A potentially great game that was far more broken and rushed then actually flawed.
In a time when even the most technologically advanced First Person Shooters were narrow corridor crawls, Trespasser gave us vast, wide open areas. It was one of the first games to use bump mapping and specular lightening. It would not be until games like Far Cry running years later on vastly superior hardware that we would see wide up spaces like this. Even now the game doesn't look horrible. Problem was it came out months, perhaps even years before there was computers powerful enough to run it at a reasonable rate. On the hardware of the time, Trespasser chugged along at a crawl.
In a time when practically all games were depending totally dependent on either weak computer A.I. or stiff, predictable scripted sequences, Trespasser was one of the first games to attempt to get its characters to actually think. The dinosaurs in Trespasser got hungry, go thirsty, protected their terroritory from both your character and other dinosaurs. Again while a terrific idea that was poorly executed, as the dinosaurs often simply refused to do anything or walk around in circles.
Trespasser sound was very solid as well, with sound effects created on the fly instead of simply being canned sound fx. Trespasser's "Real Time Foley" system has never been attempted since.
And Trespasser's physics engine, although horribly buggy, would not be equaled until The Source Engine brought real physics back to first person shooters almost a decade later.
The control scheme, although innovative, was what really ruined Trespasser. Even the simplest of tasks almost impossible to accomplish.
But it is amazing how many features we now take for granted in games first appeared in Trespasser. Anne, the game's heroine, can only carry two guns at a time just like Halo, her weapons are not static points in space but actual physical models that move with her body just like the recent Call of Duty titles. Long before Ghost Recon the game featured licensed weapons. The lack of a HUD is also a very modern idea.
As it was released in 1998 Trespasser was so broken it was all but unplayable. Now on current generation hardware with the retail patch, or some of the wonderful mods from the TresCom community, there is a lot of enjoyment in the game. It's still horribly quirky, but at times a hint of what a great game and a great engine Trespasser could of easily been will show through.
Bottom line, Trespasser was a bunch of wonderful, even revolutionary ideas that simply didn't work. The game was ambitious, but rushed, under budgeted, and way ahead of its time. Its almost like playing a very early Beta version of a great game, and given the stories I've heard about Trespasser's budget cuts and rushed deadline that might not be too far from the truth.
Had even a few of the features worked as promised the game would of been great, and had all of them worked it would of been legendary.