Gameguru Mania

[ggrobot]

Ritual has released five new screenshots of
SiN Episodes: Emergence, their soon-to-be-available first person shooter. The game will be available on May 10th. In other news, fansite

Ritualistic has a voice cast interview with Hannah Logan (Elexis), Billy O'Sullivan (J.C.) and Jen Taylor (Jessica Cannon).

Read more...

Source: GGMania headlines
GGMania.com - Daily Gaming and Tech news

[miglaugh]

I wish in games like this (hl2 is another perfect example) you had the option to kill high-level characters (or even teammates), and have drastic or severe consequences ensue. Like for example if you killed that Jessica character out of nowhere dropships land carrying your former allies, and they try like the dickens to kill you out of revenge. Or if you kill a lowly grunt or something his "buddy" comes over and kicks your ass (takes away half your health) and knocks you to the ground.

I know, like in all friendly fire situations, there would be accidents... and perhaps it would be too tedious to have to constantly avoid FF and therefore be a negative impact on gameplay; But when you are point blank to an NPC and hold down the trigger, something should happen, not "nothing" as if you never fired the weapon. There's got to be some middle ground, right?

Anyone else share the same malcontent for terribly unrealistic FF in most single player games?

I keep thinking back to Operation Flashpoint. I remember playing that demo level somewhere in the vacinity of 150 times; In the very beginning your Major or whatever is explaining what you have to do, and you can just shoot him in the face and run off... It was awesome. You usually don't live very long because soon an APC or tank or guys in jeeps come flying after you like you just took down air force one.

Maybe it's just because I like being the bad guy running from the "good" guys in games, but that style of gameplay is sorely missed. I feel thats an aspect of AI they could truely take to the highest level where you would have no chance of outsmarting them, because thats the kind of behavior they would want to curb.

I hope that OFP 2 or Armed Assault have that "feature" and don't go the way of all the other single player titles as of late.

[lmer]

So here's a thought on your example: Let's take HL2 for instance. Along the way to your cliffhanger, you meet various NPCs which are all part of one organisation, and all of them are friendly and have hours of friendly themed prerecorded dialog that you get exposed to and which costed developers a shitload of money.

What if you go wrong on one of those NPCs at the very start of the game. There would have to be a unfriendly themed dialog too for the rest of the game, or completely removed interaction with the NPCs till the end of the game. Now that would make the gameplay shitty, right?. But that's an option too.

Well, i guess the developers are bound to be faced with those kind of problems if they strive for a realism themed games. But try and tell that to now thousands and thousands of them which are actually mostly graphic artists with little clue about gameplay and a lot of will to read up on some new books about latest GPU features. We are sentenced to this kind of crap. Period. As long as there are young kids with mutated brains, rich dads, and really nice computers, these are the only kind of games we are going to be playing.

So to get back on the topic, and the example at the beginning of this rant, i think the only way forward is if the "Industry" comes up with a few talented people that are going to start to inovate in the other side of the game technology.

Imagine what would a more sophisticated text-to-speech engine do for a game? Zero $$$ for voice actors, and a posibility to make the story as deep as your writer is. Just type, tweak the sound engine for different NPCs and off you go. And you can allway add more dialog later and avoid the release date delays due to waiting for actors to come in and fill in for the missing lines.

Or AI modules, like all these phisics engines we see as comercial SDKs. Why isn't there a company that deals with AI. Say they make AI modules, highly tweakable which only require geometry data for colision detection, wonder, follow, flee and other math based crap, but have sophisticated emotion engines. I'd do it for free! I have a get-lost-in-if-then fetish.

Basically it all comes to the allready known: either there is no real talent curently at work, or the game publishers are just a bunch of ****sucking suits. Probably the later. I just know that i lost interest in just about anything that was announced yesterday for like...2009 cause i know that all that time will be spent on exporting the fucking normal maps from the various dedicated graphic programs, while little time will be spent on the actual game programming.

[miglaugh]

I wasn't meaning to say that such brutal action toward your allies in a game should carry through to the end of the title, completely screwing the original plotlines (although that may be very interesting). What I meant was for it to atleast be possible, if only to be killed but a few minutes after. The problem I have is that bullets either don't register, or you're immediately presented with a "mission failed" screen. I'd just like realistic consequences.