Nathan Frederick
Lead Quality Assurance
Joined: 17 Oct 2001 |
 Posted: Thursday, 27 May 2004 08:16PM
Whew. This is a long thread to read through 
I'd like to put in a few comments on some of the posts in this thread, and I'll echo Brenon on the 'this is not indicative of whether or not any particular feature is in the game or not', and add in a 'this reflects my opinion on these features'.
There's been several comments in this post on assorted games which have flying/swimming/z-axis. I've actually played almost all of them, and would just like to provide some feedback, and some comparisons across them.
Everquest (I play EQ):
-Swimming exists, and underwater combat exists. It
is horrible to do, with the players having to adjust to height, and position constantly. Horrible to watch, as there simply aren't animations that look good for it (probably because the resources were better put to use elsewhere). The underwater zones aren't visitted unless people have to go there for a quest of some sort. Control method: First person view. You can go into third person, but you can't control it with any degree of control. Levitation exists, but only allows downward drifting, while moving. No actual flying, and no creatures fly. Game overall has some AWFUL z-axis range issues when it comes to combat (creatures have an infinite reach on the z-axis, possibly to prevent people trying to exploit the z-axis by attacking from somewhere a creature cannot reach).
Gothic2 (just finished it last weekend actually):
-Fully 3d world with followers and swimming (even underwater). AWFUL controls in that game underwater. Can't fight underwater. No player flight, and no creatures actually fly (there are several dragons which sort of 'levitate' a few feet over the ground.
Sacred (Playing through it in my spare time in the evenings, including in this post only because it was mentioned):
-2D world faked to look 3D (like NwN). Wyverns which 'fly' have ground circles while they are in the air (and you can hit them by attacking the circle). Tiny rock on the ground - gotta walk around it. No swimming.
Morrowind (played partway through it):
-Has a pretty good flight model. Control mode is first person view, or very awkward in third person. Allowed combat to be horribly exploited (as someone else mentioned). Didn't do a whole lot of swimming, but it more or less functioned the same.
City of Heroes: Haven't played, I'll have to check out someone here flying. Won't comment on it as such.
Overall:
Morrowind is the only singleplayer game on the list which has flying and swimming. The others are MMORPG's. Morrowing has often been described as feeling like a "MMORPG without the MMO". They all lack a solid story (MMO's have 'background', and Morrowind was more 'open').
Flight fits well into these games, because there is very little that occurs as a result of the player. There's conversations, but no cutscenes, and very few scripted events (other than combat style events). Flight adds to these games, because part of these games is simply about going out and looking at things. They are all controlled in first person primarily too.
There have been comments along the line of 'if the designers know it exists, they can design with that in mind'. With flying, that is almost impossible. The majority of events and cutscenes are scripted knowing where the player will be. You drastically reduce your options on where events can take place, or start putting in a lot of artificial restrictions on flight itself (invisible walls, everything of note takes place inside, etc, etc), or start creating 'handle everything' events, which have to be very generic to handle all the possibilities. And the possibility of having bugs introduced from that is VERY high.
If a player is flying, the player could be almost anywhere. For instance, rather than walking into town through the gate, the player could come in over the wall, or in through the back side of the town, or over the wall at such a high altitude that the wall is hardly identifiable. Scripting a plot critical encounter with the city guard who questions the player, and tells them that entrance to the city is restricted is nearly impossible to do well at this point, and is probably avoidable by a clever player.
A large part of creating a compelling believable story, is knowing where the player is, and will be, in order to create events that are tailored to that situation. Generic solutions, tend to be, well, a tad generic, and somewhat bland, and very subject to being broken by a clever player going someplace that was never intended to be reached.
Player flight is cool. I won't argue that. But it only really fits 'open' environments, where a solid, story-driven, event-driven game doesn't exist. It suits the MMO scene nicely, and it fit Morrowind's open-ended gameplay style. Swimming is situationally cool. Gothic2 would have been as good without swimming. EQ would probably be better if I never had to deal with underwater combat again.
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Principal Lead
Quality Assurance
Dragon Age
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