons at the same time, sharing in the surprise and revelry, ducking down shortcuts and trying to jump off ledges and all sorts of inventive stuff. I'm not saying this can't still happen, but when dungeons are one long corridor they're not really places to get lost in, they're just loot tubes.
Randy Pitchford, president of Duke Nukem Forever developer Gearbox Software, says that publishers are forcing multiplayer modes onto games they do not suit because of an obsessive desire to keep pace with blockbusters like Call Of Duty.
Gearbox’s upcoming Duke Nukem Forever, a fast-paced FPS, naturally suits competitive multiplayer, but Pitchford points to the likes of Dead Space 2 as evidence that decisions are often motivated by the desire to tick boxes on a feature list, rather than for the good of the game itself.
“Let’s forget about what the actual promise of a game is and whether it’s suited to a narrative or competitive experience,” he tells us. “Take that off the table for a minute and just think about the concept-free feature list: campaign, co-op, how many players? How many guns? How long is the campaign?
“When you boil it down to that, you take the ability to make good decisions out of the picture. And the reason they do it is because they notice that the biggest blockbusters offer a little bit for every kind of consumer. You have people that want co-op and competitive, and players who want to immerse themselves in deep fiction. But the concept has to speak to that automatically; it can’t be forced. That’s the problem.”
While bemoaning the practice, Pitchford understands the realities of business: that these decisions are made at a high level, one unaware of, and unconcerned by, the creative concept of a game. With research firms like EEDAR suggesting that the more feature-rich a game is, the better its review scores, it’s understandable that decisions are often taken for what gamers and developers see as the wrong reasons.
“When the publisher is thinking, ‘When I put my money in, I don’t know what’s going to come out, but I know what I want the low and high numbers to be and I want the high number to be as high as possible’, fundamentally he’s gambling,” Pitchford says. “He’s a money guy, he has no creative investment. He’s putting money on the table and wants a return. For him, the worst-case scenario is that he just gets it back.”
Using the Dead Space series as an example, Pitchford says: “It’s ceiling-limited; it’ll never do 20 million units. The best imaginable is a peak of four or five million units if everything works perfectly in your favour. So the bean counters go: ‘How do I get a higher ceiling?’ And they look at games that have multiplayer.
“They’re wrong, of course. What they should do instead is say that they’re comfortable with the ceiling, and get as close to the ceiling as possible. Put in whatever investment’s required to focus it on what the promise is all about.”
Pitchford was speaking to us as part of our feature, All Together Now, which looks at the current state of multiplayer modes with input from Ruffian Games, Bethesda, Activision and Splash Damage. It’s in our next issue, E227, which will be with subscribers any day now and at all good newsagents from April 12.
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One of the reasons I like Bioshock and Bioshock 2 so much. Not only can you explore, I really want to.
And then it changed. Early, early FPS games were pretty much just linear collections of rooms. But when they realised they could build up and down, suddenly you were traipsing all over the map to meet the conditions to enter the next area and do it all over again.
Suddenly design seemed to enforce this because they wanted to show off just how 'open' the whole map was. This begins to artificially lengthen gameplay because you spend quite a bit of time backtracking just to unlock a door. Now you've got a 15-20 hour game that would've been half that if they didn't waste your time.
In relation to Homefront, it's all moot anyway. It's clearly a game designed to place emphasis on multiplayer gaming. Obviously the argument can be about how this cheapens the single player bits, for those who want it, but we'd be fooling ourselves if we failed to acknowledge that SP portions of FPS are rarely important in the long run. The people on my friends list aren't playing BLOPS solo.
Indeed. But also, the complete misuse of the term "next generation" to describe PS3/360 was bad enough, but for it to be in the actual name? Guh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhzXKMqZBBc
The required up and down paths are fairly obvious.
This statement by Dice is so much bullshit. Just Cause, RDR, GTA, etc. MMOs are also sooooooo unpopular.
They moved to digital-only releases. The few retail games in that format (Section 8, Chromehounds) haven't been hits.
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I don't know, but I do know I miss them.
Also, Quake in 52 min? What. The. Fuck.
That's not Quake in 52 mins. That's Quake 100% kills, 100% secrets in 52 minutes. I'm sure a non-100% speedrun would be noticeably faster.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Both ran as demo loops during Quake's menu screen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_done_Quick http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/
The good old days of bunny hopping making you go insane speeds.
Games were so much more breakable back then:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vi_7xZboMs
When is the Xperia whatever supposed to come out in the USA?
*rambling*
It is quite a different experience to find yourself searching through levels rather than being pushed through a scripted corridor. I noticed this on the play through I am doing now with eduke32 as I wait for DNF to come out.
Tangled was as close to as I've seen computer animation get to mimicing the classic hand drawn animation of old Disney.
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Plus, he had little to do with Tangled at all.
So really, it's a co-incidence. I'd put more of Pixar's recent success on other people too, like Brad Bird.
I watched it this weekend, and it was pretty good.
Oddly enough, the studio's 2012 project is based on a short story by... Philip K. Dick. Wrap your head around that.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/
I write about video games and stuff. It is fun. Sometimes.
Monster's Inc. disagrees.
Hah, I was going to suggest an adaptation of The Man In The High Castle, then in googling found that the BBC are already on it.
Frustratingly, I've recently had what I believe to be a genuinely good idea for a game based around a Dick short story, but I have absolutely no coding skills. So, that'll just have to lie dormant!
I remember discovering this on my own back in the day. The way the Build engine/map editor works, though, is that they didn't have to make it so the crack could have been opened in this manner. Which leads me to believe that the level designer set this up for gamers who figured it out.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Oh great, so it's just Cars all over again.
Funny enough I went into Cars expecting to hate it, and was pleasently surprised at how much I enjoyed the movie. It's not their best movie (That goes to Wall-e and The Incredibles) but I still really enjoyed it.
On the other end of the spectrum, A Bugs Life was my least favorite Pixar movie (although I liked that one too)
So far I haven't outright hated anything Pixar has done and loved most of it. They are probably my favorite animation company out there. The real test is going to be Cars 2, as even though I liked the first one, I wasn't necessarily clamoring for a sequel.
Nintendo Network ID - Brainiac_8
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Add me!
MMOs are changing.
Well of course. Most people say they want this sprawling dungeon they can explore with their friends, but then data shows time and time again that real players hate that stuff and avoid it whenever possible. They really want that epic scripted dungeon that challenges them just enough so they feel good, but they can blow through it in 30 minutes.
MMO gaming is all about minimizing risk for maximum reward. Strike that, all gaming is about that.
Also, Dire Maul can eat a dire cock.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/
I write about video games and stuff. It is fun. Sometimes.
This is funny because I greatly prefer the old keyhunt FPS's.
The War With the Fnools? That could make a neat short.
I hated BRD not because of it's design as a dungeon, but because its design as a dungeon I knew I had to run a shitload of times for various reasons. BRD at least was not LBRS. I got lost there. A lot.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
The setup of WoW's dungeons, at least in my memory, was very discouraging of exploration, because every mob confrontation ended up being a large coordinated effort on the part of the team, and the sheer freaking number of the mobs involved. If it wasn't, there's a good chance that's because you (and the other 14 people in your raid) were already well past needing to do this dungeon, or past getting anything useful out of it, which seriously reduced the likelihood of you being able to find 14 other guys interested.
Of course, there was still a chance that if you wanted to explore, you'd get horribly assaulted by the same mods even if you were doing a cakewalk, because, again, the sheer numbers involved.
Those dungeons really just didn't seem to be intended for exploration.
Blackrock Depths. I remember being in an absurd 8 hour run of that with half the server swapping in and out along the way. And yet at the end of it, through the pain and suffering and ultimately the mindset that lead to me quitting the game altogether, it was tremendously satisfying and was an experience you couldn't get in other genres.
Now I've not seen any Lich King or Cataclysm content, or anything really released from 6 months after Burning Crusade onward. But already the dungeons were much less interesting than the vanilla ones at launch, the zones more of a set of content 'arenas' rather than places, and that's why I quit. The mechanics of play never interested me but the meta aspect of being in a coherent digital realm did. And this was eroded over time as the game became more of a game, if you see what I mean.
I've seen snippets of the newer content and they have vehicles and airships and bombing runs and in-game chess and all sorts of nonsense that seems to be making it more of an abstraction, taking all sense of exploration and mystery out of it. It's a corridor of loot, optimised as you say for minimum risk maximum reward.
If that's what most people want to play, so be it. I'm not here to lay out some kind of MMO treatise, just my own opinions. The parts of WoW that I enjoyed most were those ad-hoc groups you formed in the middle of nowhere with strangers who couldn't speak English and you just worked towards a common, mundane goal. And you discovered the dungeons at the same time, sharing in the surprise and revelry, ducking down shortcuts and trying to jump off ledges and all sorts of inventive stuff. I'm not saying this can't still happen, but when dungeons are one long corridor they're not really places to get lost in, they're just loot tubes.