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The curse of 1337 graphics..

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#41
I grew up on adventure game's, hell, I played text only adventure games (you cant get fewer graphics than that).

And many were a blast... much more prefered than any arcade style game's available at the time. Everything from the many Sierra game's (KingQuest, SpaceQuest, HeroQuest, PoliceQuest, GabrialKnight), to a few LucasArt's game's(Indiana Jones and the search for atlantis, Full throttle, Sam and max), kept me entertained for some time. As well as a few mentioned, like SS2, FO2, X-com, Syndicate war's, Tie Fighter... the list goes on

I still havent found a game that tops WingCommander :privateer. (not even x3... as good as it look's, I just cant get into it...)

Though, I think one can find as many good game's as back in the day, but now a days, we have to dig through all the other crap that is released.

I still think improved graphics are a plus... they do help immerse one in a world, but alas, many games are missing that key element that would keep a player interested. MMO's are trying to keep the game play interesting, but even the best of them tend to get tiring sooner than later, even with a large player base to interact with in the game.

Personnaly, some of these more oepn ended game's, like Oblivion, look great, but the AI, the world itself, is the weak link. It's far too static, far too artificial to get interested with for more than a few minutes.

But AI is probably very much still at the early stages of development (like graphics of the early 90's), and hopefully, some of the more oepn ended games in the future, can have AI that can mimic real life more convincigly witout having to write out scripted scenes for the player's benefit... but perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself...

Still would love to see a Wing Commander MMO though....

Shadehunter
 
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#47
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#48
What happened to coop whilst we're at it? it used to be very common for games to have a coop-mode, you used to be unpleasently supriced if you bought a game and found it didn't have coop, but then, it just slipped away, and today, you are allmost shocked if you buy a game and find it has a coop mode.

Whats the deal with that? most games have both an SP and MP portion, and with most good SP games, the MP portion is just a handfull of death-match levels piled in there, so why not put the netcode to some use and offer coop? its not even hard to do, you just need to make sure more than one person can spawn in the levels, and crank the skill to its hardest, the rest is just minor tweaks to your basic MP game-modes from what i can tell, surely this wont add much development time to your game, but it will do great things for its value.

So why? i just dont get it..
 
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#49
Grobut said:
So why? i just dont get it..
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Me neither, co-op is a really nice game mode especially when you have just a few friends to play with online. I'd love to see a game which actually concentrated a bit more on co-op, not just add extra spawn and raise the difficulty. Like, some sort of teamplay FPS in which you need the other players to solve puzzles e.g. the other player is sent into the monster infested sewers to collect / repair / destroy something while the other player is monitoring him via security cameras and trying to hold the monsters off by shutting down sealed doors. Damn, that would just rock. :D
 
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#50
Co-op died because games became more story driven. Back in the "old days" there wasn't much of a story so to speak. It more a handful of levels loosely linked together and you'd run them from start to finish. When devs started linking levels together and telling more complicated stories (read: levels became highly scripted) co-op just couldn't survive. Games were written for one player and to add another would break many levels, so rather than spend even more time making the entire SP experience MP compatible, they just dropped it. It's a shame, but that's how things go.

What we'll probably see in the near future is an abundance of MMO's (shooters and such) where the entire experience can be solo or co-op depending on what you feel like doing/the difficulty level. Personally I'd love an MMOFPS with client-side hit detection to compensate for lag and a huge outdoor world with indoor installations as "dungeons". If Huxley is a success (upcoming mmofps) I think the genre will take off as devs rush to cash in.
 
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#51
Coop isn't in most games today, as it isn't just "add a few spawns ro SP". Due to the heavy scripting of SP games nowadays, even having one additional player can screw up the game big time.
In SP, a script is usually triggered by the player going to a certain area. In Coop though, firstly you have the problem of who triggers it (any player, or just the host) and more importantly: where are all the other players when the script kicks in? Nothing ****s worse than standing on a bridge that crumbles by script because a player advanced and triggered it.
 
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#52
[-project.rattus-] said:
Coop isn't in most games today, as it isn't just "add a few spawns ro SP". Due to the heavy scripting of SP games nowadays, even having one additional player can screw up the game big time.
In SP, a script is usually triggered by the player going to a certain area. In Coop though, firstly you have the problem of who triggers it (any player, or just the host) and more importantly: where are all the other players when the script kicks in? Nothing ****s worse than standing on a bridge that crumbles by script because a player advanced and triggered it.
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Well, just look at how the origional Unreal pulled it off, first off it wasen't hard scripted, even back then they managed to pull off good AI that was fun to fight with and worked just fine with a few instructions put in the map, i had hoped this trend would continue, but it has not, most AI today is dumber than it was back then, and totally reliant on scripting.

And as for triggers, if a player triggered a crumbling bridge for instance, then if coop = true, another trigger would be triggered by the event and create an alternate path for the other players, simple, and it worked a treat.


Hard-scripting AI is a big mistake to begin with, and something dev's should move away from ASAP, it ruins any chance of replayabillity, AI needs more autonomy, sure you can give them things to guard, a route to patrol, or tell them that if they spot a player they should want to press the button over here to trigger an alarm or trap, but thats it, they need to pull off combat on their own, you can help them with pathing, suggesting places where they can cover or snipe from or whatever, but if it ends up with them running to the same place every time, she's dead Jim.

If Unreal and Half-Life could do a good job of it, you cant tell me that it cannot still be done, and better, i dont belive that for a second, seems to me that Dev's have just become lazy, scripting events make things look good very easy, but at a huge cost, and its just not worth it.
 
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#53
Unreal AI was so smart it was scary!

Of the games, that I have played, afterwards none surpass Unreal and most are worse (mainly due to relying on scripted events) (DISCLAMER: I have not played EVERY title since Unreal so what I say may not be true for every game)


Still remember that Unreal level that is like a water temple, simply basic labyrinth layout in x,y and z directions.

At one place a Skaarj warrior patroling the floor below me sees me and runs out trough a door.
I tought I was safe and continue exploring and suddenly a minute or two later he comes running trough the door to the room I'm in and kills me.

He has then navigated trough a labyrinth from the floor below me trough the rooms which to find a way up to the floor I'm at and then continued and found the room I'm in.

And that was not a scripted event because when I then restart a save game (the Skaarj Warrior killed me remember) I walk the same way but this time ther is no Skaarj patroling the room I passed last time. Thus he never sees me and never starts to hunt me so this time I pass through the room where I got killed last time and no Skaarj appearing.

And Unreal was like this all the time. I love that game.
 
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#56
To me Unreal was the revolutionary game (both graphics and AI) not HL. Personally I never understood the hype around HL, graphically it was inferior to Unreal and the AI was (in my opinion) not better.

Also instead of finding out the story yourself by finding clues (personal logs etc) like you did in Unreal, in HL they made it so you meet persons along the way that tell you the story which made me even less engaged in the game since I don't even have to work for finding out what has happened.
 
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#57
Fu. Svedberg said:
To me Unreal was the revolutionary game (both graphics and AI) not HL. Personally I never understood the hype around HL, graphically it was inferior to Unreal and the AI was (in my opinion) not better.

Also instead of finding out the story yourself by finding clues (personal logs etc) like you did in Unreal, in HL they made it so you meet persons along the way that tell you the story which made me even less engaged in the game since I don't even have to work for finding out what has happened.
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No we can agree on most of that, Unreal was definately leaps and bounds ahead of HL in my opinion, and a much better game, hell theres plenty of levels in HL that i hated (like the whole "on a rail" chapter), but not a single one i didn't like in Unreal.

Also in MP Unreal was way ahead, with coop and bots.

But HL was fun to me, not as good as Unreal, true, but i loved fighting the soldiers, and i wish Unreal had NPC's like HL, the Nali was there, but you coulden't really interact with them, only when they had a secret to show you, it would have been cool to meet fellow survivors of the Vortex Rikers, or some ISV-Kraan crew.
 
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#59
BigBoss7556 said:
Most HL fans including me also disliked the "on a rail" chapter. I haven't ever played Unreal though. Though, HL2's story was better than HL1 because it didn't present most things directly like HL1 did.
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HL2 was a big dissapointment to me actually, its good.. but something's missing, that special something that made HL what it was, its just not there.

And really, thats what this thread is all about, what happened to that "special something"? with all the posibillities of modern game engines, you'd think the art of storry telling would have reached a whole new level of awesome by now, but it has degraded instead, and no spit-polished 1337 graphics can hide that fact.

And its not just because i've grown jaded and too accustomed to games, i can still fire up Unreal and be as happy with it now as i was back then, no, that "special something" is not there in most new games.
 
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#60
One main reason with HL1 that why people played it alot was that it had great variety of mod support. HL1 SP was fun til you finished around 3\4 of the game, but after that it got really boring.

I tried Unreal long time ago and it was quite good.

But it is true, the games which are not just "we got the money if u got da graphics"- stuff are usually something diffrent by genre or overall design, like Ninja Gaiden. Yes story ****s, plot ****s, but the gameplay is excellent and the game is challenging or quite hard in some points.

And like Resident Evil 4, story sounds weird, plot may still be weird but gameplay and stuff works and are quite excellent again.
 
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