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E3 Previews — Haze and Crysis
First Person Shooters are getting ever more involved. It's no longer sufficient just to ape Doom or Half-Life, and FPS titles at this year's E3 bear that out. Kotaku has a look at the fascinating title Haze. It has a deep story for a shooter, with the main character forced to make a difficult moral choice in the course of his work. Haze also introduces a number of interesting game mechanics, such as the ability to feign death in an attempt to trick your enemies. Joystiq, meanwhile, spent time with the most gorgeous-looking PC game of the year: Crysis. "Crysis is a joy for its subtleties, and for its complexities. We watched as [executive producer for Crysis Rob] Letts haphazardly caused enough commotion for an enemy combatant to fire a flare out over the tree tops. A minute later, reinforcements arrived by boat and by jeep. Some time later, over the ridge, troops who had spotted the flare earlier where still on alert. Letts spoke of a basic set of variables (the whos, whats, and wheres), which when applied to a dynamic environment, provide the player with ever-unpredictable 'action bubbles.' While there is a narrative structure to Crysis and a series of well-documented twists (two major environmental upheavals that change the nature of gameplay), Letts seemed most proud of the 'sandbox' nature of Crytek's tactical shooter."
interesting game mechanics, such as the ability to feign death in an attempt to trick your enemies Unreal had this, so it's not new. :p Or at least Unreal Tournament had this, I'm not sure if Unreal really did.
"interesting game mechanics, such as the ability to feign death in an attempt to trick your enemies Unreal had this, so it's not new."
Slashdot has it too. Apparently the mods will leave you alone if you just lie there.
Not sure if that is funny, weird as fucking or just disturbing.
The best is the enemy of the good
I'm really, really excited for this game to finally hit the stores, because then people can stop talking about it! I can't find a PC gamer these days with a graphics card made in the last year or so who ISN'T going on about this pretty face with who-knows-what behind it.
Looks just like Farcry.
Its not that hard to make a realistic group of guards, soldiers etc, have them spot you visually and attack you. (Sure, there are difficulties but the basics are well solved by now).
What's hard is making a fun game out of that, because you would most likely be killed immediately, without making it ridiculous (enemy weapons doing 1/10th damage of yours)
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
option 4: all of the above
As iD and DICE figured out 10 years ago, multiplayer > simulating multiplayer.
"Realistic" "AI" responses can always be gamed... a single-player FPS needs a lot more than attack-reaction to stay interesting for more than a day. At best, good "AI" is useful for training for real multiplayer encounters.
I'd rather play Deus Ex single-player than Far Cry, any day, and the former's "AI" tech is 4 years behind the latter's.
The only way to take advantage of the good graphics in Crysis will be to upgrade to Vista, as MS does not plan to let anyone else use DirectX 10, I know that I won't be doing anything of the sort until they sort out the problems that cause your games to run at -20% of their potential under Vista, I bought a $480 Video card to make my games MORE fluid not LESS.