After seeing Sacrifice comes so often all over the net whenever people discuss great little known games, I bought it and played through the campaign this summer. Very nice game indeed, but nothing like total annihilation. Well, beside the RTS bit and sucking ressources out of slain enenmies. If I had to name a game similar to Sacrifice, it'd be more Magic Carpet.
Anyway, about gameplay, graphic and realism: What I'm looking for in videogame, is to have a little tiny universe with its own constitent rules, with which my character/army/... can interact in as many way as possible.
There were countless insufferable games on the SNES, just they went forgotten. We equate old school with better gameplay only because of a handful of games. For instance, in Super Mario Bross 3, a brick block can be:
- Bumped by a jump, when you are little, to get hidden coin or kill the enemy above
- Crushed by a jump, when you are big, to destroy it, and kill the enemy above.
- Turned into a coin then grabbed, with a P.
- Crushed with a tail.
Similarly, turtle can be disposed in dozen of ways:
- Slide on slope and hit them
- Hit them after eating a star
- Fireball
- Jump on them
- Bump the block under
- Throw a shell or block at them
- Send a shell sliding on their path
- Hit with a racoon tail
I'm sure there are more...
And depending on which way you use, the turle may be discarded, flip over, or simply forced inside, with different result: a flipped over shell can be safely grabbed for later use, a not flipped over shell can be grabbed but you got to be quick and act before the turtle comes back out. Grabbed shells themselves have myriad of use.
Well, sorry for the long listing, but what I wanted to show, is that with very few element, a single kind of brick block, a single specie of turtle, you have lots and lots of way to interact. Some straighforwards, some taking long to master, each with its merit, and each feeling very natural and intuitive.
In comparaison, in modern FPS too often you have a single way of interacting with enemies: shoot it with a gun. The variation are only "shoot with gun" or "shoot with bigger gun". And once you get bigger gun, of course there's no point in reversing to small gun. Unlike mario's exemple where even if you have fireball, sometimes you'd better of revert to double-jump on it (so as to break a block for instance).
Where modern game fails is not in adding graphic, but in adding graphic that are disconnected to gameplay: Like, there's this wonderful alien tree, using thousands of poly, alpha transparency, bump mapped vein on shiny self shadowed leaves, but for all intent and purpose the gameplay act as if there is nothing: I can walk right through it. After a while, the alien tree begins to feel like an hologram: I grow accustomed to simply ignoring it. Since it has zero influence on my interaction with the world, it's like it doesn't really belong to this world, and despite its marvelous sight, for a better play/feel/comprehension of the virtual world, I have to force my mind to erase it from my perception of the world.
There's been a tremendous improvement in graphic, but hitmasks are still as boxy as before, and the number of means of interaction with the world has ... decreased! Recently I played Far Cry, the beach graphism were OmgFlabbergasticSoGoodICanHardlyBelieve (yes I'm three years late), but, just like every FPS, at some point it had some boxes, and the only mean of interaction I had with the boxes was to push them with bullets, or push them by walking into them! (or is there some action key I missed?). To be compared with Super Mario shells that can be hit with fireball, hit with tail, jumped over to send sliding, grabbed, thrown, bumped through a block from under...
Granted, now some games are also touting their physic engine, with Havoc and stuff, but how many times have seen an OmgUberAdvanced raggdoll system used solely to make corpses conform to each step of a stair, but with zero influence on the gameplay, your character still walking on the stair like if there was nothing at all, again the corpse feeling like an hologram, that anyway dissolve into thin air after a couple seconds
(I hate that! In Doom, when you came back to the place of a fiery battle hours afterward, the room was still littered with the corpse of slain enemies. It gave a feeling of coherence to the world, and made you feel like you had an impact on the world, instead of waltzing on a stage with invisible minions cleaning and removing every stain, corpse and other leftover like in later games, err, ok, that rant is irrelevant, even in doom cadavers had no impact on gamplay, oh wait no, they did impacted gameplay since you'd better off not leave any corpse near an archvile. Yeah, Doom gameplay still holds many lessons that later dev forgot).
The reason I like(d) Total Annihilation so much was not just because the 3D made it prettier, but because the revolutionnary engine (for a RTS) wasn't used just for eyecandy but impacted the gameplay: In other RTS, such as RTS or Starcrafts, unit would sometimes feel like icon, pretty still picture surimposed as symbols over simplistic mechanics.
For instance, in Red Altert/Star Craft/Dark Reign and other RTS of the ToalA era, even if the grid wasn't drawn, you'd feel it: each and every unit had to be over precisely a square, like pieces on a chessboard, and could only move horizontally, diagonnaly or vertically to an adjacent square (K C&C & RA had that clever "five infantry in a square", but still). In comparaison, my first TA experience blew me away with the ability to have units that moved free of chessboard square constraints. And on third mission of demo, units with varied footprint size: No more a mammouth tank taking exactly the same room as a light recon jeep! This chance completly non-graphical, it is invisible graphic-wise, yet it impacts the gameplay and feel of the game. It reconciliated look and feel: If a tank looked bigger, then it was considered bigger for the game calculations, and so felt bigger gameplaywise.
Then there were the 3D mapped units: I heard many people says that they like Starcraft crisp hand drawn graphic, with character, over TA souleless mass of grey polygons. However, for me, the 3D units of TA felt like a major improvement because they made me feel I had a real world beyond the glass of my monitor much more than sprites. In StarCraft, an Hydralisk may look pretty in astill shot, but while playing, its shape becomes irrelevant. It is only a set of 32 cute drawings that is displayed to represent square occupied by hydralisks. By comparaison, a thud in TA feels much more like an entity having its own existence in the virtual world beyond the glass of my monitor. I can feel it like a set of colored volume, smoothly deforming itself when doing stuff such as walking or aiming, and conforming to terrain. Well, a two legged thud would stay upright while moving up and down a slope, while a tracked stumpy would tilt. That's that kind of stuff that makes me feel they do exist in that virtual world, instead of being simply filler symbols. And ok, the impact on gameplay may be very subtle, but it's here: the shell comes precisely out of the mouthes of the barrel of the thud, so whether or not the cannon are raised, whether or not the unit tilted on the slope, change the origin of the shot, and so which path the shot flies and where it hits.
So, 3D trajectories too. Ok that one has been more widely discussed, but still. Zpock points out that simulation based trajectory leads to a messier gameplay, where you can't quite predict at 100% what will happen, whereas instahit weapons leads to a a much more predictive environnement. I suppose it implicitly follow that in one game, player can win out of sheer luck, while in the other there's nothing but pure skill. That's sure raising an interesting, but, BeingADefenderOfTheTrueTAFaithAgaisntTheHordeOfBlizzardHeathen that I am, I of course feels compelled to rebute it:
- TA & Spring are large scale RTS. You don't fight with two units, but with hundreds of units. By the law of statistics, when large numbers of random event are added, the results has all its randomness evened. So even if individual shots are random, the battle outcome is accuratly predictable.
- Zpock says: instahit weapons -> player can know exactly what will happen.
But I say: simulated trajectory -> player can intuitively feel what will happen.
And imo, the second is better, because it means you can grok a situation involving hundreds different kind of weapons, each with countless possibility, even with little experience, wherease in the first system, you have to learn tables by heart.
Yes, sometimes you'll see situation where a huge stroke of luck plays an overimportant role, such as the famous
shell deviated by shield lands on commander, killing it, or the more casual
loss of a unit due to a plane falling right on it, but I feel that these cases won't ruin the gaming experience since:
- They aren't that random actually, I'm sure if you leave them enough time hard core player will master the art of the skillfully redirecting plasma shots with deflector, the same way they learn to suck every ounce of every TA exploit. Or you should know and take into account in your plan that units walking below fighting bombers are at risk of receiving falling planes on their hand.
- The player with a bertha would have win anyway, it could have hit a fusion farm and trigger a chain explosion, or cripple the economy thus bringing a sure victory, or whatever.
- Such game deciding random event are actually so rare they bring more hilarity and whoahing of witnessing such special event than resent from loosing because of a roll of dice.
- BTW, don't tabletop games relies alot on dice throw, yet requires incredible strategical thinking?
Uh, where was I? Ah yeah. Graphics shouldn't be an added layer over games mechanic. They should be the mean by which game mechanics are exposed to the player. There must be adequation between looks and feel: if it looks like X, it must do X. Graphics are so the player can ingest and process enormous amount of information without even thinking about it. This is videogame, so I don't want to have to learn phone books sized statistic table, instead I use the expensive CPU and GPU show all the complexity of thousands factors interacting in real time is represented in a way I can intuitively comprehend.
More to the point, prettyier and more diverse explosion graphical effects means you can have more variety in the explosion gameplay impacting effect. Large/Medium/Small area of effect, Large/Medium/Small damage power, Blow Unit/Dig Ground/Unit damage ratio, and even flame/ice/poison damage/armor system are each clearly identifiable by how the explosion look, so after half a game you learn without effort to recognise which effect a weapon will have simply by how it looks. It of couse implies that you don't add random better FX "to spice it up" as an afterthough, but that the design of the new explosion is done with the design of the weapons balancing.
Yes, you can have the same gameplay with all explosion looking the same, or worth, explosions with similar properties looks different while explosions with widely differnt consequence look the same. Your mod balance and "gameplay" will be exactly the same, however:
- For newcomers it will be completly random, and a bad experience.
- For the few hard core player that'll stay, it'll be a matter of who can learn the most numbers by hearth.
But by harnessing the better graphic to ease the understanding of complex multi variable environnement, you get what I feel video games should be.
This is also where realism comes into play: I couldn't care less if your mod balance is made after data-sheets or real life weapons. The whole RTS basis, such as factory created in seconds, tanks firing only no further than ten times their length, etc... makes the whole idea (of applying values from real life weapons and call it "realism") not only ridiculous, but plainly inadapated.
However, the kind of realism I care for, is consistency within the realm of the virtual world: We might fight by throwing slow moving orange blobs, but at least a big orange blob does more damage than a small orange blob. And if one orange blob has arced trajectory, and splash damage, then all other orange blob must do the same. Green line on the other hand are always straight, instahit and affecting very small spot. Red lines are the same, but smaller ranged and smaller damage. So I see one of such green line in the first minutes of my first game, and from then can intuitivly extrapolate that a thicker green line will have the same properties, scaled appropriatly. Or if I see a sleek pointy plane, I know it's a fast interceptor. While a chubby plane will more likely be a bomber.
To sum up:
Realism only matters when it's about abiding to the rules of a wildly imaginary virtual universe, not realism toward the real world.
Graphics should be here to explain the gameplay, not live their own indepentant life.