Lets talk about the level design of half life and why it was soo good

[EternalAmbiguity]

@Billy4184

GI has little to do with this topic, I was simply referring to my point of view of graphics in general - although I think that in the graphics and lighting department there are a lot of nice things that could be done to take advantage of modern tech.

But it goes a lot further than that. For example, here’s a thread I made about AI personality in games and what I would like to see out of it in the near future. There are a bunch of things:

• Much more advanced and reactive AI, not only in terms of behaviour, but range and fidelity of body movement and body language, with such things as physics driven animation.

• Full-body (or at least multi-limb) interaction with games, such as in VR;

• Voice interaction in games, preferably with AI;

• Generation of very large game worlds, such as in No Mans Sky;

• Much more immersive experiences, such as with VR, that enable much more subtle control of game experiences, and has the potential to take games into a variety of territories that were simply boring on PC such as social interaction and mind-games with NPCs and maybe other players.

• Procedural generation of highly interactive and detailed game content (not necessarily realistic) that enables the interaction with the environment to be the primary source of gratification - a very simple example being something like being able to generate a planet or a city with a set of parameters and then go and walk around inside it and interact with it.

• etc.

@GarBenjamin I definitely am implying a trend toward either `realism’ in some sense, or at least a self-consistent fidelity of some kind that isn’t possible through something like a 2D game, but I don’t necessarily mean graphics as such. I just happen to like graphics a lot so it’s hard to separate it from other things.

@neginfinity I don’t quite agree, I think that the beauty of Doom’s gameplay was indirectly a result of it being a new and cutting edge game, because it was not confused by any other interpretation of the genre, whereas now we have a million different interpretations of fps and it’s very hard to innovate on it anymore.

I understand. I also am interested in a few of these (mainly AI and procedural generation), but I doubt most gamers are.

[GarBenjamin]

@Billy4184

@GarBenjamin I definitely am implying a trend toward either `realism’ in some sense, or at least a self-consistent fidelity of some kind that isn’t possible through something like a 2D game, but I don’t necessarily mean graphics as such. I just happen to like graphics a lot so it’s hard to separate it from other things.

Well I was only talking about 2D because you mentioned 2D pixel art.

Of course, the same principle applies to 3D…

It surely seems like a lot of time would be saved for innovating in other areas if the graphics in a game were like any of these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5lu4Gyb1KM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnXz2PsxJQ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BavFMlkXW8

Instead of spending all of the time needed to make everything look similar to these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUcFjRzuDP0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e30uShG3Exw

But I get it… as soon as you say REALISM then your workload has increased by a crazy amount to make everything look good. I don’t understand why that is needed but I do realize it is probably just a matter of personal preference.

[Billy4184]

@EternalAmbiguity

I understand. I also am interested in a few of these (mainly AI and procedural generation), but I doubt most gamers are.

I’m not sure, I think there are a lot of people looking for something new that feels different. And it ties back to the idea of targeting particularly that niche audience of gamers who want to see something really different.

I haven’t played it, but Overgrowth shows something about the state of affairs amongst gamers - it seems to me to be basically a tech demo for procedural animation that’s been in alpha for about five years, yet at a price point of $30 (excluding the current sale) it has sold plenty of copies and gotten mostly positive reviews - I thought it would have been ripped apart in fact. (By the way in case you’re interested there’s a nice GDC talk here on proc animation).

Anyway I’m not interested in satisfying casual gamers - for them there’s an endless buffet of choices. The idea is to make something for those who want to see the future and have the tech to make it happen.

@GarBenjamin I somewhat agree, especially in terms of the detail of a game like Witcher. I really like something like Mirror’s edge, sort of clean and simplistic yet very realistic.

[Aiursrage2k]

Yeah by having a simpler graphics style you can potentially create more content and possibly create more interesting gameplay (look at exodemon).

Exodemon Greenlight Gameplay Trailer

[theANMATOR2b]

@Martin_H

It’s enough of a difference to define the outcome of the “do I want to play this?” decision for many people, so I’d say it is pretty damn important. You might find it weird, but I’ve had numerous occasions where I’ve recommended a game and 3rd person camera, or first person camera, was named as the key reason for not being interested. Some have really strong preferences there.

Sometimes I think other people read my mind and say what I’m thinkin, but in a much more elegant way than I could ever say it.

@Billy4184

There are so many new avenues to explore, such as VR, different kinds of advanced interactivity such as AIs and environments that react closely to what you do and give the player a totally different sense of control.
In fact when I read up on new stuff that’s being tried out in articles on Gamasutra for example, it’s often AAA companies that are pushing the boundaries, and it’s not even stuff that necessarily requires a lot of money.
From my perspective there’s just a pervasive sense of apathy and reiteration, if not a total march backward in time, when it comes to a lot of indie projects.

@MV10 has some compelling and agreeable reasoning. I’d also say - profitability plays a huge role in mindset of keeping what we got and iterating in small stages to milk as much as can be milked, OR going for bleeding edge without knowing what the market may/may not like to see, and knowing in advance the market shrinks drastically when creating something on the bleeding edge - for those who only have the very latest hardware builds.
AFAIK (not researched) is there any indies who have made big bank $$$ from developing VR/AR? Assuming no - why would anyone decide to go bleeding edge when the money is not there? Beyond just trying to push the limits, most people want to make a profit from there designs. If a developer can’t make a profit - (bigger is better) they will find themselves having to update resumes quickly. Even people who lie and claim money isn’t a driving force for investment need to see positive returns on investment - or they will invest in other avenues/industries.

@Billy4184

Whether that’s graphics fidelity, physics fidelity, trying to spawn a solar system on someone’s gpu or whatever, there’s very little going on that just plays with the limits just for the sake of it - and when it does it usually dies in some sort of metamorphosis between the original, crazy concept that gave birth to it, and the need to cater to everyone’s expectations of 100 hours of gameplay and 200 side quests with looting.

And gets over-hyped with unfulfilled promises and expectations. No Mans Sky

@GarBenjamin

I enjoy playing those retro games for what they are. But you are right in that I dislike this whole nostalgia nonsense. I am sure many people play such games for the nostalgia of it but not all of us do.

Agree with basically everything you mentioned, though I think we may be missing one element. A lot of current developers see a large audience (Millennials) that didn’t get to experience the 80s-90’s pixel art craze completely. Although they may have played a couple popular games on gameboy or maybe even PS2-3 and Steam, a large portion of games (great games) were played by Gen X - and those games can be updated with modern mechanics to be played by the current/up coming generation of gamers who have excess money due to there parents working there butts off.
Although there are a lot of games from that era that are not being recreated, there are a ton of story elements and mechanics that could be ‘borrowed’ from older games to fit right nicely in the market today. Its much easier to say “I’m going to recreate Legend of Zelda but with different graphics and a couple updated mechanics” than it is to create something from scratch.

[Billy4184]

@theANMATOR2b

I’d also say - profitability plays a huge role in mindset of keeping what we got and iterating in small stages to milk as much as can be milked, OR going for bleeding edge without knowing what the market may/may not like to see, and knowing in advance the market shrinks drastically when creating something on the bleeding edge - for those who only have the very latest hardware builds.

I think there’s opportunity here precisely because of this. A lot of indies seem to have been sucked into the idea of trying to copy AAA games in terms of method, namely aiming for casual gamers, high replay factor, stuff like that. The problem is that AAA companies can do that type of game much better, market it much better, continuously create all of the content that keeps people coming back for more, etc.

The thing is that if you make a game for gamers who want something different, you can have a lot more success precisely because a lot of AAA don’t bother with niche markets or risky new ideas.

I think Overwatch was a good example of something that succeeded relatively well (despite a huge array of reasons why it shouldn’t have, not least because it’s hardly worthy of being called a game) because it catered to people who wanted to see something new. And I think that No Mans Sky would have been received very positively by a lot of people had the devs been more open (though might not have made quite so much money). No Mans Sky is kind of an exception in that they got swept into the mainstream and failed at being a mainstream game - but it’s the kind of game that indies have a good chance of succeeding with because of its somewhat niche character, and its attempt to do something different.

[Martin_H]

@Billy4184

yet at a price point of $30 (excluding the current sale) it has sold plenty of copies and gotten mostly positive reviews - I thought it would have been ripped apart in fact.

Pretty sure at 5$ the reviews would be mostly negative. Often people willing to spend less are a lot more entitled. People willing to drop 30$ on a really unfinished game seem to be more patient. Barrier to entry can be a good thing, even for game prices. Raise it high enough and your only customers are those that really want to have the thing. There are some other psychological mechanisms at work too, that bias people towards liking their expensive purchases.

[Billy4184]

@Martin_H

Pretty sure at 5$ the reviews would be mostly negative. Often people willing to spend less are a lot more entitled. People willing to drop 30$ on a really unfinished game seem to be more patient. Barrier to entry can be a good thing, even for game prices. Raise it high enough and your only customers are those that really want to have the thing. There are some other psychological mechanisms at work too, that bias people towards liking their expensive purchases.

Well that’s what we need to do then to do something different, aim at niche gamers who will pay a good price.

By the way, although I thought that $30 for that game would have gotten a few people worked up, I definitely don’t think releasing at $5 would have been any better. $15 or 20 is what conventional wisdom would dictate, yet I think here is the evidence that quite a few people really, really want something new.

In fact maybe No Mans Sky’s $60 price point would have worked out well, had it not been marketed at the wrong audience.

[neoshaman]

@Billy4184

I haven’t played it, but Overgrowth shows something about the state of affairs amongst gamers - it seems to me to be basically a tech demo for procedural animation that’s been in alpha for about five years, yet at a price point of $30 (excluding the current sale) it has sold plenty of copies and gotten mostly positive reviews

That’s not the truth at all, it’s a sequel to a cult classic, lugaru, which is why people are waiting for it, lugaru looked like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmzWG_gTV5s

I can’t enter these thread and not have a controversial opinion it seems, but the goat for me was golden eye and perfect dark, Before that I played a lot of fps and so call immersive sim like deus ex and system shock (bad control) … and I always thought half life was just an evolution of duke nukem style of set pieces, not really impressed, and doom had already enemy that fight each others and detect you by sound … Now golden/dark introduce incredible ideas that no one really run with it because the fps keyboard mice warrior where too busy having instant gratification I want disarm back …

[MV10]

@neginfinity

Doom is good because skilled people put enough effort into it. Not because of “cutting edge”.

You can say just about any successful AAA title is good because skilled people put enough effort into it. The question is the nature of that effort… and the nature of that effort made it a cutting-edge product and absolutely did contribute to what made it any good. The same people made Wolfenstein, and while it’s well-respected, it isn’t remotely in the same league. It was quality, not quantity.

[Billy4184]

@MV10

You can say just about any successful AAA title is good because skilled people put enough effort into it. The question is the nature of that effort… and the nature of that effort made it a cutting-edge product and absolutely did contribute to what made it any good. The same people made Wolfenstein, and while it’s well-respected, it isn’t remotely in the same league. It was quality, not quantity.

I saw an interview once with Carmack where he was asked about what he thought was his greatest experience or something like that - and he said that it was Doom/3D/fps because he’d never had the experience before or since of being so totally in unexplored territory and on the boundary of what was possible at the time. I think there’s something to connect there in terms of what Doom meant to those involved, and the quality of the result.

If we as the community of game developers want to recapture that for out time, we have to go further out, into what’s not been made possible yet, and make it possible. Not go back and try to reiterate what’s already had its day.

[ArachnidAnimal]

@UnityMaru

That electric tram section was just horrendous.

You’re referring to the tracks that are connected at 45 degree angles to each other? I was expecting the train to fly off the tracks when playing the game.
What I remember most about the game were the cool sound effects. I think they even reused some of the sound effects in Portal (the HalfLife sound of picking up a barrels)

[neginfinity]

@MV10

You can say just about any successful AAA title is good because skilled people put enough effort into it. The question is the nature of that effort… and the nature of that effort made it a cutting-edge product and absolutely did contribute to what made it any good. The same people made Wolfenstein, and while it’s well-respected, it isn’t remotely in the same league. It was quality, not quantity.

“Cutting-edge” does not mean that it has a good gameplay. It means that it uses newest tech.

Doom is good because of the gameplay.

To the date there are maybe 3 shooter games total that get anywhere close to level of Doom (For example, Painkiller and Rogue Trooper). Everything else is significantly worse, even if it looks better has grass and leaves and shadows and shines everywhere, experience is still worse. Which is why I eventually gave up on FPS genre which used to be my favorite. People think that “cutting edge matters”, think that “cutting edge means tech”, start chasing shiniest technologies, and in the end produce experience that plays worse than one game from 1990s.

[Kiwasi]

@neginfinity

“Cutting-edge” does not mean that it has a good gameplay. It means that it uses newest tech.

Doom is good because of the gameplay.

To the date there are maybe 3 shooter games total that get anywhere close to level of Doom (For example, Painkiller and Rogue Trooper). Everything else is significantly worse, even if it looks better has grass and leaves and shadows and shines everywhere, experience is still worse. Which is why I eventually gave up on FPS genre which used to be my favorite. People think that “cutting edge matters”, think that “cutting edge means tech”, start chasing shiniest technologies, and in the end produce experience that plays worse than one game from 1990s.

But to be fair, Doom was cutting edge technology when it was released. That’s not the reason people like it today, but that was one of the reasons it was successful when released.

[MV10]

@neginfinity

“Cutting-edge” does not mean that it has a good gameplay. It means that it uses newest tech.

Doom is good because of the gameplay.

…which is why I used the word “contribute”.

[GarBenjamin]

Nintendo seems to be a great example of not focusing on tech and instead focusing on game play experience for innovation. While other companies were always trying to max out visual quality, # of objects on screen at once without slowdown and so forth Nintendo generally took a different route of building very cool games well within the existing technical boundaries.

[passerbycmc]

@GarBenjamin

Nintendo seems to be a great example of not focusing on tech and instead focusing on game play experience for innovation. While other companies were always trying to max out visual quality, # of objects on screen at once without slowdown and so forth Nintendo generally took a different route of building very cool games well within the existing technical boundaries.

yeah i dont play very many nintendo games, or own any of there hardware atm, but i do appreciate that they are experimenting with the hardware and input methods. Otherwise i think we would just have variations on a controller that existed since the ps1 days still.

I guess even the ps1 dual shock which is what pretty much all modern controllers are based on, was in reaction to nintendo and its n64 controller with the analog stick. They just made it to the standard dual stick system first.

[RockoDyne]

@GarBenjamin

Nintendo seems to be a great example of not focusing on tech and instead focusing on game play experience for innovation. While other companies were always trying to max out visual quality, # of objects on screen at once without slowdown and so forth Nintendo generally took a different route of building very cool games well within the existing technical boundaries.

Have you seen a Nintendo controller in the last twenty years? Nintendo doesn’t focus on high end tech, sure, so instead they focus on their tech that’s a bunch of gimmicky bullshit. Star Fox Zero, I rest my case your honor.

[neoshaman]

Star fox zero could have been amazing with the same control if it wasn’t the same game on 64 with occasional spot where you need the aiming and nerf direct aiming. They had teh potential to redefine the game like they did on mario 64 (redefining platformer, 3d camera, and sandbox level design) and zelda 64 (extending open world level design, simplified 3d camera with lock on).

Instead they did it like all absent minded dev do … tacked on unnecessary control on well define formula that wasn’t broken. I mean damn it, they could have usher a new era of aiming dissociated with views, instead we have star fox other M, and thank god the failed metroid had the prime trilogy first to show us the control could be non gimmicky (better control with lock + aim) though even there it was not used to full length … which is a story we start seeing at nintendo, idea are n more thought through like with mario 64 and all.

They should go back to make game around control scheme instead of making game and shuffling the control scheme after the fact.

[hippocoder]

I’m sure everyone here being game developers, can prove their points with prototypes.