This was released here today. Or, technically, yesterday, since it's 4am. Anyway, I've just spent my first evening with the game. I'm much too tired to articulate properly, so I'll just say these things.
- This was the biggest Xmas period release I've been waiting on. It's getting nowhere near the publicity or recognition of PGR2 or Prince of Persia, and I think that's unfair, considering the depth of the project. These people are really trying to change things, make something new.
- The Half-Life 2 style physics are a dream come true for me. Everything seems to be governed by Havok, not just the bodies. Sad as it is, I spent the first five or six minutes throwing objects around my bedroom, which is the first room in the game. A basketball, a trophy, a computer chair, the pillow off the bed. The basketball's travel is dampened by the carpeting, but it rolls freely on hard surfaces. I know, I'm sorry, this stuff means something to me. Just nudging things can make them fall over or move around.
- Bodies. Oh, the bodies. First off, I've not seen one disappear yet (a gripe of mine with Rainbow Six 3) and they also maintain their physics postmortem (another gripe I had with Rainbow Six 3) for those of us who like to... experiment. You can pick up and drop the bodies, and this is the first game I've played where dropping one body on top of another really drops the guy on top, ie he doesn't glitch through to become some sort of two headed mutant with the guy below. I appear before you now having just beaten two deceased gentlemen around an office in the train station for 8-10 minutes with a shotgun and a crowbar as my utensils.
- The lighting can go wrong, but generally it's the best I've seen, better than Splinter Cell to my eyes. Lots of hard shadows. Oddly, you seem to be the only thing that doesn't cast a shadow.
- t3h best front end menu music EVAR!!!!11111!thenumeralone!!!1
- Sweet sound. Though it has slightly thin weapon sounds (a la Halo) and the thwip-thwip effect you get when flipping through inventory items is so high timbre it stabs my ears like needles, there's a lot of cool positional audio. I understand from the developer diaries that this a) was a labor or love and b) will become vital for gameplay reasons later in the game. On my way up to a nightclub, I could hear high pressure nosebleed dance music, muffled by the building so that most of it came through my sub, making for exactly the sort of sound you get in real life when you... walk up to a nightclub.
- Sadly, all my beautiful physics and that saweeet lighting come at the cost of several frames per second. I'd estimate that you're frequently looking at 20 fps when in a room on your own with nothing happening. It feels just at that sort of stage where if you disabled a couple of smaller luxuries on a PC game, it'd be fine. The framerate, I'd have to say, is definitely the most disappointing part of this game I've been so eager to play. But I can live with it. It depends how much you buy into Stephen Poole's "temporal resolution." The theory makes sense, but it would've also asserted that Perfect Dark was unplayable, whereas it was, of course, sex.
- The other cost? Loading. Oh deary me. Up in this elevator; out to the loading screen we go. Back down? No, sir, we haven't cached it, I'm afraid you have another appointment with the loading screen, scheduled for NOW! Certainly breaks up that whole "I'm in a living, breathing, Bladerunnery city" thing. Actually, it's not so Bladerunnery - there's something about it that makes me feel like I'm getting to walk about in Syndicate. And that's nice. Because Syndicate r00led.
- This made me very happy, following yet another gripe I had with RSix3: you can disable auto-aim! I'm really not such a bad shot with a pad, and I've hated the recent trend in auto-aim gameage.
- In addition to Easy, Normal and Hard difficulty, there's a Realistic setting. Very nice idea. Because it's not as simple as it being tougher than the 'Hard' setting, it's just a different set of rules. For example, enemies take greater damage in Realistic than in Hard, because in Hard they're fortified artificially to make for a greater challenge, though it's clearly more "realistic" to drop a human with a few shots, or a good head shot.
I've forgotten what else I was going to say. Forgive me. It's too late. I have to sleep. Clearly these are all shallow aesthetic observations about the engine. I am well aware - as it's what drew me to the game - that there's a giant gaming experience under here with the very latest and most daring implementation of so-called emergent gameplay, moral choice and dynamic situations. It's early on, but my feeling is that this will be the ultimate sandbox game, because the possibilities are endless.
Sleep.
EDIT: Also, because it looks like I'm ratting on it, I'll just point out that I am still loving Rainbow Six 3. It's only because it's so good that its faults are in sharp relief.
- This was the biggest Xmas period release I've been waiting on. It's getting nowhere near the publicity or recognition of PGR2 or Prince of Persia, and I think that's unfair, considering the depth of the project. These people are really trying to change things, make something new.
- The Half-Life 2 style physics are a dream come true for me. Everything seems to be governed by Havok, not just the bodies. Sad as it is, I spent the first five or six minutes throwing objects around my bedroom, which is the first room in the game. A basketball, a trophy, a computer chair, the pillow off the bed. The basketball's travel is dampened by the carpeting, but it rolls freely on hard surfaces. I know, I'm sorry, this stuff means something to me. Just nudging things can make them fall over or move around.
- Bodies. Oh, the bodies. First off, I've not seen one disappear yet (a gripe of mine with Rainbow Six 3) and they also maintain their physics postmortem (another gripe I had with Rainbow Six 3) for those of us who like to... experiment. You can pick up and drop the bodies, and this is the first game I've played where dropping one body on top of another really drops the guy on top, ie he doesn't glitch through to become some sort of two headed mutant with the guy below. I appear before you now having just beaten two deceased gentlemen around an office in the train station for 8-10 minutes with a shotgun and a crowbar as my utensils.
- The lighting can go wrong, but generally it's the best I've seen, better than Splinter Cell to my eyes. Lots of hard shadows. Oddly, you seem to be the only thing that doesn't cast a shadow.
- t3h best front end menu music EVAR!!!!11111!thenumeralone!!!1
- Sweet sound. Though it has slightly thin weapon sounds (a la Halo) and the thwip-thwip effect you get when flipping through inventory items is so high timbre it stabs my ears like needles, there's a lot of cool positional audio. I understand from the developer diaries that this a) was a labor or love and b) will become vital for gameplay reasons later in the game. On my way up to a nightclub, I could hear high pressure nosebleed dance music, muffled by the building so that most of it came through my sub, making for exactly the sort of sound you get in real life when you... walk up to a nightclub.
- Sadly, all my beautiful physics and that saweeet lighting come at the cost of several frames per second. I'd estimate that you're frequently looking at 20 fps when in a room on your own with nothing happening. It feels just at that sort of stage where if you disabled a couple of smaller luxuries on a PC game, it'd be fine. The framerate, I'd have to say, is definitely the most disappointing part of this game I've been so eager to play. But I can live with it. It depends how much you buy into Stephen Poole's "temporal resolution." The theory makes sense, but it would've also asserted that Perfect Dark was unplayable, whereas it was, of course, sex.
- The other cost? Loading. Oh deary me. Up in this elevator; out to the loading screen we go. Back down? No, sir, we haven't cached it, I'm afraid you have another appointment with the loading screen, scheduled for NOW! Certainly breaks up that whole "I'm in a living, breathing, Bladerunnery city" thing. Actually, it's not so Bladerunnery - there's something about it that makes me feel like I'm getting to walk about in Syndicate. And that's nice. Because Syndicate r00led.
- This made me very happy, following yet another gripe I had with RSix3: you can disable auto-aim! I'm really not such a bad shot with a pad, and I've hated the recent trend in auto-aim gameage.
- In addition to Easy, Normal and Hard difficulty, there's a Realistic setting. Very nice idea. Because it's not as simple as it being tougher than the 'Hard' setting, it's just a different set of rules. For example, enemies take greater damage in Realistic than in Hard, because in Hard they're fortified artificially to make for a greater challenge, though it's clearly more "realistic" to drop a human with a few shots, or a good head shot.
I've forgotten what else I was going to say. Forgive me. It's too late. I have to sleep. Clearly these are all shallow aesthetic observations about the engine. I am well aware - as it's what drew me to the game - that there's a giant gaming experience under here with the very latest and most daring implementation of so-called emergent gameplay, moral choice and dynamic situations. It's early on, but my feeling is that this will be the ultimate sandbox game, because the possibilities are endless.
Sleep.
EDIT: Also, because it looks like I'm ratting on it, I'll just point out that I am still loving Rainbow Six 3. It's only because it's so good that its faults are in sharp relief.
Comment