May 25, 2008

“Don’t Reveal All Of Your Special Tricks At Once!”

The ability to keep the gamer interested from start to finish is one of the golden rules of game development. Unfortunately, in reality, so much time is spent on getting the graphics engine to work the right way at the right time, that thinking about what the game is actually like to play is forgotten about and the game falls into the “repetition” trap: the player ends up doing the same routines over and over again with very little reward or incentive and eventually gives up.
Rockstar Games , however, never fall into this trap and always manage to keep their players mesmerised. One of my favourite moments in gaming was back in 2004, playing San Andreas : Grand Theft Auto : after being taught the basics of the gameplay, you are then dropped off by 2 crooked police officers in the countryside in the middle of nowhere…. only then does it dawn on you what a huge vast world is waiting for you to explore : 3 big cities and enormous areas of sea and countryside.
The same technique is found in “Bully”, another Rockstar game : You learn the basics in a closed in area of the school and then, when you are ready to advance , the school gates open and you are free to go wherever you please with your newly acquired skateboard or bike. Throughout both these two games, you are constantly unlocking new options, new techniques and new challenges.
These two games share other things in common as well: an almost identical game pattern and design, they use the same graphics engine and they share the same hardware problem: simply put, these games are almost too advanced for the consoles they were designed for. In San Andreas , all the data was streamed so that you never encountered loading problems except for “mission” data. On both the PS2 and Xbox , however, this meant that, at heavy data traffic areas, such as when you had a 6 star rating and 5 police cars were trying to arrest you , the hardware was unable to keep up and the game slowed down. Also when you were riding a fast motorbike, certain scenery (such as flowers and grass) was constantly popping up as the data struggled to be loaded in time. I mention all this , because : Bully started its life on the PS2 and has now been ported to the Xbox 360 and Wii. "Bully" is such a good game that it needs the right hardware to do it justice and yet both new versions are mediocre …. A little graphical enhancement and a few extra missions and not much else. On both versions , we find many graphical glitches and popups…
And my point? Well, you cant argue with sales figures… Both titles are extremely successful and deservedly so … I guess my point is that Rockstar, having decided to go ahead with Bully back in 2004 , should have developed the game for next generation consoles? If you are going to make such a good game, make sure you do your best to maximise its potential by keeping within the hardware limitations. If Bully had originally been developed for PS3 and 360, I am positive it would have been even more successful and nobody would be complaining about bugs and loading times. In addition , it makes you wonder if the new Grand Theft Auto game will be so ambitious and awesomely clever that the poor consoles wont be able to cope….

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