Rampant Games - Good Looks, But No Interaction

Myrthos

Myrthos

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The Rampant Coyote talks in his blog about good looking 3D worlds that are just pretty pictures and offer little to no interaction.

Naturally, as a game developer, I knew better. I looked forward to playing games that were as beautiful and fully realized as this, and knowing all the while that once they were, just poking around the landscape wasn’t gonna do it for anybody. And that all came to pass very quickly. And we took it for granted, looking forward to even more beautiful, more realistic worlds, ignoring the incredibly interesting details because there are bad guys in need of shooting!

But I think there’s more to it than that. It’s not just that we take these beautiful worlds for granted because we’re so used to them. I think we miss these painstakingly-textured details because they are meaningless to us. The pock-marks on the wall, the old posters, the burn-marks… in theory, they help tell the story of the landscape that we’re in. But in reality – it’s all just a soundstage. All that beautiful set dressing is simply to hide the fact that we’re on a linear obstacle course.

And so we’re used to these prettier worlds being of the “look, don’t touch” variety. In fact, we’re pretty accustomed to the idea that the prettier a 3D world is (relative to modern technology), the less interactive it is. All that incredible detail comes at a price, and that is that you can’t move things around and screw things up. There’s nothing behind those doors, and the forest in the background is just a picture.
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That was one big flaw in FO3 that irked me in an otherwise truly enjoyable game. There were so many buildings and houses that I could not enter. On the outside, they looked like they were begging to be explored, bot there was no way in except via a console command 'TCL'. Once inside -- nothing. An empty shell.

Put something, anything in a building even if it's just some trash to kick around.
 
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Zephyr said:
That was one big flaw in FO3 that irked me in an otherwise truly enjoyable game. There were so many buildings and houses that I could not enter. On the outside, they looked like they were begging to be explored, bot there was no way in except via a console command 'TCL'. Once inside — nothing. An empty shell.

Put something, anything in a building even if it's just some trash to kick around.
Click to expand...

TCL is the one that allows you to go through walls yes? If so, it really won't do anything even if you go through locked doors of not-empty houses since the inside of houses are actually separate spaces that you have to go through loading screens to.
 
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I don't mind good looks with no interaction. In life there are many things I am not allowed to interact with, including most others' homes, so having that in an RPG can increase the immersion for me. Also, if game-makers had to make everything interactable then that would be time spent creating that which could have been time spent creating something else interesting in the game, such as plot.

I do enjoy interactivity with everything in a game, but it is not important to me. What is important to me is that I have plenty of enjoyable things to do. Take Witcher 3 as an example, there were some houses I could not get into but I really didn't care because there were a lot of interesting things for me to do in the game.

By contrast, much of Fallout 3 was somewhat boring to me as the interesting things to do in the game were mostly just exploring and that got old. Fallout New Vegas was interesting because of the storylines of the different people in places. I guess what it came down to was the writing, Bethesda's (makers of Fallout 3) writing has never been my cup of tea.
 
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Where I have a problem is when there are artificial limits placed for no apparent reason. When you - like in the Half Life games - have tools and are often required to break things down ... yet perhaps 75% of doors you see are impenetrable ...

It is slightly different, but for me I always equate those 'artificial limitations' to the stealth mission in Jedi Knight II ... you just plowed through dozens of stormtroopers and dark Jedi, then you see 8-10 stormtroopers and Kyle says 'too many' of them. WTF, right? Same for these artificial limits.
 
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I want everything to be able to be interacted with. That's why I love Elder Scrolls games. I would much rather have designers spend money on making the game super interactive and deep in that regard than spending time on graphics and other elements. Give me a world to explore and interact with in clever ways, not a corridor of high res textures and nothing to explore in them.

I guess it comes down to what you like to do in games. I'm happy with a simply written quest that sends me to some unique location full of interactivity, and then exploring it all until I can't explore anymore. I'm a natural born explorer, I guess. =)
 
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