Comments on: Open World Games: Cramming All The Good Stuff Into One

By: Lampica

Lampica — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 03:43:05 +0000

Yeah that's right Jason L, having things going on in the world around your character means that you character must be powerless to effect the world.. Your deliberately ridiculously exaggerated misinterpretations and condescending sarcasm are unbecoming to such a high degree that I will simply no longer reply to you...

By: Jason L

Jason L — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:45:43 +0000

They couldn't really interact with each other beyond standing around and repeating the same chat scripts, they didn't trade with each other or get into fights over petty disagreements, or hatch plots to kidnap someone's daughter for ransom and then attempt to carry those plots out.

And I go further: If you want the feeling of an impossibly complex world where you're largely powerless to affect your fate against the whims of uncountable other actors, that's actually been packed in for free with your wetware.

By: Lampica

Lampica — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:39:26 +0000

@Jason L - your exaggerating to the point where it is hard to even take you seriously. An attribute tree effecting percentage chances is not the sort of advanced AI you are talking about. It is just smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of a more convincing AI - it is hard to even call what I am talking about AI at all. It is more akin to the random encounter tables in pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons. And when no one is looking, their interactions do not need to be physics based at all, they can be abstracted to the extreme. As for food requiring all of biology and chemistry to work in game - well that is just absurd. We can see food used to sate hunger and even death from starvation used as a mechanic already in countless existing video games. The mechanic would be the same, the only difference is in how NPCs would deal with this already tried and fully doable game mechanic.

True that what I am suggesting would be a major undertaking and it may not be a very realistic expectation of any game in the near future, but it is not anywhere near as outrageous as you make it out.

@Jackohbite - Well, I agree that it is probably not likely to happen anytime soon, and it is pretty tough to debate the 'impossible' argument without actually doing it. In general the most effective argument against 'impossible' is to just do it and then say "see, I told you so".. hehe. But I admit it is beyond me personally as an individual at this time.

I do have to wonder though. I think that people (including most developers) accepted that it was not possible back in the 90s when we where playing doom on 386s. It was still not possible a few years later on our 300mhz pentiums with 256mb memory. But today I am running a quad core 3000 mhz cpu, 8gigs of high performance memory, and a crazy powerful video card with 2 gigs of dedicated high performance video memory.

Over the years it has just become accepted that we don't try to go there, and once something like that is commonly accepted throughout an industry it can be a long time after the capability is present that anyone actually breaks from traditional logic and leverages those capabilities (and in this case it is most likely to succeed as a major group effort, which of course is even less likely than a few individual progressives making any such efforts)..

Look back at a game like magic carpet (huge open world 3d game, with dynamic lighting, real time deformable terrain, massively destructible environments, real time physics including gravity and fire which could spread and reduce forests to ashes. This game came out in the mid 90s and ran on 100mhz CPUs with 32mb memory. Of course it didn't use hardware rendering, and characters where actually 2d sprites, but then again this kind of fire was in a game well over a decade ago, yet today is lauded as a revolutionary leap forward when seen in far cry 2.

Fire that spreads and after a short time causes a leafy tree to be replaced with a charred leafless one - it is a simple thing to make work, and the truth is that this sort of thing should have been the norm a decade ago, but is a standout feature today instead. And even now, other games don't raise the bar to that level. NOLF had respectably well done reflections of your character in mirrors, AvP (original) also had this feature only it looked better. AvP 2 which used the NOLF engine had mirrors - but no reflections in them, this was a successor to 2 great games, but rather than adding to the pallete - it subtracted from it.

We probably won't see many other games come out with spreadable fire for a long time yet to come, not because it's impossible to calculate the physics of it, or even very difficult. But rather because they can sell us games just fine without going to the negligible trouble of making spreadable fire.

Then if you check out the Men of War games, and consider that most of what is happening on screen in some of the major battles is not scripted at all (there is some scripting but even then most of the scripting is just to send units into the fray - 99% of what is happening on the battlefields in those games are not scripted and purely dynamic.

Also look at what nVidia has been doing with Tesla - we are talking about exponential leaps forward in processing power. To bad they are pushing this tech further and further away from consumer level - they started out marketing to a level which was tantalizingly close to consumer affordable. But at the same time, even as enterprise level tech it opens up new possibilities. A game like this could be packaged with a piece of dedicated hardware which would handle a great deal of the processing overhead. That would raise the cost of the game but with the right licensing deals and decreasing cost of processing power, it might not need to raise the cost all that much.

The other possibility could be the massive online multiplayer approach. You could calculate the AIs in a distributed manner on a powerful server farm and clients would just see the results of those calculations...

So it may not be probable in the near future but I don't think it is all that far fetched, and while it would be a major undertaking, I think the main reason it won't be done anytime soon is not because it can't be, but rather because it would be risky to try...

By: Jackohbite

Jackohbite — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:48:57 +0000

That's a rabbit hole that goes several miles deep right there. I like your idea, Lampica, I just don't think it's possible. It's far too complex and expensive to implement in a game where the player is guaranteed to be only seeing a small percentage of it. A good workaround, I think, would be to script the game well enough that the NPCs do dynamic, interesting things when you're in a position to actually see them do it. That'd give the world a more lively feeling. So really, what I'm saying is I think you're right, that would be an amazing, open game world. But it's not possible, at all, and I'm much more interested in what is possible, because I get to play it.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:33:16 +0000

So, a minimum of several hundred near-Turing-Test AIs interacting at all times in real time, on and offscreen, with a polynomially or exponentially scaling number of objects, most with important physics (if you want food to 'work', as you imply, throw in organic chemistry, all of biology and most of ecology), on a consumer CPU and a few gigs of RAM. That's what you want from a videogame, then? We'll get right on that. Tangentially, do you really want to shoot something that can generate interesting human behaviour on its own? Would 'it' still be 'something'?

By: Lampica

Lampica — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:18:19 +0000

Oblivion didn't really try to do this. The NPCs didn't have the sort of deep attributes tree I mentioned (they had very shallow attribute lists). I forget exactly how it worked but they didn't need to provide food for themselves or their families. They needed to eat but I think they auto-generated food. They would not normally deviate much from their very simple routines, and if they did they either get stuck, fall through the floor, or be teleported back to their routine. They couldn't really interact with each other beyond standing around and repeating the same chat scripts, they didn't trade with each other or get into fights over petty disagreements, or hatch plots to kidnap someone's daughter for ransom and then attempt to carry those plots out.

Even if Oblivion had tried and it didn't work out doesn't necessarily mean it can't work - just need to do a better job. In some ways what I describe may be even easier to make work and process then what Oblivion was attempting. Oblivion was trying to run hundreds of scripts, mostly unique, whereas what I described would just be random reactions but the percentage chance of given reactions would be influenced heavily by their attribute trees on the fly.

Of course, as you mentioned, the play mechanics are of great importance, but one of the things that almost always bothers me most in almost every open-world game is the shallowness of the world, and the sense that I am the only one doing anything. NPCs that sleep, eat, and walk around is not the answer. They are still not doing anything of any consequence in the world, unless it is something specially pre-scripted for my benefit and triggered by me.

When the people you are shooting are not just cardboard cutouts then it would give shooting people in a MiG so much more weight. More I think even then shooting other players in multiplayer, who may not be cardboard cutout NPCs, but who will just respawn and be back for more.

By: Jackohbite

Jackohbite — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:25:38 +0000

Yeah, that sounds great, but Bethesda tried it in Oblivion and it didn't work out. It's just too ambitious an idea to actually work in the near future. Right now, what I want to see is developers getting good at work-arounds, at faking a wide open world, making it seem massive and alive whilst not being the case. When Devlosirrus said: “It might seem as though I’m missing the point, but I think meaningful, well-scripted and rewarding campaign missions are an extremely important part of an open world.” I completely agreed. I don't want a big loose mess, I want something focused, something that's been designed from the ground up to hook me and never let me go, and I think that that'd be best achieved not by making Assbackwards McGee #1164 have feelings, emotions and a life playing out when I'm on the other end of the island shooting people in a MiG but by making the MiG a really, really fun thing to use, and giving me a reason to want to use it. Games need to focus around the player, not simulate a whole world. That sounds more like an amazing advancement in technology rather than a good game.

By: Lampica

Lampica — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:07:07 +0000

I can see that you put a lot of thought into it but I've got to say that I would not be that into the game you describe. I think it would all seem too contrived and gamey. Colored light beacons color coding different dead agents. dead agents. how many dead agents would I expect to stumble across on an island. Unlockable upgrades. I have always hated in games where items are locked and become unlocked based on some sort of abstract game mechanic which is abstractly related (if even) to your characters ability to purchase/use some item. I mean if it was some advanced device like an electron spectrometer then I could see it's use being tied to learning some skill.

Some mini/meta territory games which to me seem like they would only further distance me from deep immersion.

I think the key to the most awesome open world game ever is to make it truly open world. Make randomly generated world, with randomly generated NPCs whose random attributes go beyond simple measures of physical and mental capabilities. So NPCs get a randomly generated, fairly deep attribute tree outlining their likes and dislikes, their temperaments in different moods, their minor issues and hang ups, as well as the occasional full blown neurosis. Give them jobs and families. Make their interactions with the world be determined in large part based upon their unique attribute trees. And make those attributes trees also be effected by the world and their continuing experiences. So different NPCs who are hungry will take very different approaches to handle the situation. One may start stealing, another may look for a job, another might start scrounging for goods which he can trade - and each of these courses will have repercussions. The mugger may kill a victim who fights back, and now he is a murderer and a family's father won't come home from work because he is dead and the family will get worried and call police, they will miss him and be sad which will effect how they react to situations (or maybe they won't miss him - one might be angry that he's dead, another might be happy depending on what he was like and what they are like), and eventually they'll get hungry without his paychecks. The scrounger/trader may end up a dumpster diving hobo, or he may only start out that way and end up a successful merchant with his own shop depending in part on his own attribute tree but also in part on luck as the situations he encounters could have major impacts on the direction of his life.

The biggest problems with this are the processing power required to calculate all those NPCs lives and communications both between NPCs and between the player and NPCs. It would be great if it was hard to tell who was another real player and who was just an NPC. With a fantastic communication interface this blurring the line between NPC and Player could be possible.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 18:32:21 +0000

Fair enough really, but I had a couple of twinges while reading you. That 'war over territory and ideals' determines only which uniform is spawning to hose you down with bullets, and that strawman of Rifle of Improbable Durability - is it really so much to ask that a gun, especially an AK, fire a few hundred bullets without exploding?

By: DemonDoll

DemonDoll — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:38:22 +0000

Someone mentioned it in the comments once but Farcry 2 does all of the things you mention. Really, you're starting from Farcry 2 and fleshing everything out a bit more. The character progression is well-paced and relies on progression through missions and finding collectibles (like your idea). The collectibles concept is nearly identical but simplified since Farcry 2 decided that it didn't need money and it doesn't really make sense to take a gun that was lying in a ditch for however many weeks before you found the dead guy. You also mention that "upgrades and finding special weapons... don’t often work well together" and that is a huge flaw with modern games that Farcry 2 solves better than any other game I've ever played with the combination of quickly degraded weapons and small, frequently replenished ammo capacities. Many other games (from System Shock to STALKER) include the former but it is discouraging to lose your main weapon for which you've hoarded a mountain of bullets so your only choice is to take the nearest fallen enemy's weapon with half a clip. The vast majority of shooters (from Deus Ex to Resident Evil 4) do something like the latter where you find a shiny gun that's better than the rest and stick with as ammo permits. Farcry 2 strikes a unique balance that keeps you on your toes with respect to your arsenal forcing you to enter novel situations with sub-optimal weapons that you were forced to scrounge and not rely on the "Unique's Super Tweaked Rifle of Improbable Durability" from the second you find it 'till the End Boss. Another central theme of Farcry 2 is "your work [getting] harder to rationalise." Most of the side missions that you mention - assassination, motorcade assault, sabotage - are all present in the game but aren't the fluid, free, open-world affairs you describe but are just samey optional missions. Sure, in Farcry 2 you do not move your leader token with x rebel counters onto the adjacent zone but you're actually fighting a war over territory and ideals with two opposing factions and a million more nuances that the board game meta-game you describe. You even have a huge number of photogenic safe-houses which, during the course of the game, get stocked with an invaluable array of tools (and even a bed, like you mentioned you wanted) to help you recharge between missions. Believe it or not, I think that Farcry 2 has a few fatal flaws which keep it from being a truly fun sand-box game like having to traverse half of fucking Africa to meet face-to-face with your fucking psychopathic 'buddy' who FUCKING CALLED you on a FUCKING PHONE who then asks you to set an orphanage on fire. Also, all the enemies that respawn when you get 10 feet away. However, I did want to play devil's advocate and give credit where credit is due since your article could have been "10 Tweaks to Make Farcry 2 The Best Open-World Game Of All Time" instead of "What If Just Cause Was Completely Different... And Not Boring."

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:39:47 +0000

And you let THAT through? Akismet, you're fired.

By: mahjong

mahjong — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:04:22 +0000

I am often to blogging and i actually appreciate your content. The article has really peaks my interest. I am going to bookmark your site and maintain checking for brand spanking new information.

By: eleczycanin

eleczycanin — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 22:16:51 +0000

Tekst

By: Thalamos

Thalamos — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:15:15 +0000

i want a dimension based game, where you can traverse dimensions as is necessary to achieve a target. enemies and game environments would traverse with you, but of course changing to meet that dimension. for instance if in 2d you encounter a table you wont be able to crawl under it because the leg is blocking you. go to 3d, the 2d scene pans out and you can crawl under.

4d if i remember correctly is time, and if a game mechanic could be worked out for this, it could show a number of possible future action paths which are relevant to the "present" or whenever you traversed to 4d. or you could subtly influence things from 4d, mild telekinesis, telepathy, at higher levels pyrokinesis and the ability to spontaneously create organised patterns of matter.. using these you could encourage certain action paths, create new action paths, or just torture the crap out of all the ncp's :D.

each dimension would give you various powers and attacks would be few, but would work differently in different dimensions

1d, there would be a line on your screen and thats it.

this would be an awesome game if you were a hyper-dimensional entity, who could unlock powers allowing access reality more concretely (this being the objective, ultimately to manifest yourself within that reality (negatively of positively or powerfully etc). imagine being able to incite a riot in a crowd by projecting image( eg their president) with connotations (negative or positive to varying degrees) directly into their brains. then you use pyrokinesis to set a few cars on fire, the riot police start to overreact with you projecting emotion (anger, fear, duteous). next you use your newly unlocked ability to manipulate matter to start a fight between two coworkers in the office, its escalates and ends up with the 68 floor office building demolishing like 10 blocks of city.

more ideas plz!

By: johnmarstondude

johnmarstondude — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:18:56 +0000

you definitely should check out RED DEAD REDEMPTION ---->Rockstar
it has miles of land you can travle and trade, kill bad desperados kill or capture em free towns and so on.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 01:52:49 +0000

Link dump 2/2: It's Fidgit so you have to take it with a teaspoon of salt, but I found it interesting to compare this with Crackdown 2's announced choices.

By: Blah

Blah — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:50:15 +0000

Someone should hire you soon. This would be awesome/beast/etc. Only one thing left to add...a multiplayer mode of awesomeness.

The idea would be that you have up to four agencies, each with 1 or 2 players(too many, and it becomes deathmatch with extreme lag) vying for control of the island, all against both each other and the AI president, kinda like story mode. The first team to hold power for at least five minutes without the capitol and surrounding territories getting captured by the opposing teams wins.

It plays almost the same as story mode, just simplified and accelerated. Collectibles are out, missions are all opportunistic(which allows for multiple ways to start it(like ERglabs mentioned), but with greater rewards, and even the regular opportunities hold great prizes. Everything happens in real time, but fast travel is removed to prevent people from using it when they rightfully deserve to be killed.

If you want, you can just stay in the safety of your tent, upgrade your troops to take all the territories/find weapon caches/etc., and pray to god they dont find your camp and kill you. Or, you could be the hands on guy. Go in guns blazing, upgrade everything you've got, and team up with local revolutionaries to hunt down the other players.

However, when something like the president fleeing, or an enemy officer patrolling occurs, everyone is informed and gets a chance to do the deed themselves. For example, in mid chase, one team could ttake out two of the convoys, but another would snipe the president from far off, only for another to install theirs. This can create near-creamblast feelings when you underhandedly win at such a situation, when the other teams are too far away from you to stop the timer before it runs down.

And yes, this is near impossible to balance properly, but would sell millions if it were.

By: ERGlabs

ERGlabs — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:03:40 +0000

Gotta chime in with my 2 cents worth.

One thing I think that would seriously benefit open-world games, yet is rare, is designing missions that have multiple start points. ie. ways to stumble into a mission on your own without being given a missive from some slack-jaw in the nearest town. Open worlds have an inherent call to explore, and few things render exploration tedious like "Oh, wow, I found this totally cool... oh wait. this must be a mission I don't have yet." (I'm looking at you, Bethesda) Then you have to traipse back to town to find the person that will lead you by the nose to spot you felt so awesome for finding earlier.

Obviously, it couldn't work for every mission, but Fallout 1 & 2 did a fantastic job of creating dynamic missions that could be triggered a dozen ways other than finding that key NPC who wants you to go do x.

The distraught mother who wants you to go find her kidnapped daughter, obvious starting point.BUT, if you had stumbled upon the bandits shack first it shouldn't be empty, it should have the daughter regardless, who would then ask you to help her find her mother. Or a discarded piece of clothing on a hidden trail would add the mission, etc...

By: The Random One

The Random One — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:14:37 +0000

I think this hit exactly why I can't play most open world games-I just can't get into it if there's no one home base of operations. And I need it to stay a constant safe haven. One of the worst moments in both SM64 and Star Fox Adventures was when baddies began showing up in the regions I thought were the safe lands.
Meanwhile KOTOR had the entire first planet blow up, when I expected that apartment to be my main base, Mass Effect has a mobile base in a ship which makes it less meaningful in some way, and Oblivion just makes you move too much if you want to do the main quest to keep any one base.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:00:02 +0000

Aw, thanks. Yep, this is a type of post which, if successful, causes mainly sadness.