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Mirror's Edge (or movement in an FPS)
Rook
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Mirror's Edge (or movement in an FPS) It's EDGE day here in the UK, and once again I'm rather dazzled by the cover. It almost makes me not feel ashamed to buy it (the strangely phallic Wii cover last month was an unusual drop in quality).
DICE is ready to talk about their new game. And it's not Battlefield, or even a Battlefield spin off. Their new property is all about movement, running, jumping, climbing. It's a game that wants you to feel everything, you're not just running, your legs are pounding into concrete trying to keep you up right and moving forward. It's a a game that wants you to leap of the edge, twisting in midair to get that shot off before the ground into you. It wants you to move past people, or over people, crashing through a window before you'll stop for cover. It's all about the parkour inspired chic that's currently riding high with Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia and the soon to be added Assassin's Creed. But with every other game doing this, what makes it worthy of a cover? Well, mainly because it's still an FPS.
It's not the first FPS to do this, recently Arkane has probably been most adventurous as far as the mainstream goes with Dark Mesiah. Sword play added momentum to your steps, and suddenly you're not just watching a blade fly back and forth across the screen but your lunging and swinging with every slice. A hefty blow would send you realing backwards or worse yet, knocked to the floor having to pick yourself up again, a tradition that looks set to continue in The Crossing. F.E.A.R. dabbled in the concept with your character able to throw kicks, although arguably Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was far more visceral in this respect, even if it did occasionally switch to third person.
The indie scene as always has been more adventurous, taking chances that would perhaps alienate boardrooms and the marketing departments. Half-Life mods such as the opera come complete with flips, jumps and somersaults with the camera mimicking the player’s movement (and often inducing nausia too). Although Aliens versus Predator, also encroached on this stomach churning action, mixing up multiplayer to more than just a shootout, with aliens scuttling up walls, leaping around and using movement rather than precision aim to bring people down.
But in a world filled with disembodied hands holding guns, with running rarely achieving more than an increase in movement (half-life) or heavy acrobatics, characters stopping or flipping on a dime rarely presented as more than a bump on camera movement, maintaining pixel perfect accuracy(UT). Is there really room for a game where the guns aren't as important as the hands holding them, and the feet carrying the camera?
So cheesy marketing line aside (Putting the person back into first-person - although quickly clarified with it's an adventure, not a shooter), what are people's thoughts?
Personally I'm pretty excited, as these kinds of features done right I think add a whole lot to the game when you start concentrating more on the movement and momentum. So as I realise many of you probably don't have access to this fine vestibule of gaming information, how about some discussion on movement in first person games? I'll try and grab some scans when I get home, not much in the way of screenies, but the concept lead character looks hot.
Oh: PC, PS3, 360. With 360 being lead platform.
Edit: Original Edge Article here
DICE is ready to talk about their new game. And it's not Battlefield, or even a Battlefield spin off. Their new property is all about movement, running, jumping, climbing. It's a game that wants you to feel everything, you're not just running, your legs are pounding into concrete trying to keep you up right and moving forward. It's a a game that wants you to leap of the edge, twisting in midair to get that shot off before the ground into you. It wants you to move past people, or over people, crashing through a window before you'll stop for cover. It's all about the parkour inspired chic that's currently riding high with Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia and the soon to be added Assassin's Creed. But with every other game doing this, what makes it worthy of a cover? Well, mainly because it's still an FPS.
It's not the first FPS to do this, recently Arkane has probably been most adventurous as far as the mainstream goes with Dark Mesiah. Sword play added momentum to your steps, and suddenly you're not just watching a blade fly back and forth across the screen but your lunging and swinging with every slice. A hefty blow would send you realing backwards or worse yet, knocked to the floor having to pick yourself up again, a tradition that looks set to continue in The Crossing. F.E.A.R. dabbled in the concept with your character able to throw kicks, although arguably Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was far more visceral in this respect, even if it did occasionally switch to third person.
The indie scene as always has been more adventurous, taking chances that would perhaps alienate boardrooms and the marketing departments. Half-Life mods such as the opera come complete with flips, jumps and somersaults with the camera mimicking the player’s movement (and often inducing nausia too). Although Aliens versus Predator, also encroached on this stomach churning action, mixing up multiplayer to more than just a shootout, with aliens scuttling up walls, leaping around and using movement rather than precision aim to bring people down.
But in a world filled with disembodied hands holding guns, with running rarely achieving more than an increase in movement (half-life) or heavy acrobatics, characters stopping or flipping on a dime rarely presented as more than a bump on camera movement, maintaining pixel perfect accuracy(UT). Is there really room for a game where the guns aren't as important as the hands holding them, and the feet carrying the camera?
So cheesy marketing line aside (Putting the person back into first-person - although quickly clarified with it's an adventure, not a shooter), what are people's thoughts?
Personally I'm pretty excited, as these kinds of features done right I think add a whole lot to the game when you start concentrating more on the movement and momentum. So as I realise many of you probably don't have access to this fine vestibule of gaming information, how about some discussion on movement in first person games? I'll try and grab some scans when I get home, not much in the way of screenies, but the concept lead character looks hot.
Oh: PC, PS3, 360. With 360 being lead platform.
Edit: Original Edge Article here
Rook on
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I thought it was great! Replacing the dagger in the SAS emblem with the Wiimote with the appropriate motto
I'm not particularly convinced this'll be good. Motion sickness will probably play a part, especially if the movements are sudden. I best pick up the issue to see what it's all about....
also hope the keep the white room in, maybe as a VR Missions type mini game.
as for last months EDGE cover, i've got to agree with Airan. loved it, and with certain rare exceptions EDGE's covers are always a better alternative to tech mags that plaster half naked women all over their covers.
Hell, for a time period I refused to use any guns whatsoever to make the game more fun.
Yeah, absolutely agree on this, I wouldn't exactly say any of DICEs games have felt really immersive. But then again, they're not exactly idiots either when it comes to making games.
I'm also not entirely sure how they're going to implant some of the parkour stuff. I mean, rail flipping and kong jumps just won't be the same if you can't see the rest of your body.
First-person view is not like real life. In a first-person game you only see a rectangle in front of you. You don't get the awareness of your surroundings like you do in real life.
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Yeah, I generally also know what activities my other limbs happen to be partaking in, even if they aren't directly within my line of sight.
I also have a blog!
You can also see your feet in real life.
Buy some useless stuff at my Cafepress site!
Absolute bullsh-
...
I also have a blog!
I would wager that there's a large percentage of gamers who cannot, in fact, see their feet in real life.
well thats kinda the point. to give the same kind of immersion and freedom of movement found in 3rd person games, but with a 1st person perspective.
as for seeing your body/knowing what your limbs are doing, they're addressing this too. the game may be a first person shooter, but the emphasis will be on movement, not combat. you're not going to be just a gun floating in the middle of the screen. you'll see your body, it will move in a realistic fashion in context with the movements you're making. the article makes mention of how well implemented the sense of momentum is. one example being that when you go into a crouch from running you slide, legs extended infront of you, head and body snapping back. there are a couple of screens showing a few examples of this and more*. maybe they're being overly ambitious, maybe i'm just buying into the early hype, but the brief hands on detailed in the article gives positive impressions of the most basic aspects, so hopefully they'll be able to extend the good work to the full game.
*i can't scan them, but hopefully a quick search will turn something up, unless Rook wants to add the rest to the OP.
You know, I realized that after I hit the submit button.
Buy some useless stuff at my Cafepress site!
The environements will have to seem very realistic. Not the graphics specifically but all the objects and their placement in the environments. It cant look like a parkour park. I was guessing the game should play like Tony Hawk, but more fun.
I laughed altogether too much at this comment, and this thread in general.
A run and gun meets Splinter Cell acrobatics
Fantastic
I rally like the look of it. Bright, clean and colourful. However it's really not a game where it seems all that useful to make judgements based on screenshots. When we see it in motion for the first time will be when we might get any real idea about wether DICE can pull off the first person parkour action.
Here
It gives the impression that DICE had managed to get a basic and working model for first person moving together already back then. So I think the game sounds really promising.
It's funny how they almost color coded the game, what's up with all those weird red ramps on people's roofs? I will be impressed if they pull off climbing and running around smoothly in first person. Knowing where your character is in the world and what (s)he's doing is a lot harder that way.
I loved climbing around and exploring in assassins creed, so I hope this game will bring the same feeling of freedom. Unfortunately, going by how those ramps are set up in that first screenshot, it does seem pretty linear and not a totally open city you can run around in. Might be just a test level though, so does anyone know how the real game will be set up? Will it be sandboxy or will it be more traditional?
I would love to see a futuristic sandbox game with more variation than AC. To leap around in a big city as a rogue agent with high tech gadgets. I want to do something like the assassination at the beginning of the first Ghost in the Shell movie in a game.
something like assassin's creed appears to have roughly the same polygonal complexity but still high texture resolution; i guess it just depends on the skill of the developer
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Hey, you're right, you can see it near the red crane on the left. I thought (reflected diffuse?) lighting like that was supposed to be really difficult without a ray tracer? Is there any current game that does that?
They might bake the reflected colored lighting like they do static shadows in some games. Or these might be bullshots. Any case, they look pretty slick compared to most next gen games.
Well, RSC 2 was, IMO, the best looking game, bar none, last gen and BF: MC looks spectacular, so I don't question DICE's ability to squeeze some great graphics out of the PS3 and 360. However I haven't seen any official comments about the screenshots so they might very well be bullshots or high end PC screens, since it's announced for PC as well.
It does sound bloody fantastic.
Have we seen this in action yet? Sounds ace.