Video games have advanced considerably, including much more realistic acting virtual “worlds” your character interacts with. Yet I haven’t seen the following (not that I’m up on all the latest games):
I think more games should have that, too.
Jack Thompson strikes again.
All I did was accidently hit Enter while in the title bar! :mad: :mad: :mad:
Anyway:
[ul]
[li]Your enemies do not have unlimited ammo. If they run low on ammo, they adjust their strategy or retreat.[/li][li]In fact, you compete with NPCs for ammo, health and other goodies.[/li][li] Your maximum speed drops when you’re wounded.[/li][li]You can’t carry unlimited stuff, and have to choose what to keep and what to drop. Your maximum speed also drops when you’re overburdened.[/li][li] Your enemies are slower, weaker and (sometimes) more cowardly when they’re injured.[/li][li]You don’t automatically pick up any usable object when you touch it. You have to use a Pickup command.[/li][li] You can actually carry healthkits with you for later use.[/li][li]You need to eat and drink occasionally. And not that “99 cans of soda will restore you from the brink of death to full health” either.[/li][li]Injuries continue to drain health from you until treated.[/li][li]All objects are breakable to some degree, although obviously cliff faces are a lot harder to damage than window glass.[/li][li]You can pick up objects (within weight limits) to move them.[/li][/ul]
How many of those features would cause more people to buy a game? How many would turn people off? It’s tough to say exactly, but the whole point of video game creation is profit, so you have to worry about things like this. I don’t think any of your ideas can’t be done, but some of them probably have a low return on investment.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
[ul]
[li]Your enemies do not have unlimited ammo. If they run low on ammo, they adjust their strategy or retreat.[/li][/quote]
I work as a game tester, and one of the games we’re working on had a mechanic like this. It really, really didn’t work well. But then, that’s going to describe 90% of the finished product, so I wouldn’t take it as industry gospel. The problem is AI, whch is a real bitch to program. Mimicking human thought and action in a dynamic manner is very difficult, to say nothing of expensive. The more sophisticated you try to make your AI, the more often it’ll start acting in some bizarre, unrealistic fashion because it’s encountered a set of variables that you hadn’t planned for. Stuff like tracking enemy ammo tends to get cut, because it’s easier (and usually more fun) to have a big fire fight than to have the bad guys running away because they have no bullets.
Still, there are a few niche games that tried this. The Jagged Alliance games, which were turn-based, squad-level tactical shooters, kept track of enemy ammo, and shoot outs could sometimes end up as hand-to-hand brawls.
[quote]
[li]In fact, you compete with NPCs for ammo, health and other goodies.[/li][/quote]
I don’t know of a game that does this. Probably for those AI reasons explained earlier.
[quote]
[li] Your maximum speed drops when you’re wounded.[/li][/quote]
I’m absolutly certain I’ve seen this in many games. Can’t think of a single one right now. Most FPS favor a high-speed, run-and-gun type of game play, so things that slow the player down are eschewed. There are a lot of more realisitc games out there, though, that have probably employed this mechanic.
[quote]
[li]You can’t carry unlimited stuff, and have to choose what to keep and what to drop. Your maximum speed also drops when you’re overburdened.[/li][/quote]
The original Deus Ex had a grid-based inventory system. You had a grid of, say, forty squares, and each item you found took up a certain number of squares: a grenade took one square, a pistol took six, a shotgun ten, all based on the size of the graphic for that item. Both Diablo games did the same, as did the more recent Resident Evil 4. All fantastic games, BTW.
[quote]
[li] Your enemies are slower, weaker and (sometimes) more cowardly when they’re injured.[/li][/quote]
I think Halo may have had something like this. The new game F.E.A.R. is supposed to have excellent AI, and may include it. I haven’t played it yet, but I’m thinking of picking it up this weekend.
[quote]
[li]You don’t automatically pick up any usable object when you touch it. You have to use a Pickup command.[/li][/quote]
Lots of games. The aforementioned Diablo and Deus Ex, the Thief games, pretty much any graphic adventure or 3D RPG game would do something like this.
[quote]
[li] You can actually carry healthkits with you for later use.[/li][/quote]
I think Hexen was the first FPS I played that let you do this. Dark Forces and its sequels, the Jedi Knight series, also allowed this. Usually it treats them as seperate pick-ups: one kind of healthkit is instant, another kind goes in your inventory. Deus Ex and Resident Evil both required you to pick up any object before you could use it. Any RPG-style game will most likely work the same.
[quote]
[li]You need to eat and drink occasionally. And not that “99 cans of soda will restore you from the brink of death to full health” either.[/li][/quote]
The Ultima role-playing games all required that you eat and drink regularly, as did Dungeon Master. Those are pretty old, though. Arx Fatalis, a first-person RPG in the mold of the old Ultima Underworld (a spin-off franchise from the more traditional Ultima games) also had a hunger and thirst element, and is of more recent mint. Can’t think of any shooters that do this, though, possibly because they tend to operate in real-time for battles, and don’t portray inter-level down time.
[quote]
[li]Injuries continue to drain health from you until treated.[/li][/quote]
Can’t think of any game that does this across the board. A lot have specific damage types that do this, like poison or special “bleeding” attacks, but I can’t think of any game that treated all wounds like that. I have trouble seeing this work from a game-play standard. A game like that would probably be going for a level of realism that would start to detract from the fun of the game.
[quote]
[li]All objects are breakable to some degree, although obviously cliff faces are a lot harder to damage than window glass.[/li][/quote]
There was one game series, I want to say Red Faction, that had fully destructible enviroments. Never played it, but I heard it was pretty mediocre. The very old (and also mediocre) 3D RPG Arena allowed you to cast a spell that could destroy almost any type of wall, allowing you to tunnel through some dungeons. It’s sequels (Morrowind being the most recent) did not have this element.
This is probably the hardest game play element, and the one you’re least likely to ever see fully implemented. When a game developer makes a level, it needs to be tested extensively to make sure that there are no places where the player can see a “seam” between surfaces and out of the game world, no places where he can fall through one of those seams, no places where the character will get stuck permanently in the geometry, no places where the textures on the geometry get corrupted, no place where the player can use the terrain to trick the AI into doing something clearly artificial (getting the stuck behind a door while you shoot them all dead) no circumstances in the level that would make it impossible to reach the level’s exit, and on and on and on. And that’s with a level design that is totally static through out game play. If the players can alter the level design more or less at will, it becomes almost impossible to make sure the level can’t be broken in one of the above mentioned ways. So, it’s very hard to make a game like this, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon: the technology is already there, for the most part. It’s making a workable game mechanic out of it that’s the problem.
This is also fairly common in high-end first person games these days. Ultima Underworld, which is a pretty old RPG at this point, was the first one I remember playing. Mostly it’s been RPGs that have done this, but advances in graphics cards and processing power has seen a surge in full world physics in action shooters. Half-Life 2 is the master of this, with every object in the game world being fully 3D with its own physics. Far Cry had this to a decent degree, and I understand F.E.A.R. does exceptionally well in this regard.
Alot of these have actually been done.
-Speed dropping when wounded was done in The Getaway.
-Limited supply of goods is a big thing in alot of RPGs, and some of them include overburdening as well.
-Not picking up objects automatically would just be annoying.
-Carrying healthkits has been pretty standard fair for most of the FPSs I’ve encountered in the last 5 or so years. And RPGs have always had them.
-Breakable objects has been played around with, as has interactive objects. Most noticably it was done in Half Life 2 (and games with the HL2 engine). However, making every single object moveable/breakable could take up significant CPU power.
All these were used in Sierra’s Quest for Glory series. There wasn’t a limit as to the number of objects you could carry, but each object had a set weight and you could only carry so much weight before being overburdened. When you were overburdened you moved slower and your stamina went down faster.
You had to carry “adventuring rations” with you at all times or risk starving to death. In the second game (which was set in the desert), you also had to carry water or risk dying of thirst, but the other games excluded water.
And, of course, all of Sierra’s old text-parser- and icon-interface adventure games required that you either type “pick up [object]” or click the hand icon on it to retrieve it.
Most of those things have already been done.
The ones that haven’t been done (eg; all objects are breakable) would create more problems than they are worth – and have been done as nearly as is desirable.
One advance that I’d like to see at some point is fire modelling – materials have adjustable combustibility and thermoconductivity properties. Fires can break out and spread through a building realistically – including collapses of load-bearing walls, automated fire-control systems, working fire extinguishers, etc. Obviously, this is a few years away, and levels would have to be carefully designed with concrete or stone firewalls, to avoid short-cuts or dead ends – but I the extra level of realism would be cool. Carelessly bust out the flame-thrower in the a disused file-room in the cellar of a wooden building and see if you can get out of there with your skin intact. 
in the Resident Evil series, as you are injured, not only does your speed drop, but your character’s walking/running animations change as well, when badly injured, you limp along clutching your side, if you are using a rifle or shotgun, at times it looks like you’re using it as a crutch/cane
the GameCube game “Eternal Darkness” also does this as well
both games make use of the “limited inventory” feature, and RE4 adds in “orientation” to item storage as well, some items fit better if they’re vertical in the inventory, rather than horizontal
System Shock had a number of these things, over 10 years ago.
Manual pick-up of items, Limited inventory (first ‘grid system’), and Health kits.
It also had a number of other features, including different types of damage (and changeable weapons), searchable items/bodies, and if you ran for too long you would actually tire out. It also had more range of movement than other games at the time, with leaning, crouching, and mantling on jumps.
It also sold < 100,000 copies. Doom sold several million.
If you’ve never played a game from Looking Glass, you should get your hands on one.
They had portable health kits as far back as Duke Nukem 3D. The portable health kit was separate from the regular powerup-type health kits. It had 100 points of health, and could be used repeatedly until all the health was exhausted.
In general, stuff related to the player’s health tends to be highly unrealistic because a realistic game wouldn’t be fun. A realistic player health system would be a one-shot kill, or at best you’d be unable to continue with the game until paramedics had come and rescued you.
Destuctable environments are popular, and are a big hit with players, but it’s usually only objects within the level that can be damaged, while the walls are usually indestructable for the reasons Miller mentioned. Rise of the Triad had a neat system where bullets that hit the walls left bulletholes. The bulletholes disappeared after a while, however.
Realistic fire modelling would be supremely cool, but programming it would be a nightmare.
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, 1985.
All I could think of while reading your list was how NetHack already does all that and more.
I don’t see how some of them could work in an FPS environment though. There is an issue of realism vs. fun. A soldier in real life could probably only take 2-3 bullet wounds to any part of the body before having to retreat and spend the next few weeks in a hospital, but I doubt gamers would enjoy that. If you’re hit in the head by a bullet that’s pretty much instant death right there. And yet, I can’t see myself playing a game where I have a good chance of just dropping dead at any given moment. FPSs a lot of the time are about getting out of tight squeezes on your reflexes alone. But if you’ve got 5 bullet wounds and your speed has been reduced to 5% of normal, you’re SCREWED, especially if you can’t fix yourself up by drinking 99 cans of soda. And as for modifying game environments, I suppose that could be done but as Larry Mudd said you’d have to be careful to design levels so you can’t just dynamite your way through to the end. Which would rule out some interesting setups, too.
Goddamit, I was all set to come in here and mention that Nethack had every single one of these features.
A popular Quake 2 mod called Action Quake also features speed drops when wounded, limited carry and health draining when wounded.
It’s kind of funny, Lumpy, because the Metal Gear Solid series of games - especially Metal Gear Solid 3, which came out about this time last year, makes extensive use of almost all of the things you listed as parts of its gameplay.
The big innovations in MGS3 were the food system and injury system - wounds must be treated with a series of objects, and you must find, kill, or capture food and eat regularly to maintain energy. The wound system was pretty nice - a gunshot wound, for example, would make you remove the bullet (use knife), clean the wound (use disinfectant), stop bleeding (apply styptic), then sew the wound shut (use suture). The game balanced it out well; you didn’t find yourself having to do this every time you took damage, but if a grenade blew you back 10 feet or an enemy sprayed you with close-range gunfire, it was time to go to the injury menu.
The food system wasn’t quite as successful, mainly because it wasn’t intuitively paced out; the player found himself having to feed the character every few minutes. Still, it was complex enough to be fascinating - you could capture animals to eat later, kill animals and keep the meat, and so on. Eating a piece of found fruit might only replenlish 10% of your energy, while consuming a whole live python would shoot you right to 100%. Not bad for the first contemporary game that’s really tried to incorporate a system like this.
Almost all of the other things you listed - enemies moving slower and behaving more cowardly when injured or under attack, a backpack with limited inventory that affects your speed and movement based on how full it is, and so on have been a part of the series since the first installment back in 1998.
Metal Gear Solid 3 even incorporated a certain degree of “competing for food and ammo,” in that you could find enemy storehouses of food and ammo and destroy them, which would cause soldiers to be low on ammo and food for the rest of the stage. Creeping around, you’d even hear one audibly complain to the other one, “I’m starving!” and if you came under fire, they’d be low on ammo and grenades. Interesting execution.
I think that destructible environments are one of the current “holy grails” of video games. Many games have moved to incorporating a reasonable amount of them - the aforementioned Storehouses from Metal Gear Solid 3 spring to mind, and one of Mercenaries’ selling points was the ability to level entire buildings via rockets or air strikes, but there are heaps of problems involved in offering *fully * destructible environments. I like the idea of being able to level an entire city block via plane crash in Grand Theft Auto, but it has to respawn at some point - when? It would be kind of silly to level several skyscrapers, drive around the block, and find them all right back where they were. There’s always that level of linearity in game plots that makes fully destructible environments undoable - in other words, what happens if I level that building that’s an essential part of mission 27 later in the game?
Deus Ex had the speed limiting when you got injured, but only if your legs were where the damage was. Makes sense in the game as you were a cyborg. It was pretty good too, in that if your legs were too badly injured you had to crawl. I remember the first time I was too close to a grenade I’d thrown at a robot in the training mission and blew my legs off. I then had to fight the robot from the ground, and big surprise died soon after :).
I really should reinstall that game…
Mafia gave the bad guys limited ammunition. Waiting them out was a viable tactic. The only problem being of course that they only fired at you if there was a chance of hitting you, and if they used up all their ammo, none for you. Also, if you crashed a car you were driving badly enough you got injured too.
I really should reinstall that game, too!
Here’s what I wonder: console RPGs used to allow you to rename characters. But once you introduce voiceover work into the equation, that usually becomes infeasible (unless you do what Dragon Quest VIII does, which is have the character name in the text script but the VOs skip over it). I wonder if tech will ever progress to the point where you can rename characters and have that change show up in voiceover work. Quite probably not, since even if the tech advances, the cost for voice acting might be too much. But I wonder…
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve played, but I think Everquest features almost every single item on this list. There’s not much in the way of destructible environments (at least in EQ1, I haven’t played EQ2), but I think everything else is there.
As has been mentioned, most of these have been done before.
Expect HUGE advances is physics rendering in the next 2 years or so, though, as the idea for a dedicated physics engine card is gathering a full head of steam. Soon, you’ll be able to offload all physics processing to a separate processor, making smashing objects of different materials very realistic, plus having each part break as it would in real life due to where and how hard the impact is…plus the fire modeling that was mentioned…so much will be able to happen. Right now, though, you can’t have a physics world that is that real without overburdening the main processor such that it would make the game crawl.