Dark Messiah has been becoming a chore. It has a lot of flaws, these can be overlooked on the first play but become more apparent second time through. So I’m taking a short break.
Incidentally Dark Messiah is one of the games in Steams weekend deal this week. Beyond Good & Evil, Dark Messiah, Far Cry and I-L2 Sturmovik for the small price of £8.99. Despite my troubles I still recommend Dark Messiah, it’s worth it for the first time through.
Crysis came in the post today (along with yet another offer from my bank for a credit card…), and I’ve spent some of today playing it.
It has been great fun. Sneaking around in the bushes, drugging people from a distance, and the game was fun too. 😉 So for today I decided to cover two points which came to me whilst playing.
How Intelligent should AI be?
Over the many years that gaming has been going AI (Artificial Intelligence) has come a long way. From simply moving slowly towards your character to NPCs that make decisions, circle around you and follow trails. More recently however innovation in this area has practically stopped. Graphics engines get more complex, Worlds get expand and yet it would be hard to tell the AI apart from that of several years ago. This has been a big problem for some gamers, I don’t mind so much myself. Some Gamers have been calling for more development in the area, they want more intelligent enemies to take on. I’m thinking however that maybe they are intelligent enough already, who wants an enemy that can out think you most of the time? Some games do need to catch up, but there are several examples of games that have a level I am quite happy with. Unreal Tournament has some great bots for one-on-one deathmatch, with a sliding scale of difficulty that can suit almost every player. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I once attacked one of the military bases, after firing off a few shots at the enemies I retreated then moved to a different angle of attack. This took several minutes to do and when I was back into a good position I saw that some of the guards were now standing at the point where I had been before. Whist moving to another location I had been out of their sight, so they made the logical decision of advancing on my previous position in the hopes of discovering me. Crysis’ AI is quite similar, I would attack from one direction, cloak and move away, but the enemies would follow up. Sometimes they would continue to shoot where I had been before cloaking, just in case I was nearby. I feel that this is a pretty good level of AI. It gives you a challenge, has you constantly thinking, and yet it’s still possible to gun down most enemies. Sometimes you want a difficult challenge, others you play to relax, you just want to win and still feel that they had a chance.
One area that does need some work is pathfinding. How they deal with the player is fine, but they don’t understand the terrain. I could improvise and head up a small hill to get out of the way, and yet they can only go the normal route. It would be a lot of fun if they could use the terrain to as good an effect as us. There is also the issue of NPCs getting stuck on a pebble, immersion is the key word for games and mistakes like that break the immersive feeling, spoiling a good experience. Then there is the bane of character based game, escort missions. Brrrh, I felt a shiver just saying it. Most experienced gamers will have played a game at some point with a terrible escort mission. Whilst you are running around doing as well as usual, they clunk around, blundering into enemies and what ever you do, don’t get too far ahead… In Crysis this situation was avoided, when it came time to escort someone to safety I was left to clear the area rather than actually lead the person, something that could have been a big problem.
The final area I can see needing some improvement is stealth, you nearly always know the general direction of the NPCs in relation to you in a game, imagine if one could sneak up on you… 😯
In conclusion, I think we’re actually much closer than we think to a ‘perfect’ opponent. The area that needs improvement is the AIs understanding of it’s environment, not necessarily knowing more advanced tactics.
Destructible Scenery
This is something I feel is severely lacking in many games today. In Crysis, if you are running the DirectX10 version you can ‘chop down’ trees by shooting through them. It’s great fun, and they fall pretty realistically too. In a general gun fight it isn’t used much, once or twice I found a small tree between myself and the enemy and by the end of the fight something had fallen down. Aside from the giddy little thrill you get from things falling down, it also helps increase immersion. By the end of an enocunter you really feel that something has happened in the area when there is destructible scenery. Dark Messiah had several sections that were destructible, sure it was limited but when it worked right it felt great. Sadly, apart from exploding barrels and breakable crates destruction is hardly ever used in most games.
Going back a few years I remember playing the demo of Red Faction, it was based around a mining operation, and wherever there was soil you could blast your way through. It was even destroyed in the correct direction. It was underused though and never really found a purpose. I’ve heard of some voxel based games that have completely destructible environments, one such example is Voxelstein3D. I haven’t played it myself but it offers a completely destructible game made to be like Wolfenstein3D. I also found this on the OGRE forums (that are used to discuss the ORGE3D game engine), it features fully destructible land masses. These are really only tech. demos though, sadly it’s just not technically possible to have this in a modern game, the more destructive objects you have the bigger the overhead. One day we may end up with systems powerful enough to render high quality, fully destructible games, or a new technology may be discovered that works better than current graphics technology. Until then, I’ll keep blasting trees in Crysis.
To finish off a few beautiful looking screenshots. As per usual, click to see full size.
[…] More recently I have experienced the amazing feeling, that some of the games listed here gave me, less often. Sure I have enjoyed games, but that real feeling of ejoying a game that few people can explain has escaped me. Crysis brought it back. Overall it’s a pretty average shooter, but while I was playing it recently I was lost. I don’t know how to explain it other than to say I felt a buzz while playing it, and I didn’t want to stop. Not to mention the fact that it’s great for screenshots. […]
[…] to your location, many objects have physics properties and are sometimes even destructible. (I’ve already covered these last two.) But when it comes to language things have barely moved on from the text adventures of the […]