A living, breathing world ...
Yeah right.
Wait, how many times have I heard a developer claiming they were building that kind of seamless world where "nothing is scripted and everything is happening independently" ?
There's that Ukrainian team, named GSC GameWorld, and they tried to do exactly what that guy is telling us in that interview, they tried to do the same thing with S.T.A.L.K.E.R... and you guys see the result. There ARE "levels" in the Zone, the place is NOT 30 square kilometers, it ISN'T seamless, it IS scripted, and the so called "A-Life system" is limited to specific areas of each levels where if the creatures go beyond those limits will back-track and ignore you. And what happens in most, of not all of the mods where the A.I is "unlocked" to go anywhere they want ? Well the game crash and/or the A.I messes up the whole scripted scenes and often prevents the player from properly completing missions. They've spent (or wasted, depending on how you look at it) SEVEN years of their lives trying to figure out a way to do it exactly like FarCry 2 claims to be, and they never managed to do it.
Oh, I almost forgot, Bethesda Software, a team of developers on the scene of gaming since much longer than GSC, more experienced ... they also wanted to create something big with Oblivion. Ok, they DID manage to do a semi-seamless world. By "semi" I mean that the "world" is in fact separated in literally hundreds of cells, that have to load separately from each others. In a sense they ARE levels, but the method of rendering them is different. So instead of loading one time for 50 seconds, the engine has to hit your HDD hard constantly to load those cells that cover small areas at a time as you move on and as the textures load in, as the objects, trees rocks etc all load in. And let's not forget that A.I in Oblivion also loads in the same cell as YOU are in. That means that while you're in a specific cell, up to its limits then things can occur, A.I can spawn WITHIN that amount of space. But outside of the region that you're in simply NOTHING happens. There's no Minotaurs attacking some patrolling Goblins 20 kilometers away from you while you're doing your stuff, unaware that the battle is occurring. Everything that happens is confined within the cell you're in.
I'm not sure if I'm ready to believe even an ounce of what that guy is advertising FarCry 2 as. It sounds "already tried by others" and also sounds impossible to my ears that such an ambitious project can be done at all, and much less in a three years development period, when it took seven years for GSC to make a 15 hours or so long scripted story-line. If all of the 50+ team members are A.I programmers then maybe there is hope but I highly doubt that I'm gonna buy anything that guy has said. Even CryTek, a now experienced developer couldn't make Crysis a full seamless world. It HAS to have some solid scripted base or else everything will fall apart. You can't just create a sandbox game where everything is random without expecting major bugs to occur, can you ?
With all that said ...
Believe me guys, I do HOPE, sincerely, that one day I'll be able to play in such a big virtual world where I'm not forced to do anything (like Oblivion) WITH the world living around me and well BEYOND me, where the A.I do its stuff beyond the horizon, that things I can't hear nor see are happening away from me and then walk by at one point and see the carnage of a past battle. I remember GSC GameWorld said the EXACT same thing for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ... that's why I have my doubts.
Facebook
Twitter