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How come I can't collapse ceilings or blow half a guy's head off yet?

DangerAardvark

DangerAardvark

Diamond Member
The FPS genre hit two milestones in 2001. One was Geomod in Red Faction. The other was the damage model engine in Soldier of Fortune. In other words, destructible environments (including walls, floors and ceilings) and realistically (the actual execution was over-the-top, but the technology could have been implemented in more realistic situations) destructible enemies.

Both of these should have been standard in every serious FPS since, but have been crippled by two things: the need to deviate from conventional level design that comes along with destructible environments, and fear of backlash from a realistic portrayal of gore.

But this is 2007, and here we are on the precipice of another generation of FPS games, and this shit STILL isn't standard. Crysis comes out soon, and the game looks like it completely lacks any sort of creative vision, so I haven't read up on it. So, does it have these two things?
 
Crysis has destructible objects like trees and buildings, but not destructible environments.

I remember you could actually dig holes into the ground in Red Faction. Can't do anything like that in Crysis. I agree that the destructible environments feature in Crysis is far from true destructibility.

As for the gore, I agree as well. I'm sick of games that only show a blood spot no matter where you hit enemies or with what you hit them with. I'm also not a big fan of shooting someone in the legs 7 times and still have them run around like normal. I want to see that my shot placements have some effect on the way characters move or react or look. No more of this 100% or dead (no in between) crap. Crysis doesn't have this either.
 
You may never get the level of gore you are asking for. In fact, I'm not even sure it would be a good thing.

Destructible environments require dumbing down the environment as well. Red Faction wasn't exactly the prettiest game ever made nor the most complex. Take Bioshock, for example. Do you actually think you could code everything required to make that environment destructible? Would you be able to code chambers flooding accurately and depressurization? How about coding enough so that digging a tunnel under a building causes enough of a shift to collapse the building and thus the tunnel as well? We are not there yet at all. But there is also nothing stopping someone from making another game like Red Faction, where you can dig through shit like lemmings.
 
Originally posted by: Skacer
You may never get the level of gore you are asking for. In fact, I'm not even sure it would be a good thing.

Destructible environments require dumbing down the environment as well. Red Faction wasn't exactly the prettiest game ever made nor the most complex. Take Bioshock, for example. Do you actually think you could code everything required to make that environment destructible? Would you be able to code chambers flooding accurately and depressurization? How about coding enough so that digging a tunnel under a building causes enough of a shift to collapse the building and thus the tunnel as well? We are not there yet at all. But there is also nothing stopping someone from making another game like Red Faction, where you can dig through shit like lemmings.
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That's a good point about Bioshock. We may not be there yet, but damn that's a cool concept.

It just seems that they keep shoving sharper textures and prettier lighting at us instead of technology that could actually affect gameplay.
 
I'd imagine the development team concentrate mostly on the things that sell now so they can hope a publisher picks them up with a good deal.

Though I agree, I've actually complained about this at least 5x in this forum about bouncing rubber AI, and red decals.
 
I've been wanting destructible terrain ever since games like X-Com and Steel Panthers. It seems like game design went downhill with first person shooters. You get rocket launchers that can't even shoot through tissue paper. Even worse is when you have a rocket launcher and tons of explosives and have to go look for a key to open a flimsy door, arrrghhh.

I can't say game AI has really gotten noticeably better either since I first started playing PC games.

The only thing that has improved is everything is shinier now. Gameplay however hasn't improved all that much.
 
Originally posted by: Skacer
You may never get the level of gore you are asking for. In fact, I'm not even sure it would be a good thing.

Destructible environments require dumbing down the environment as well. Red Faction wasn't exactly the prettiest game ever made nor the most complex. Take Bioshock, for example. Do you actually think you could code everything required to make that environment destructible? Would you be able to code chambers flooding accurately and depressurization? How about coding enough so that digging a tunnel under a building causes enough of a shift to collapse the building and thus the tunnel as well? We are not there yet at all. But there is also nothing stopping someone from making another game like Red Faction, where you can dig through shit like lemmings.
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See what bothers me about this argument that now with more sophistication and complex engines and graphics, the more the gore or gun mechanics seem to lag behind the generation. We still have those basic AI hit boxes and the bouncing rubber doll effect, but we have the gravity gun?.

Take HL2 for example. Beautiful game. Environment is lush and the acting and story telling compelling. Grenades that ricochet off the ground realistically, and a crow bar or grav gun that can clear many obstacles. However, when I whip out my shot gun, shoot a zombie in the leg, and then the zombie goes flying backwards about 5 feet but of course only after the 2nd shot -something does not add up here.


Forgive me, I just woke up and I didn't sleep too well so my motor skills are about as good as a Saturday night drinking 6 beers in an hour.
 
Originally posted by: ZappDogg
You just haven't been paying attention. Crysis has massively destructible environments, and Soldier of Fortune: Payback has the best damage modeling system since...well, the original Soldier of Fortune.
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you may be right about SoF: Payback (but no one knows for sure. seems very little info out there for this game), but Crysis does not have massively destructible enviroments, unless you count chopping down a few trees, knocking over a few ramshackle huts (made of plywood and a few sheets of aluminum held together by mud), and blasting some bottles and barrels "massively destructible".
 
Everyone clamoring to destroy everything is a stupid argument, in my opinion. There would invariably come a point at which 1) you create so much havok (pun intended) that the physics engine can't keep up, or 2) you end up blocking a vital path/destroying an objective, etc...there has to be a shred of linearity in order to keep the game moving along.
 
Originally posted by: ZappDogg
Everyone clamoring to destroy everything is a stupid argument, in my opinion. There would invariably come a point at which 1) you create so much havok (pun intended) that the physics engine can't keep up, or 2) you end up blocking a vital path/destroying an objective, etc...there has to be a shred of linearity in order to keep the game moving along.
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maybe they should start making games with non-linear objectives.
 
Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I remember seeing a demo for a new Call of Duty flick that had destructible environments.
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Flick? you mean game?
CoD4? the demo didn't have destructible environments.
 
Couldn't agree more. It's not about wanting more gore - it's about wanting realistic gore. Like others have said, if you shoot an enemy in the leg, the enemy loses function of that leg, and so on. It shouldn't be that hard to make strides in this area.

The massive destructible environments are definitely something for the future. I think that as games seek to be even more immersive and multicore CPU technology keeps progressing we'll see more possibilities for this. I can't wait to see what games are out in 2025. Probably not duke nukem forever, but still, we'll probably have 1000 core CPU's with holographic displays and all kinds of fun stuff for physics, AI, and destructible environments.
 
I think we'll definitely get there. Right now games are focusing on visual things, but I personally don't see it getting that much better than Crysis. Once you've already reached photorealism in graphics, what's next? Probably full interactivity. Physics. Damage modeling. Environmental destructibility. I think this will be part of the natural evolution of games.
 
The technology for superconductors has existed for years but you don't have a superconducting PC sitting on your desktop yet do you? Why? Because even though the technology exists it's a bitch to make and not economically feasable.


"Fundamentally, when you?re rendering an image of a scene, you don?t have to render everything at the same level. It would be like forward texture mapping, which some old systems did manage to do. But essentially what we?ve got in graphics is a nice situation where there are a large number of techniques that we can do that we can fall off and degrade gracefully.

Physics doesn?t give you that situation in the general case. If you?re trying to do physical objects that affect gameplay, you need to simulate pretty much all of them all the time. You can?t have cases where you start knocking some things over and turn your back on it and you stop updating the physics. Or even drop to some lower fidelity on there, where then you get situations where if you hit this and turn around and run away, they?ll land in a certain way, and if you watch them they?ll land in a different way. And that?s a bad thing for game development." - John Carmack



 
Nice quote smilin, interesting stuff.

I think what some people are saying though is there an endless parade of games that look pretty...why can't we have a few that maybe look uglier but have more dynamic envirnoments and enemies. It does feel like graphical developments have moved at a blistering pace while AI has been at a standstill. We're FINALLY seeing some physics stuff, but the developers usually don't even incorporate it into a game as more then an afterthought. (like trash rolling around)

However, multiplayer games are pretty big and based on what I've seen this kind of stuff would be pretty hard to pull off without some insane connections as well.
 
Hmm, interesting topic.
I remember playing SOF (1or2, I don't remember) that had 'destructible enemies." It did make things more interesting and actually changed the gameplay, but most of the time it was just over-the-top gory. But especially in games that have swords, melee fighting, etc. there should definitely be destructible enemies.

There are those who would complain about the possibility of too much gore, though. My take on it is this. If games take on a more realistic rendition of violence, then perhaps the actual games themselves will change. As games become more and more interactive, the possibility for gameplay that excludes mowing down fields of enemies will become the norm. But then again, people like pretend killing, myself included (I play CS:S, HL2, etc.) I found SOF a little too much, however (it was a little disturbing).
 
Originally posted by: The Green Bean
Originally posted by: ZappDogg
Everyone clamoring to destroy everything is a stupid argument, in my opinion. There would invariably come a point at which 1) you create so much havok (pun intended) that the physics engine can't keep up, or 2) you end up blocking a vital path/destroying an objective, etc...there has to be a shred of linearity in order to keep the game moving along.
Click to expand...

maybe they should start making games with non-linear objectives.
Click to expand...

This is a tough one. People have been talking about it for 20 years, but I don't think most know what it really means. Narratives are linear. Stories have plot points and progression, climaxes and anti-climaxes. Even the thinnest story underlying the most basic shooter takes you from point A to point B. The only genre where complete nonlinearity works is in multiplayer games, where the players become the story, and the basic idea is repetitive but enjoyable action. A single player game built that way would be boring as hell. Oblivion is not a counter-example. Sure, you can wander the world and collect stuff, but the story moves forward linearly. If you don't move it forward then eventually you get bored of doing the same stuff over and over. Drama is important to entertainment, and drama doesn't arise spontaneously from artificial worlds. At least not yet, and maybe not ever.
 
I think destructible envionrments are a combination of technological and design. From a design standpoint, allowing the player to destroy an entire map is self defeating in your average FPS. In a sandbox enviornment it might be fun in the short term, but FPS aren't just about realism, it is about an experience, action, drama, tension, challenge. all of which hopefully is fun. you don't necessarily need fully destructible terrain to get a great FPS experience.

as for gore, i think developers should investigate and create more accurate combat systems. not necessarily just for gore but to make combat more rewarding. As a player we're looking for more than just taking a MOBs hitpoints to zero, i think shooting out a knee causing a MOB to fall and trip up his comrades behind him who then fall forward over a ledge is more rewarding then just unloading with the machine gun.
 
Originally posted by: TBSN
Hmm, interesting topic.
I remember playing SOF (1or2, I don't remember) that had 'destructible enemies." It did make things more interesting and actually changed the gameplay, but most of the time it was just over-the-top gory. But especially in games that have swords, melee fighting, etc. there should definitely be destructible enemies.

There are those who would complain about the possibility of too much gore, though. My take on it is this. If games take on a more realistic rendition of violence, then perhaps the actual games themselves will change. As games become more and more interactive, the possibility for gameplay that excludes mowing down fields of enemies will become the norm. But then again, people like pretend killing, myself included (I play CS:S, HL2, etc.) I found SOF a little too much, however (it was a little disturbing).
Click to expand...


SOF was a little too much, but for what it's worth it was realistic, in a lot of FPS's if you blast somebody point blank with a shutgun they fall and die, in SOF they blow back and usually loose a limb or something, much more realistic. Gory? hell yes, but I found it better than shooting somebody in another game and having them die with no sign of bullet holes and zero blood.

SOF III is going to raise the bar for realism, from the preview I read if they leave it as it is. The game could end up with a AO rating, definitely M at the lowest.
 
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