GameSpotting


 Sam Parker
Hardware Editor
Now Playing: Warcraft III, Freedom Force, Soldier of Fortune II multiplayer
Cool Hardware: GeForce4 Ti cards

Immersive, Visceral, Destructible

Although there are often games flashing on monitors around the office in the late afternoon and into the evening, it's quite rare to find more than a couple of GameSpot editors playing a given game at a given time. But things have been different in the week or so since we scored a beta of Soldier of Fortune II. Every evening after 5pm we've had eight to 12 people jump onto a LAN server for some games of SOFII infiltration and capture the flag. That's a lot of people. Naturally, all the PC editors are in there showing off our FPS skills, but the matches are rounded out by a couple of VG guys, most of GameSpot Live, and a few people from other departments. It says something when a bunch of game editors are staying until 8pm to play a LAN game. I even skipped couple nights of Aikido training for it.

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Soldier of Fortune II's jungle maps turn capture the flag into a series of commando raids, complete with ambushes from tall grass.
There are a few theories as to why the Soldier of Fortune II's multiplayer is so popular here, given how many other games we have to play. Apart from the obvious fact that the beta lets any number of players share a CD key for LAN games, I think that what got people hooked on the game is that it looks very good. Randomly generated jungle maps are the house favorites for capture the flag games. There's plenty of tall grass to hide in, and the terrain is significantly different every time we play. The combination of good graphics and realistic outdoor settings makes for a very immersive gaming experience. There's nothing quite like hiding out in the grass for a successful ambush. With a couple of teammates to help, a clean engagement can open a path to the flag, although you have to haul it out of there since the enemy can respawn faster than you'd imagine.

 
 What's more important, pretty graphics or interactive environments?

Pretty graphics
Interactive environments

 
As hooked as I am on Soldier of Fortune II, one quick comment made me think about what would take it to the next level. One of the guys from the business side of the office pointed out that for all the high-concept talk he's heard over the years about how immersive games will soon be, this game still works much like a conventional first-person shooter from a couple years ago. Shouldn't the trees fall when hit by explosive fire? Shouldn't incendiary grenades make a fire in that tall grass? He was completely right.

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Bungie's Myth II did a surprisingly good job of representing fire as an unpredictable force on the battlefield.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in talking about game physics, there's more to making a game look believable than just high-poly models, sharp textures, and good animations. A world that reacts to your actions is much more interesting than one that's static. It's one thing to script in lots of predetermined interactions (Duke Nukem 3D did this well, as did Max Payne), and quite another to have a more general system. Take fire, for example. Bungie's Myth II actually used fire to very good effect. Fire arrows and, to a lesser extent, explosions could make the grass in an environment catch fire. The fire would spread naturally, burning the grass and any units nearby. It would even ignite any explosives dropped by fallen units. Adding fire to the battlefield was a nice extension of Myth's capable physics engine, and it would be great to see in a military-themed shooter.

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Superheroes don't do anything on a small scale, so it's great that Freedom Force has an engine that lets them throw cars, take down buildings, or even fly.
What about having trees fall? Well, destructible environments have been done before, but I can't say that I've seen falling trees. I'd say it's one thing to have before and after art for a building or a car that can be blown up, and it's quite another to try to do that for all the varieties and variations of trees it takes to keep an outdoor environment from looking like someone rolled a generic tree brush over the landscape. Then, if you want a tree trunk to hurt any player it falls on, that's a whole different set of physics demands. Freedom Force is one game that does a pretty good job with making things blow up, which is perfectly appropriate when you're dealing with powerful superheroes and villains. The game gives practically everything a hit-point counter and has decent art for when stuff starts coming apart at the seams. Part of the limitation of interactive environments is technical and part of it is creative. Clearly, games are doing a better job finding ways around these limitations.

But "can do" and "should do" are quite different. Not every game needs to get the blow-everything-up treatment, and it would even be inappropriate in many cases. Certainly, I'm not eager to see more games that use such a feature as a key gameplay mechanic. Red Faction and State of Emergency are two games that rely too much on their technical capacity to represent real-time destruction. But in the right setting, I see where games can benefit from more technical realism to reinforce the shock of violent confrontation, rather than to make cartoony combat prettier or more visually gratifying.
 

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