The SEGA Blog now offers a new Aliens: Colonial Marines Suspense Trailer made with 100% in-game footage from Gearbox's upcoming Aliens shooter. This is accompanied by some screenshots and an update from Gearbox Software CEO and President Randy Pitchford, who discusses the game an its just-announced new release date of February 2013.
Post Comment
Enter the details of the comment
you'd like to post in the boxes below and click the button at
the bottom of the form.
siapnar wrote on May 22, 2012, 15:28: I think they're leaning more towards the "taking away control from the player scripting" being annoying.
I'm all for scripting in games - the HL series has some of the best - but I hate it when the game rips control away from you and shatters the immersion. It's basically a cheaper way of scripting, where, since they don't know how to direct the player's attention properly, they just take control of the camera.
Exactly. In Half-Life you were responsible for everything. If you needed a door opened then you did it yourself, or you found a scientist and brought him to the iris scanner. The scripted sequences didn't take you out of character. More importantly, Half-Life was one of the first games to use complex scripted sequences - things have understandably moved on since then.
COD and BF3 are perfect examples of BAD scripting. Some doors you can open, others require you to wait for your teammates. Some enemies will respawn forever unless you move to a certain point. Some scenes will stop you being able to use your weapon (around friendlies, etc). Some will require you to quickly press a button that appears on the screen, breaking immersion in the game. It's all done to deliver the narrative but it's clumsy and makes you feel like you don't have any real impact upon the gameplay / narrative.
Games like Far Cry 2 and Skyrim do the opposite. They have scripted events but for the most part you have complete freedom over the game world, you can go where you want and your play style is entirely up to you. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was also very well done because they gave players the option of how they wanted to approach a situation - it was very much like Half-Life evolved. I'd like to see FPS games become more like Skyrim, where there is a lot of interactivity aside from simply killing people. Half-Life was about expanding the gaming expectations, yet games like COD, MOH and BF3 have gone backwards by micro-managing every interaction and limiting freedom to deliver narrative. I'm really intrigued to see how Far Cry 3 turns out, as they're attempting to focus the narrative and somewhat restrict the scope but to make the gameplay more compelling (FC2 was a bit TOO freeform and some of the AI interactions were annoyingly repetitive).
Getting back on topic, all the footage I've seen so far looks overly scripted. It also doesn't have much immersion because it shows the game taking control of the camera away from the player. I'm hoping the game turns out decent but it doesn't look as freeform as the original AVP.
Twitter 
