big mistake - if the game is unannounced, it shouldn't be announced in this way. Especially with the all too predictable and inevitable responses...

This comment was edited on Oct 12, 08:08.

I haven't played the game like you, only the demo, so I may be wrong. I agree with the aestetics stuff. Too bad to hear you are disappointed - I'm still hoping I will like it. The reviews seems to be fairly good, after all....

A little late for that discussion, but I only just got to try out the demo, and my conclusion is that the massive negativity generated around it is probably wrong. Some points:

* Just like the first game, the game is flawed in certain respects. The graphics aren't as bland as in the first game, but it is too demanding for my rather high-end PC - and that is a plain mistake. The design also feels a bit crowded, "blocky" and old fashioned in some ways.
* Although the demo is too short to show it, I can feel the depth the game will have because of given by choices, and the multiple solutions approach and not at least: because of the the very fact that the game not only has visual design, but a social and narrative design - a constructed society, history, political situation etc as a backdrop. That last thing is very important - what other game has it?
* The interface is not too dumbed down. In fact it is still too complex. The people complaining are people with an unusual tolerance for complexity accounting for approximately 2% of gaming population (not hardcore gamers like those who read Bluesnews, that is.)
* People forget that the first game was largly forgotten for a while and then grown larger and larger in the last year or so, due evident lack of innovation in the genre and with the benefit of hindsight as to what has actually happened. The original demo would also disappoint to the same extent today without this history.
* This team can probably only make flawed games: the graphics, the lack of sensitivity to things that would frustrate the user and other things, shows that this is an "academic" approach to the idea of making a game. They don't start with the material of digital objects and see what you can shape them into, like Unreal T and Quake. They start with an abstract idea of what the game should be like, and then try to press the game into that mould. What you see is what you get with that appraoch. A game with many flaws due to this strain, but with one important difference: it is made with a important vision, which something very rare.
* We have a new ideological conflict brewing with regard to FPS games: should it be multilinear and based on "emergent" narratives or should it be (semi) linear with scripted events, like the Half-Life makers say (and which also say that multilinearity is *mistake*). I personally think that Deus Ex way of doing has and will show its success. Philosophically it seems to be more important than the Half-Life approach. The Half-Life people will be/is proven wrong about their assertin by Deus Ex I and II. (I doubt if there are much "emergent" narratives in Deux Ex II though. I doubt very much if the AI is good enough for that.
* I think Deus Ex II will be a good game to play, for the same reasons that the first game was good. Because it will show the validity of this approach, it will also be important to gaming.

Will

I agree that is what he says, and I half expected a solution like the one you mentioned. My point is rather if done this way the claim that "the player can really tell his or her own story" is not stricly true. The cutscenes you mention only makes it clear that there is a narrotor at work telling the story for you. Such things should be scripted. I think we will see that in HL2.

From the article

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Money: The great thing about a Deus Ex game is the player can really tell his or her own story. We provide a fictional outline and set up goals within that story, then let the player do things how they want, when they want.
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Can I hope that Deus Ex is a game that doesn't utilize cutscenes? If they have it, then what Money say isn't strictly true, and if they don't have it, the game might be important to raise more awareness for the need to develop interactive storytelling techniques - a lesson that quite incredibly has been overlooked in Half-Life.

Further: It is an interesting point that RPG-elements may be needed to develop interactive storytelling, but I think RPG-style skill interfaces are the wrong way to do it. Such interfaces have no real-life equivalents and are most likely a distraction for most players. The skills should either be developed automatically or as a result of direct external interaction, rather than interface interaction.

My best wishes as well, Blue.

Relatively interesting interview yet again with Spector. I would like to say that I am not *that* impressed with the Matrix-lookalike-coincidence of Deus Ex. By the time of Deus Ex, the setting is old news and Spector is merely a copier. These are settings and ideas introduced by Bladerunner, William Gibson and the movie "Johnny Mnemonic".

What is good about Matrix is the full punch of the virtual reality idea at just the right time in the zeitgeist, and the pure quality of execution. Deus Ex in comparison, in that regard, as I said, just pick up old ideas.

That isn't so bad, it is just that a person with the ambitions of Warren Spector shouldn't be in particular proud of this. I have a wish for Spector: for your next game, why not try to use the medium to introduce a new stylistic/narrative idea? I think it has been done before: both Quake and Doom had a creative edge that excerted influence the other way in relation to other media. Doom had a "I don't give a damn" political incorrectness which was a great contribution, and Quake was good at expressing the "industrial" look at the time. I also liked the way Riven managed to create universe with a character that felt particular to that game. I liked the way Prey in its time evidently attempted to utilize *alternative geometry* to make a story unique to the 3d-medium.

I have said this before in this forum, so perhaps people are tired of hearing this.












This comment was edited on Sep 12, 16:08.

Good point....

May suggest that Bluesnews put all ION-storm interviews in a dedicated box on the top? It is about the only thing here that ever says something interesting about the industry.

First, I think that Spector is right that the PC-games industry, at least with regard to FPS (that is the only thing I play), has been in a crisis the last 2-3 years, and that is a fact that should receive much more attention. I don't think that there has been a single game worth playing in this time, in the sense that they haven't been contributing something new. One thing is that even the good games, like those from Monolith is stuck in blind alley. The genre *clearly* needs to head in the direction of pure interactive storytelling and utilize these possibilities, and in addition it needs to come up with something new to the very FPS-formula. I guess we are waiting for Half-Life 2 to save us. Doom will probably not do any good.

And just a note concerning the similarity between Neo and Denton - that is wrong of Spector I think, and may betray a weakness in Deus Ex (I and II) - they don't really any understanding of psychology of charachters. In Deus Ex they are just cardbord figures. Neo is a person in addition being a hero and Denton has nothing of that (partly intentionally). Half-Life is good at that because their charachters are the result of a certain witty and fresh look at personalities.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to Deus Ex II. Thanks for being a glimmer of hope.

Update: Actually the Valve interview was pretty interesting too. OK - maybe a box for both Valve and ION storm then... :-P
This comment was edited on Sep 11, 09:58.

There is huge amount of information in that Half-Life thread. Here is an interesting piece of information - new media is apparently around the corner (unless I have missed it?)

quote:


Gabe what's your family like?

Gabe's Response

Wow. I didn't think anyone would care! Haha. My wife is good, expecting a child in a few months. By the way, I recieved your message on my machine. The Half-Life2 media will be released tomorrow, July 1st.

__________________

Yes - thats great. Daikatana had that - it enhanced the gameplay immensly. I think it is just greak when the developers aims to frustrate the player because they know better than him what he likes.

This comment was edited on May 15, 10:08.

Sound interesting... I don't play much simulations, so I don't really know about it. Perhaps I should have

Still, perhaps an important point is that game developers are guided by a "picture" of a game should achive. NOLF and Unreal II is clearly guided by the traditional linear narrative. Thinking of the ideal game as an emergent narrative might inspire other technical solutions. Your suggestion, if feasible, would certainly enable a very different shooter.

Or another wild suggestion: what about dynamically generated world that does not depend on traditionally designed levels? Like autogenerated maps in SOF - just expanded to generate a set of levels the size of a real-life world. =)

"Emergent narrative" - it seems to me that this should be a key concept in the next stage for the first-person-shooter.

I often wonder how the genre will solve the problem with having a "story" and being interactive. The concept of story is by definition linear, while the notion of being interactive tends toward non-linearity.

As hinted in the interview, the apparent contradiction is solved by the introduction of *simulation*. This introduces the distinction between ex ante narrative and ex post narrative, and while the former is incompatible the full ambition of interactivity, the latter goes very well with it. Come to think of it, all the stories that matters most to us, are the ones that have a story line ex post - in other words those that came to be in the real-life simulation of our own natural environment.

Perhaps the ultimate goal for the genre should be a game that is pure simulation. The game merely sets up a setting, much in the same way that going to Iraq right would have the potential for an emergent narrative for the individual who did.

>I'd hate to see it dumbed down by removing any kind of >thinking and shorten the missions significantly.

I agree about not removing thinking or shorten the missions, but I do hope that the user interface is dumbed down. I think it was much to complicated...

Actually, I hope that they move as much of the manipulation as possible away from the interface, and let it be done by external machinery and the like. That is more logical anyway, since a real person (even an augmented one) would not utilize an internal interface.

eh.. What is a FMV? Full Media Version? :-P

Thank you for an interesting exchange. Let me begin by saying that I do agree that Half-Life is limited in many ways and I do not intend to say that is perfect or even adequate in every respect. I remember when I played it the first time I was struck by two things: First that here *finally* I was seeing a game that seemed to take the next step to fulfill the potential of the first-person 3d-medium since Doom/Quake in a way that felt perfectly natural. Next, I felt that measured by this standard it was also just the beginning, and that all we saw was was just a hint of the possibilites it was playing with.

Perhaps the heart of our different perceptions of HL is to be found in this remark of yours:

>Without cutscenes we would then be stuck with interactive >storytelling. That would be horrid. It means the player >would have to interact with either very complex scripts or >the player would be forced to test its patience by standing >near a talking NPC. While I now see what you mean by >Half-Life's storyline, a story is not entirely comprised of >minute actions or events which then lead to nowhere. There >was almost nowhere to begin in Half-Life, but that was >besides the point: that if you want a good storyline you >will also need a storyline supported by FMV or in-game >cutscenes. A convincing one supporting an awe-inspiring >world at least. (Plus, movies are by far the best source to >learn how to tell a story, anyhow.)

Possibly the demand that a game should have a "story" is bit misleading, precisely because this is the kind of structure on a user experience which is forced on us in *non-interactive* media. NOLF follows this strictly and you only do things to in order to trigger scenes in a story which is not yours. In lesser games I almost haven't even got the patience to watch the cut-scenes out. In the real interactive world the outcome is determined to a much larger extent by your actions, and there is no voice coming from above telling you what kind of "narrative" you are in. Things just happen as a result of your actions and the interpretation of what happens belongs to you or your participants. That is why I feel the NOLF way of doing it (however elegant and sympathetic) is blind ally for the genre.

How could it be otherwise? I think the genere must acquire a new set of techniques over time, like the film industry has done, and how the written media has done. Half-Life shows that the makers knows about this and has started the process to explore the real possiblities of the 3d-gaming experience.

Some examples: I really like the opening sequence in Half Life, where the train takes you deeper and deeper into the Black Mesa complex. The voice on the intercom indirectly lets you know a good deal about the nature of the institution, a feeling for your own role and social relations. And along you can walk around and look at strange machines doing work, military helicopters taking off etc - things that make *you* make up your mind about what kind of story you are in. This train represents a technique to deal with the technical limitations of bringing you into a "story" in a game while at the same time letting the character experiece it first hand. Compare that to some lame cut-scene, and realize how profoundly more important such an attempt is for the game genre.

In real life experience an understanding of what happening is most often the result of talking to other people. This is not possible or at least easy to do in a game, but in Half-Life they use the techique that the characters talks to you, not expecting an answer. This is another solution to exploit a possiblity in the medium at the same time as dealing with its limitations.

And a many other things such as the scripted sequences, the over-heard dialogue, that you disscover (not by a narrator) that soldiers that turn on you the other staff mid game etc. The game feels more than scene, a place where things happen than glued on story.

Deus Ex, by the way, introduced another techique, which is to introduce multiple solutions to each problem and even different story lines as the result of you actions. Clearly a contribution to the fundamental problem of deveoloping the genre.

I liked Shogo as well, but do not feel it belongs to the present discussion. If Unreal 2 goes for shallow characters taken from the top of your head, because it is imprinted by the most superficial popular culture (and found in games like SOF, Gunman Chronicles), they would be well advised however, to rather try to utilize their specific kind of charm, like Shogo did.

>Zenon - 1:
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>“Aren't these the guys who claims to surpass Half-Life? From >these short glimpses it seems that they do not understand >that such an undertaking must be done intelligently, like it >was done in NOLF and Half-Life. “
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>It is reasonably easy to surpass Half-Life by my standards.

I'm not sure you are right about that. The whole thing in Half-Life comes well toghether in a way that is not so easy to surpass IMO. The sense of story and immersion, the enviromental sounds, the wit and intelligence behind the charachter portrayal, the quality of the puzzles, the way the graphics enhances the story.

The only game in my mind that comes close is NOLF and Deus Ex. I don't like that NOLF uses cut-scenes to tell the story - I think that the genre should aim a kind of immersiveness and interactivity that is specific for this medium and should not aim to copy a movie. Deus Ex is great, but has some important flaws. Apart from that I don't can't think of any games coming close so far, despite the time that has passed since Half-Life.

Another important point is that to surpass gaming experience that Half-Life gave it is not enough to somehow "incrementally" improve upon it. To genuinly surpass it, a contender must be as original in relation to present games as Half-Life was to its predecessors. I don't think that is easily done.

I guess its is a mark of progress, sort of, that the world of computergames evidently can look forward to shallow, stereotypical and uninteresting computer actors (and possibly bad scripts as well).

Aren't these the guys who claims to surpass Half-Life? From these short glimpses it seems that they do not understand that such an undertaking must be done intelligently, like it was done in NOLF and Half-Life.