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Every year, games of all genres are gradually becoming more and more realistic. But ultimately, how far will this go, or more to the point, how far do we want it go. Do we actually want a perfect recreation of reality? How much longer would immense realism make the development of a game? Could we be looking at 10+ years for the development of a single game?
Before anything else I have tried to imagine what games with ultimate reality would be like. Many people long for ultimate reality, but you can make up your own mind when you have read what I imagine ultimate reality games would
eventually be like.
Ultimate Reality Half-Life (2054)
It’s a hard job you know, making the earth a better place. You are on your way to the briefing room now, following one of the Barneys. He ambles along, limping slightly from where he broke his leg playing football only a few weeks
ago. He stops outside the heavily guarded chamber and punches his access code into the machine. Damn, he typed it wrong, try again. That’s better, the
door opens and you walk through. The commissioner is very busy indeed and doesn’t notice you at first, he is bending over a computer screen talking animatedly with an engineer. You sit down in a nearby chair while you wait, and doodle on a sketch-pad with a pencil. Oops, you broke the lead. The commissioner sees you at last and rushes over. Ouch, he spills his coffee in his haste and stains his clean white shirt.
An hour later, you are walking away from the chamber, having discussed in detail your next mission, and the best way of going about it. You are detained in the reception area by a pretty young secretary who has some papers for you. Except a page is missing, so she asks you to wait for a minute while she tries to find it in her office. She is taking her time, so you spot a friendly cat wandering
about and start to stoke it. It hisses at you, so you take out your combat knife and slice it in half. You are just removing the guts from the cat and spreading them over the floor for your own amusement when the secretary comes back.
She is horrified and starts screaming. You pull out your AK47 and shoot her down. Blood spills all over the desk and ruins a lot of the paperwork on it. You stroll out the front door and walk towards your Mercedes, waving your gun at Black Mesa workers and enjoying their shock and individual reactions. Bang, you are shot dead by a security officer.
Ultimate Reality FIFA 2046 (2046)
Your men are walking out of the tunnel, soaking up the applause from the crowd. A boy on the side is frantically calling out for an autograph from Owen, who ignores him, but Seaman takes pity on the lad and signs his book. The game is eventually underway. Beckham passes to Heskey, back to Beckham who fluffs his pass and misses the ball completely. Pheep, play is halted for a female
streaker who has eluded the tight security and is running on the pitch. Officials and security charge after her and eventually catch her. She is covered in a blanket and escorted from the pitch. Play continues. Play is stopped again an opposing striker shoots and the speeding ball hits Neville in the face. Medics are called on and cart off Neville. His brother Phil is brought on his place, only he
doesn’t seem to realise that his shirt is on the wrong way round. At the final whistle England lose 1-3 and are knocked out of Euro ‘46 in the qualifying stages.
Ultimate Reality Colin McCrae (2051)
The light turns green and you wheelspin on the wet grass. Seconds later a helicopter passes above you and races further on in the track where another racer has injured someone when their car overturned. You speed along and
glance at Nicky Grist sitting to your left. He is frowning as he tries to make sense of the dirty map he is reading, the water splashing through the open window doesn’t help much either. A few minutes later, Nicky accidentally gives you a wrong direction, so you slide into a left hand corner facing right. You bump off the track and bash your side onto a tree. You try to reverse, but the car isn’t
moving. You get out of your car, and only then do you notice that your wheel is inextricably attached to a branch. A few bystanders try and help but to no avail.
Your race is over.
Playing these sort of games would be so tedious as to become unbearable. OK, some might like experimenting with what can actually be done, and have fun doing so. But to complete a specific objective would be almost impossible if
realism was total. Half-Life: Just imagine, all the AI would be as clever as you, one shot would probably kill you, and yet would be outnumbered about 10,000 to 1, as per usual.
FIFA: Each game would last for the full 90 minutes, players might refuse to play, stamina would drain very quickly, and all the nimble tricks that we are so used to
pulling off by tapping a few buttons would rarely work, like in real life.
COLIN McCRAE
Just one bump could ruin your race if it mashed a vulnerable part of your car, a high speed collision would totally write off your car, also killing you, and total
engine failures could occur, knocking you out of the race unfairly.
There are a few very simple formulas to remember when designing a game.
Realism=Good
Fun&Gameplay=Good
Realism+Fun&Gameplay=Very good
Realism+Realism=Bad
That’s right, although realism can make or break a game, too much realism will ruin a game for most. Some people would like to try ultimate realism, as indeed most of us would, but that couldn’t really be classed as a game. For a game that will appeal to the masses, the key is to fine tune the balance of realism and fun & gameplay.
The most important step is gauging how much realism you need in the game. Warren Spector (of Deus Ex fame)focused his efforts on believability rather than realism. The actual aim of any game is to make the player believe that they are actually there, in a virtual world, being a hero. Obviously ultimate realism could create believability, but we’re not really interested in that since we don’t want to make ultimate reality games. What we do want to know is whether a genuinely good game that is fun to play requires total or near total realism to achieve believability? Thankfully, this is not the case. An immersive and believable game only requires so much realism to make you actually feel that you are there.
We have established that total realism is not required for perfect games, so what we now have to consider is how current games can improve so they can achieve this standard. I will now discuss this point, and address certain areas where I think attention is needed. Since there are so many genres though, I will be addressing my comments mainly, but not entirely, at First Person Shooters.
CONSISTENCY
I feel that one of the most important but sadly neglected areas of realism is the consistency of a game. If the grate to your right is breakable, then how come the
grate to your left isn’t? This sort of thing occurs constantly in games, where developers base the realism of certain objects upon what they need to make a particular level, rather than what would be realistically possible. This should be abolished, and decisions should be made. For instance, it doesn’t matter whether the grates are breakable or not, so long as the same rules apply to all
similar grates in the game. Have you also noticed that many games have computers, screens, buttons etc, yet never can you use them. The only buttons that you can press are the plot-essential ones, the rest just sit there like dummies and flash lights at you. It wouldn’t matter so much if there wasn’t even an effect when you pressed the button, just so long as it could be pressed and make a little beeping sound like all the others. It isn’t that interactive buttons are a necessary addition, but it goes a long way toward the believability of a game, which is the important factor.
PHYSICS
Another embarrassment in realism for most games is the physics. Isn’t it strange how your immensely powerful time bomb will wrench a huge pair of wrought iron gates in two, but won’t even take a splinter off a nearby wooden shelf. The problem is that most games excel at certain physics that are necessary to the completion of a game, but for the rest of the objects in a game, you couldn’t knock a candle over with a rocket launcher. I am not complaining that physics should be entirely accurate, but that there should be at least passable physics for all elements of the game, not just hyper-realistic physics for the plot-essential
parts as many games seem to think. Operation Flashpoint went so far as to model the speed of sound, and things like this, although a bit extravagant, inspire believability, which is good. But when I laid a bomb under a tree in the same game, it merely blackened it. Passable physics for all objects would inspire believability, whereas the lazy indestructible physics for many objects don’t.
CHARACTER INTERACTION
This partially comes under consistency, but it’s such a major problem that it can be addressed as a fault in it’s own right. In just about any game ever made you will come across NPCs. Computer controlled characters that are either necessary for game completion, or just add colour to the scenery. Once again the problem lies in the fact that the only NPCs you can talk to or interact with in any depth are inevitably the plot-essential ones. Admittedly some games have made a real effort, Deus Ex comes to mind for it’s ability to talk to almost everyone in the game. And Unreal Tournament is just one of the many games that manages to effectively use orders for the team-based modes. But many, many games either lack such depth in interaction, or they fail to put interaction there in the first place. Even in Half-Life for example you can only give two basic commands, follow and stop.
But it’s also important not to overstep the mark a bit, as the Discworld series does in some cases. They give you so much dialogue to listen to that it becomes tedious just sitting listening to characters rambling on about some
half-wit conversation of their’s. Long, tedious conversations do promote believability, but they sacrifice some of the Fun & Gameplay in the process. I think the nearest game to perfection in terms of character nteraction has to be Deus Ex. It’s system of letting you speak a few lines with all the non-important characters yet have in-depth, but not tedious conversations with major
characters has yet to be beaten. Creating believability without sacrificing other elements of the game is the key, and Deus Ex does that with near perfection. I salute it and point to it for any future game developers worried about character
interaction.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI is one of the biggest, deciding factors on how good a game is. How frustrating was it back in the original Commandos when you turned your back on one of your men for just a minute and some enemies spotted them. Your men
would start screaming at you for help, while they just stood there swallowing the lead that the Nazis were shooting at them. They didn’t even run for cover or
defend themselves. That sort of niggle in a game’s AI really spoils the enjoyability in playing it, as you know that in real life your men wouldn’t be so pitifully, suicidally thick. One of the games famous for it’s AI was Half-life. Battling the Marines was one of the most exhilarating experiences in gaming history. Why? Because
heroically diving across hallways with your gun blasting while dodging their grenades and tactical advances created an immense amount of believability and immersion. How else can you explain the fact that everyone who has played
Half-life comes away babbling “Red Team, Recon”, “Go go go”. The AI is actually an extremely long distance from total reality, but what does that matter if the believability is extreme? Half-life’s AI has been improved on with all the recently released FPSs to create even more intelligent AI. ‘Medal of Honour: Allied Assault’ probably holds the ‘Best AI’ flag at the moment because it manages to increase the intelligence of the AI considerably without affecting the Fun & Gameplay other than raising it.
The perfect AI then, as partially achieved by MOH, would consist of 4 main elements:
1. Different personalities for soldiers, aggressive, defensive etc.
2. A host of offensive and defensive tactics that they use appropriately to good
effect.
3. Realistic shot accuracy.
4. Their reaction to the world around them.
That last element can add a great deal to the feeling of immersion in the game if implemented properly. The Nazis in MOH are a prime example of this, they react ealistically to the physical world that they exist in, making use of obstacles, walls, open spaces etc, to aid them while fighting, or whatever else they are
doing. This idea would be expanded even further in the perfect game to cover use of darkness, shadows, colour camouflage, height, and also managing things like
locking doors behind them if retreating into a building.
I feel that AI like this would create a huge amount of immersion and believability
while managing to achieve maximum Fun & Gameplay.
LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT
The current lengths of development range from about 1.5 years to sometimes over 4 years. To go to the lengths of creating an ultimate reality game in any genre would take a very long time. All possibilities would have to be accounted for, both visually, in the graphics, and physically, in the programming. I would estimate that an ultimate reality Half-Life would take approximately 10-16 years to create, and then at least another year or more QA testing. The final result would probably require up to 4 DVDs, and a whopping amount of hard drive usage. The extra time in development means that the price of the game would
more than double to cover all the costs, and wages of the developers. Is that really what we want?
A Half-Life that met all the requirements of our perfect game however would require only 4 - 5 years development, 1-2 CDs and no unreasonable demands upon our gaming system. Game price might increase, but not by very much.
CONCLUSION
So that’s it ladies and gentlemen. You know my opinion of how realism in future gaming should turn out, but now it’s time to form your own. You have 2 paths to choose from.
1. Gaming should attain ultimate realism, ridding itself of anything that wouldn’t happen in the real world. Nothing should be spared to create total simulation.
Development times will increase substantially as will game prices, meaning that we have to wait longer and pay more for our games.
2. Our gaming future will shun realism when other precious gaming elements are at stake to create a rounded out and more enjoyable game. The basic guidelines are: Believability is the essential part of a game rather than total realism, because total realism sacrifices a lot of the fun & gameplay. Intense believability, immersion, fun & gameplay are basically what compromise the perfect game, and so are to be strived for at all costs. Development times and prices will naturally increase, but only by small amounts.
Whatever happens, we are riding the tidal wave of technology, and we can look to the future with slavering anticipation. Half-Life 2 anyone.......?
Before anything else I have tried to imagine what games with ultimate reality would be like. Many people long for ultimate reality, but you can make up your own mind when you have read what I imagine ultimate reality games would
eventually be like.
Ultimate Reality Half-Life (2054)
It’s a hard job you know, making the earth a better place. You are on your way to the briefing room now, following one of the Barneys. He ambles along, limping slightly from where he broke his leg playing football only a few weeks
ago. He stops outside the heavily guarded chamber and punches his access code into the machine. Damn, he typed it wrong, try again. That’s better, the
door opens and you walk through. The commissioner is very busy indeed and doesn’t notice you at first, he is bending over a computer screen talking animatedly with an engineer. You sit down in a nearby chair while you wait, and doodle on a sketch-pad with a pencil. Oops, you broke the lead. The commissioner sees you at last and rushes over. Ouch, he spills his coffee in his haste and stains his clean white shirt.
An hour later, you are walking away from the chamber, having discussed in detail your next mission, and the best way of going about it. You are detained in the reception area by a pretty young secretary who has some papers for you. Except a page is missing, so she asks you to wait for a minute while she tries to find it in her office. She is taking her time, so you spot a friendly cat wandering
about and start to stoke it. It hisses at you, so you take out your combat knife and slice it in half. You are just removing the guts from the cat and spreading them over the floor for your own amusement when the secretary comes back.
She is horrified and starts screaming. You pull out your AK47 and shoot her down. Blood spills all over the desk and ruins a lot of the paperwork on it. You stroll out the front door and walk towards your Mercedes, waving your gun at Black Mesa workers and enjoying their shock and individual reactions. Bang, you are shot dead by a security officer.
Ultimate Reality FIFA 2046 (2046)
Your men are walking out of the tunnel, soaking up the applause from the crowd. A boy on the side is frantically calling out for an autograph from Owen, who ignores him, but Seaman takes pity on the lad and signs his book. The game is eventually underway. Beckham passes to Heskey, back to Beckham who fluffs his pass and misses the ball completely. Pheep, play is halted for a female
streaker who has eluded the tight security and is running on the pitch. Officials and security charge after her and eventually catch her. She is covered in a blanket and escorted from the pitch. Play continues. Play is stopped again an opposing striker shoots and the speeding ball hits Neville in the face. Medics are called on and cart off Neville. His brother Phil is brought on his place, only he
doesn’t seem to realise that his shirt is on the wrong way round. At the final whistle England lose 1-3 and are knocked out of Euro ‘46 in the qualifying stages.
Ultimate Reality Colin McCrae (2051)
The light turns green and you wheelspin on the wet grass. Seconds later a helicopter passes above you and races further on in the track where another racer has injured someone when their car overturned. You speed along and
glance at Nicky Grist sitting to your left. He is frowning as he tries to make sense of the dirty map he is reading, the water splashing through the open window doesn’t help much either. A few minutes later, Nicky accidentally gives you a wrong direction, so you slide into a left hand corner facing right. You bump off the track and bash your side onto a tree. You try to reverse, but the car isn’t
moving. You get out of your car, and only then do you notice that your wheel is inextricably attached to a branch. A few bystanders try and help but to no avail.
Your race is over.
Playing these sort of games would be so tedious as to become unbearable. OK, some might like experimenting with what can actually be done, and have fun doing so. But to complete a specific objective would be almost impossible if
realism was total. Half-Life: Just imagine, all the AI would be as clever as you, one shot would probably kill you, and yet would be outnumbered about 10,000 to 1, as per usual.
FIFA: Each game would last for the full 90 minutes, players might refuse to play, stamina would drain very quickly, and all the nimble tricks that we are so used to
pulling off by tapping a few buttons would rarely work, like in real life.
COLIN McCRAE
Just one bump could ruin your race if it mashed a vulnerable part of your car, a high speed collision would totally write off your car, also killing you, and total
engine failures could occur, knocking you out of the race unfairly.
There are a few very simple formulas to remember when designing a game.
Realism=Good
Fun&Gameplay=Good
Realism+Fun&Gameplay=Very good
Realism+Realism=Bad
That’s right, although realism can make or break a game, too much realism will ruin a game for most. Some people would like to try ultimate realism, as indeed most of us would, but that couldn’t really be classed as a game. For a game that will appeal to the masses, the key is to fine tune the balance of realism and fun & gameplay.
The most important step is gauging how much realism you need in the game. Warren Spector (of Deus Ex fame)focused his efforts on believability rather than realism. The actual aim of any game is to make the player believe that they are actually there, in a virtual world, being a hero. Obviously ultimate realism could create believability, but we’re not really interested in that since we don’t want to make ultimate reality games. What we do want to know is whether a genuinely good game that is fun to play requires total or near total realism to achieve believability? Thankfully, this is not the case. An immersive and believable game only requires so much realism to make you actually feel that you are there.
We have established that total realism is not required for perfect games, so what we now have to consider is how current games can improve so they can achieve this standard. I will now discuss this point, and address certain areas where I think attention is needed. Since there are so many genres though, I will be addressing my comments mainly, but not entirely, at First Person Shooters.
CONSISTENCY
I feel that one of the most important but sadly neglected areas of realism is the consistency of a game. If the grate to your right is breakable, then how come the
grate to your left isn’t? This sort of thing occurs constantly in games, where developers base the realism of certain objects upon what they need to make a particular level, rather than what would be realistically possible. This should be abolished, and decisions should be made. For instance, it doesn’t matter whether the grates are breakable or not, so long as the same rules apply to all
similar grates in the game. Have you also noticed that many games have computers, screens, buttons etc, yet never can you use them. The only buttons that you can press are the plot-essential ones, the rest just sit there like dummies and flash lights at you. It wouldn’t matter so much if there wasn’t even an effect when you pressed the button, just so long as it could be pressed and make a little beeping sound like all the others. It isn’t that interactive buttons are a necessary addition, but it goes a long way toward the believability of a game, which is the important factor.
PHYSICS
Another embarrassment in realism for most games is the physics. Isn’t it strange how your immensely powerful time bomb will wrench a huge pair of wrought iron gates in two, but won’t even take a splinter off a nearby wooden shelf. The problem is that most games excel at certain physics that are necessary to the completion of a game, but for the rest of the objects in a game, you couldn’t knock a candle over with a rocket launcher. I am not complaining that physics should be entirely accurate, but that there should be at least passable physics for all elements of the game, not just hyper-realistic physics for the plot-essential
parts as many games seem to think. Operation Flashpoint went so far as to model the speed of sound, and things like this, although a bit extravagant, inspire believability, which is good. But when I laid a bomb under a tree in the same game, it merely blackened it. Passable physics for all objects would inspire believability, whereas the lazy indestructible physics for many objects don’t.
CHARACTER INTERACTION
This partially comes under consistency, but it’s such a major problem that it can be addressed as a fault in it’s own right. In just about any game ever made you will come across NPCs. Computer controlled characters that are either necessary for game completion, or just add colour to the scenery. Once again the problem lies in the fact that the only NPCs you can talk to or interact with in any depth are inevitably the plot-essential ones. Admittedly some games have made a real effort, Deus Ex comes to mind for it’s ability to talk to almost everyone in the game. And Unreal Tournament is just one of the many games that manages to effectively use orders for the team-based modes. But many, many games either lack such depth in interaction, or they fail to put interaction there in the first place. Even in Half-Life for example you can only give two basic commands, follow and stop.
But it’s also important not to overstep the mark a bit, as the Discworld series does in some cases. They give you so much dialogue to listen to that it becomes tedious just sitting listening to characters rambling on about some
half-wit conversation of their’s. Long, tedious conversations do promote believability, but they sacrifice some of the Fun & Gameplay in the process. I think the nearest game to perfection in terms of character nteraction has to be Deus Ex. It’s system of letting you speak a few lines with all the non-important characters yet have in-depth, but not tedious conversations with major
characters has yet to be beaten. Creating believability without sacrificing other elements of the game is the key, and Deus Ex does that with near perfection. I salute it and point to it for any future game developers worried about character
interaction.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI is one of the biggest, deciding factors on how good a game is. How frustrating was it back in the original Commandos when you turned your back on one of your men for just a minute and some enemies spotted them. Your men
would start screaming at you for help, while they just stood there swallowing the lead that the Nazis were shooting at them. They didn’t even run for cover or
defend themselves. That sort of niggle in a game’s AI really spoils the enjoyability in playing it, as you know that in real life your men wouldn’t be so pitifully, suicidally thick. One of the games famous for it’s AI was Half-life. Battling the Marines was one of the most exhilarating experiences in gaming history. Why? Because
heroically diving across hallways with your gun blasting while dodging their grenades and tactical advances created an immense amount of believability and immersion. How else can you explain the fact that everyone who has played
Half-life comes away babbling “Red Team, Recon”, “Go go go”. The AI is actually an extremely long distance from total reality, but what does that matter if the believability is extreme? Half-life’s AI has been improved on with all the recently released FPSs to create even more intelligent AI. ‘Medal of Honour: Allied Assault’ probably holds the ‘Best AI’ flag at the moment because it manages to increase the intelligence of the AI considerably without affecting the Fun & Gameplay other than raising it.
The perfect AI then, as partially achieved by MOH, would consist of 4 main elements:
1. Different personalities for soldiers, aggressive, defensive etc.
2. A host of offensive and defensive tactics that they use appropriately to good
effect.
3. Realistic shot accuracy.
4. Their reaction to the world around them.
That last element can add a great deal to the feeling of immersion in the game if implemented properly. The Nazis in MOH are a prime example of this, they react ealistically to the physical world that they exist in, making use of obstacles, walls, open spaces etc, to aid them while fighting, or whatever else they are
doing. This idea would be expanded even further in the perfect game to cover use of darkness, shadows, colour camouflage, height, and also managing things like
locking doors behind them if retreating into a building.
I feel that AI like this would create a huge amount of immersion and believability
while managing to achieve maximum Fun & Gameplay.
LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT
The current lengths of development range from about 1.5 years to sometimes over 4 years. To go to the lengths of creating an ultimate reality game in any genre would take a very long time. All possibilities would have to be accounted for, both visually, in the graphics, and physically, in the programming. I would estimate that an ultimate reality Half-Life would take approximately 10-16 years to create, and then at least another year or more QA testing. The final result would probably require up to 4 DVDs, and a whopping amount of hard drive usage. The extra time in development means that the price of the game would
more than double to cover all the costs, and wages of the developers. Is that really what we want?
A Half-Life that met all the requirements of our perfect game however would require only 4 - 5 years development, 1-2 CDs and no unreasonable demands upon our gaming system. Game price might increase, but not by very much.
CONCLUSION
So that’s it ladies and gentlemen. You know my opinion of how realism in future gaming should turn out, but now it’s time to form your own. You have 2 paths to choose from.
1. Gaming should attain ultimate realism, ridding itself of anything that wouldn’t happen in the real world. Nothing should be spared to create total simulation.
Development times will increase substantially as will game prices, meaning that we have to wait longer and pay more for our games.
2. Our gaming future will shun realism when other precious gaming elements are at stake to create a rounded out and more enjoyable game. The basic guidelines are: Believability is the essential part of a game rather than total realism, because total realism sacrifices a lot of the fun & gameplay. Intense believability, immersion, fun & gameplay are basically what compromise the perfect game, and so are to be strived for at all costs. Development times and prices will naturally increase, but only by small amounts.
Whatever happens, we are riding the tidal wave of technology, and we can look to the future with slavering anticipation. Half-Life 2 anyone.......?
Does any 'regular' want to help me out by posting this in the FOG room. Thanx.
Great post, shame it is all true though!
Brew wrote:
> I know, but as I said, Newbies can't post in there
Crazy
> I know, but as I said, Newbies can't post in there
Crazy
I know, but as I said, Newbies can't post in there
I can't believe you arrived yesterday and your writing top quality posts, belongs in the FOG forum though ;-)
Every year, games of all genres are gradually becoming more and more realistic. But ultimately, how far will this go, or more to the point, how far do we want it go. Do we actually want a perfect recreation of reality? How much longer would immense realism make the development of a game? Could we be looking at 10+ years for the development of a single game?
Before anything else I have tried to imagine what games with ultimate reality would be like. Many people long for ultimate reality, but you can make up your own mind when you have read what I imagine ultimate reality games would
eventually be like.
Ultimate Reality Half-Life (2054)
It’s a hard job you know, making the earth a better place. You are on your way to the briefing room now, following one of the Barneys. He ambles along, limping slightly from where he broke his leg playing football only a few weeks
ago. He stops outside the heavily guarded chamber and punches his access code into the machine. Damn, he typed it wrong, try again. That’s better, the
door opens and you walk through. The commissioner is very busy indeed and doesn’t notice you at first, he is bending over a computer screen talking animatedly with an engineer. You sit down in a nearby chair while you wait, and doodle on a sketch-pad with a pencil. Oops, you broke the lead. The commissioner sees you at last and rushes over. Ouch, he spills his coffee in his haste and stains his clean white shirt.
An hour later, you are walking away from the chamber, having discussed in detail your next mission, and the best way of going about it. You are detained in the reception area by a pretty young secretary who has some papers for you. Except a page is missing, so she asks you to wait for a minute while she tries to find it in her office. She is taking her time, so you spot a friendly cat wandering
about and start to stoke it. It hisses at you, so you take out your combat knife and slice it in half. You are just removing the guts from the cat and spreading them over the floor for your own amusement when the secretary comes back.
She is horrified and starts screaming. You pull out your AK47 and shoot her down. Blood spills all over the desk and ruins a lot of the paperwork on it. You stroll out the front door and walk towards your Mercedes, waving your gun at Black Mesa workers and enjoying their shock and individual reactions. Bang, you are shot dead by a security officer.
Ultimate Reality FIFA 2046 (2046)
Your men are walking out of the tunnel, soaking up the applause from the crowd. A boy on the side is frantically calling out for an autograph from Owen, who ignores him, but Seaman takes pity on the lad and signs his book. The game is eventually underway. Beckham passes to Heskey, back to Beckham who fluffs his pass and misses the ball completely. Pheep, play is halted for a female
streaker who has eluded the tight security and is running on the pitch. Officials and security charge after her and eventually catch her. She is covered in a blanket and escorted from the pitch. Play continues. Play is stopped again an opposing striker shoots and the speeding ball hits Neville in the face. Medics are called on and cart off Neville. His brother Phil is brought on his place, only he
doesn’t seem to realise that his shirt is on the wrong way round. At the final whistle England lose 1-3 and are knocked out of Euro ‘46 in the qualifying stages.
Ultimate Reality Colin McCrae (2051)
The light turns green and you wheelspin on the wet grass. Seconds later a helicopter passes above you and races further on in the track where another racer has injured someone when their car overturned. You speed along and
glance at Nicky Grist sitting to your left. He is frowning as he tries to make sense of the dirty map he is reading, the water splashing through the open window doesn’t help much either. A few minutes later, Nicky accidentally gives you a wrong direction, so you slide into a left hand corner facing right. You bump off the track and bash your side onto a tree. You try to reverse, but the car isn’t
moving. You get out of your car, and only then do you notice that your wheel is inextricably attached to a branch. A few bystanders try and help but to no avail.
Your race is over.
Playing these sort of games would be so tedious as to become unbearable. OK, some might like experimenting with what can actually be done, and have fun doing so. But to complete a specific objective would be almost impossible if
realism was total. Half-Life: Just imagine, all the AI would be as clever as you, one shot would probably kill you, and yet would be outnumbered about 10,000 to 1, as per usual.
FIFA: Each game would last for the full 90 minutes, players might refuse to play, stamina would drain very quickly, and all the nimble tricks that we are so used to
pulling off by tapping a few buttons would rarely work, like in real life.
COLIN McCRAE
Just one bump could ruin your race if it mashed a vulnerable part of your car, a high speed collision would totally write off your car, also killing you, and total
engine failures could occur, knocking you out of the race unfairly.
There are a few very simple formulas to remember when designing a game.
Realism=Good
Fun&Gameplay=Good
Realism+Fun&Gameplay=Very good
Realism+Realism=Bad
That’s right, although realism can make or break a game, too much realism will ruin a game for most. Some people would like to try ultimate realism, as indeed most of us would, but that couldn’t really be classed as a game. For a game that will appeal to the masses, the key is to fine tune the balance of realism and fun & gameplay.
The most important step is gauging how much realism you need in the game. Warren Spector (of Deus Ex fame)focused his efforts on believability rather than realism. The actual aim of any game is to make the player believe that they are actually there, in a virtual world, being a hero. Obviously ultimate realism could create believability, but we’re not really interested in that since we don’t want to make ultimate reality games. What we do want to know is whether a genuinely good game that is fun to play requires total or near total realism to achieve believability? Thankfully, this is not the case. An immersive and believable game only requires so much realism to make you actually feel that you are there.
We have established that total realism is not required for perfect games, so what we now have to consider is how current games can improve so they can achieve this standard. I will now discuss this point, and address certain areas where I think attention is needed. Since there are so many genres though, I will be addressing my comments mainly, but not entirely, at First Person Shooters.
CONSISTENCY
I feel that one of the most important but sadly neglected areas of realism is the consistency of a game. If the grate to your right is breakable, then how come the
grate to your left isn’t? This sort of thing occurs constantly in games, where developers base the realism of certain objects upon what they need to make a particular level, rather than what would be realistically possible. This should be abolished, and decisions should be made. For instance, it doesn’t matter whether the grates are breakable or not, so long as the same rules apply to all
similar grates in the game. Have you also noticed that many games have computers, screens, buttons etc, yet never can you use them. The only buttons that you can press are the plot-essential ones, the rest just sit there like dummies and flash lights at you. It wouldn’t matter so much if there wasn’t even an effect when you pressed the button, just so long as it could be pressed and make a little beeping sound like all the others. It isn’t that interactive buttons are a necessary addition, but it goes a long way toward the believability of a game, which is the important factor.
PHYSICS
Another embarrassment in realism for most games is the physics. Isn’t it strange how your immensely powerful time bomb will wrench a huge pair of wrought iron gates in two, but won’t even take a splinter off a nearby wooden shelf. The problem is that most games excel at certain physics that are necessary to the completion of a game, but for the rest of the objects in a game, you couldn’t knock a candle over with a rocket launcher. I am not complaining that physics should be entirely accurate, but that there should be at least passable physics for all elements of the game, not just hyper-realistic physics for the plot-essential
parts as many games seem to think. Operation Flashpoint went so far as to model the speed of sound, and things like this, although a bit extravagant, inspire believability, which is good. But when I laid a bomb under a tree in the same game, it merely blackened it. Passable physics for all objects would inspire believability, whereas the lazy indestructible physics for many objects don’t.
CHARACTER INTERACTION
This partially comes under consistency, but it’s such a major problem that it can be addressed as a fault in it’s own right. In just about any game ever made you will come across NPCs. Computer controlled characters that are either necessary for game completion, or just add colour to the scenery. Once again the problem lies in the fact that the only NPCs you can talk to or interact with in any depth are inevitably the plot-essential ones. Admittedly some games have made a real effort, Deus Ex comes to mind for it’s ability to talk to almost everyone in the game. And Unreal Tournament is just one of the many games that manages to effectively use orders for the team-based modes. But many, many games either lack such depth in interaction, or they fail to put interaction there in the first place. Even in Half-Life for example you can only give two basic commands, follow and stop.
But it’s also important not to overstep the mark a bit, as the Discworld series does in some cases. They give you so much dialogue to listen to that it becomes tedious just sitting listening to characters rambling on about some
half-wit conversation of their’s. Long, tedious conversations do promote believability, but they sacrifice some of the Fun & Gameplay in the process. I think the nearest game to perfection in terms of character nteraction has to be Deus Ex. It’s system of letting you speak a few lines with all the non-important characters yet have in-depth, but not tedious conversations with major
characters has yet to be beaten. Creating believability without sacrificing other elements of the game is the key, and Deus Ex does that with near perfection. I salute it and point to it for any future game developers worried about character
interaction.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI is one of the biggest, deciding factors on how good a game is. How frustrating was it back in the original Commandos when you turned your back on one of your men for just a minute and some enemies spotted them. Your men
would start screaming at you for help, while they just stood there swallowing the lead that the Nazis were shooting at them. They didn’t even run for cover or
defend themselves. That sort of niggle in a game’s AI really spoils the enjoyability in playing it, as you know that in real life your men wouldn’t be so pitifully, suicidally thick. One of the games famous for it’s AI was Half-life. Battling the Marines was one of the most exhilarating experiences in gaming history. Why? Because
heroically diving across hallways with your gun blasting while dodging their grenades and tactical advances created an immense amount of believability and immersion. How else can you explain the fact that everyone who has played
Half-life comes away babbling “Red Team, Recon”, “Go go go”. The AI is actually an extremely long distance from total reality, but what does that matter if the believability is extreme? Half-life’s AI has been improved on with all the recently released FPSs to create even more intelligent AI. ‘Medal of Honour: Allied Assault’ probably holds the ‘Best AI’ flag at the moment because it manages to increase the intelligence of the AI considerably without affecting the Fun & Gameplay other than raising it.
The perfect AI then, as partially achieved by MOH, would consist of 4 main elements:
1. Different personalities for soldiers, aggressive, defensive etc.
2. A host of offensive and defensive tactics that they use appropriately to good
effect.
3. Realistic shot accuracy.
4. Their reaction to the world around them.
That last element can add a great deal to the feeling of immersion in the game if implemented properly. The Nazis in MOH are a prime example of this, they react ealistically to the physical world that they exist in, making use of obstacles, walls, open spaces etc, to aid them while fighting, or whatever else they are
doing. This idea would be expanded even further in the perfect game to cover use of darkness, shadows, colour camouflage, height, and also managing things like
locking doors behind them if retreating into a building.
I feel that AI like this would create a huge amount of immersion and believability
while managing to achieve maximum Fun & Gameplay.
LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT
The current lengths of development range from about 1.5 years to sometimes over 4 years. To go to the lengths of creating an ultimate reality game in any genre would take a very long time. All possibilities would have to be accounted for, both visually, in the graphics, and physically, in the programming. I would estimate that an ultimate reality Half-Life would take approximately 10-16 years to create, and then at least another year or more QA testing. The final result would probably require up to 4 DVDs, and a whopping amount of hard drive usage. The extra time in development means that the price of the game would
more than double to cover all the costs, and wages of the developers. Is that really what we want?
A Half-Life that met all the requirements of our perfect game however would require only 4 - 5 years development, 1-2 CDs and no unreasonable demands upon our gaming system. Game price might increase, but not by very much.
CONCLUSION
So that’s it ladies and gentlemen. You know my opinion of how realism in future gaming should turn out, but now it’s time to form your own. You have 2 paths to choose from.
1. Gaming should attain ultimate realism, ridding itself of anything that wouldn’t happen in the real world. Nothing should be spared to create total simulation.
Development times will increase substantially as will game prices, meaning that we have to wait longer and pay more for our games.
2. Our gaming future will shun realism when other precious gaming elements are at stake to create a rounded out and more enjoyable game. The basic guidelines are: Believability is the essential part of a game rather than total realism, because total realism sacrifices a lot of the fun & gameplay. Intense believability, immersion, fun & gameplay are basically what compromise the perfect game, and so are to be strived for at all costs. Development times and prices will naturally increase, but only by small amounts.
Whatever happens, we are riding the tidal wave of technology, and we can look to the future with slavering anticipation. Half-Life 2 anyone.......?
Before anything else I have tried to imagine what games with ultimate reality would be like. Many people long for ultimate reality, but you can make up your own mind when you have read what I imagine ultimate reality games would
eventually be like.
Ultimate Reality Half-Life (2054)
It’s a hard job you know, making the earth a better place. You are on your way to the briefing room now, following one of the Barneys. He ambles along, limping slightly from where he broke his leg playing football only a few weeks
ago. He stops outside the heavily guarded chamber and punches his access code into the machine. Damn, he typed it wrong, try again. That’s better, the
door opens and you walk through. The commissioner is very busy indeed and doesn’t notice you at first, he is bending over a computer screen talking animatedly with an engineer. You sit down in a nearby chair while you wait, and doodle on a sketch-pad with a pencil. Oops, you broke the lead. The commissioner sees you at last and rushes over. Ouch, he spills his coffee in his haste and stains his clean white shirt.
An hour later, you are walking away from the chamber, having discussed in detail your next mission, and the best way of going about it. You are detained in the reception area by a pretty young secretary who has some papers for you. Except a page is missing, so she asks you to wait for a minute while she tries to find it in her office. She is taking her time, so you spot a friendly cat wandering
about and start to stoke it. It hisses at you, so you take out your combat knife and slice it in half. You are just removing the guts from the cat and spreading them over the floor for your own amusement when the secretary comes back.
She is horrified and starts screaming. You pull out your AK47 and shoot her down. Blood spills all over the desk and ruins a lot of the paperwork on it. You stroll out the front door and walk towards your Mercedes, waving your gun at Black Mesa workers and enjoying their shock and individual reactions. Bang, you are shot dead by a security officer.
Ultimate Reality FIFA 2046 (2046)
Your men are walking out of the tunnel, soaking up the applause from the crowd. A boy on the side is frantically calling out for an autograph from Owen, who ignores him, but Seaman takes pity on the lad and signs his book. The game is eventually underway. Beckham passes to Heskey, back to Beckham who fluffs his pass and misses the ball completely. Pheep, play is halted for a female
streaker who has eluded the tight security and is running on the pitch. Officials and security charge after her and eventually catch her. She is covered in a blanket and escorted from the pitch. Play continues. Play is stopped again an opposing striker shoots and the speeding ball hits Neville in the face. Medics are called on and cart off Neville. His brother Phil is brought on his place, only he
doesn’t seem to realise that his shirt is on the wrong way round. At the final whistle England lose 1-3 and are knocked out of Euro ‘46 in the qualifying stages.
Ultimate Reality Colin McCrae (2051)
The light turns green and you wheelspin on the wet grass. Seconds later a helicopter passes above you and races further on in the track where another racer has injured someone when their car overturned. You speed along and
glance at Nicky Grist sitting to your left. He is frowning as he tries to make sense of the dirty map he is reading, the water splashing through the open window doesn’t help much either. A few minutes later, Nicky accidentally gives you a wrong direction, so you slide into a left hand corner facing right. You bump off the track and bash your side onto a tree. You try to reverse, but the car isn’t
moving. You get out of your car, and only then do you notice that your wheel is inextricably attached to a branch. A few bystanders try and help but to no avail.
Your race is over.
Playing these sort of games would be so tedious as to become unbearable. OK, some might like experimenting with what can actually be done, and have fun doing so. But to complete a specific objective would be almost impossible if
realism was total. Half-Life: Just imagine, all the AI would be as clever as you, one shot would probably kill you, and yet would be outnumbered about 10,000 to 1, as per usual.
FIFA: Each game would last for the full 90 minutes, players might refuse to play, stamina would drain very quickly, and all the nimble tricks that we are so used to
pulling off by tapping a few buttons would rarely work, like in real life.
COLIN McCRAE
Just one bump could ruin your race if it mashed a vulnerable part of your car, a high speed collision would totally write off your car, also killing you, and total
engine failures could occur, knocking you out of the race unfairly.
There are a few very simple formulas to remember when designing a game.
Realism=Good
Fun&Gameplay=Good
Realism+Fun&Gameplay=Very good
Realism+Realism=Bad
That’s right, although realism can make or break a game, too much realism will ruin a game for most. Some people would like to try ultimate realism, as indeed most of us would, but that couldn’t really be classed as a game. For a game that will appeal to the masses, the key is to fine tune the balance of realism and fun & gameplay.
The most important step is gauging how much realism you need in the game. Warren Spector (of Deus Ex fame)focused his efforts on believability rather than realism. The actual aim of any game is to make the player believe that they are actually there, in a virtual world, being a hero. Obviously ultimate realism could create believability, but we’re not really interested in that since we don’t want to make ultimate reality games. What we do want to know is whether a genuinely good game that is fun to play requires total or near total realism to achieve believability? Thankfully, this is not the case. An immersive and believable game only requires so much realism to make you actually feel that you are there.
We have established that total realism is not required for perfect games, so what we now have to consider is how current games can improve so they can achieve this standard. I will now discuss this point, and address certain areas where I think attention is needed. Since there are so many genres though, I will be addressing my comments mainly, but not entirely, at First Person Shooters.
CONSISTENCY
I feel that one of the most important but sadly neglected areas of realism is the consistency of a game. If the grate to your right is breakable, then how come the
grate to your left isn’t? This sort of thing occurs constantly in games, where developers base the realism of certain objects upon what they need to make a particular level, rather than what would be realistically possible. This should be abolished, and decisions should be made. For instance, it doesn’t matter whether the grates are breakable or not, so long as the same rules apply to all
similar grates in the game. Have you also noticed that many games have computers, screens, buttons etc, yet never can you use them. The only buttons that you can press are the plot-essential ones, the rest just sit there like dummies and flash lights at you. It wouldn’t matter so much if there wasn’t even an effect when you pressed the button, just so long as it could be pressed and make a little beeping sound like all the others. It isn’t that interactive buttons are a necessary addition, but it goes a long way toward the believability of a game, which is the important factor.
PHYSICS
Another embarrassment in realism for most games is the physics. Isn’t it strange how your immensely powerful time bomb will wrench a huge pair of wrought iron gates in two, but won’t even take a splinter off a nearby wooden shelf. The problem is that most games excel at certain physics that are necessary to the completion of a game, but for the rest of the objects in a game, you couldn’t knock a candle over with a rocket launcher. I am not complaining that physics should be entirely accurate, but that there should be at least passable physics for all elements of the game, not just hyper-realistic physics for the plot-essential
parts as many games seem to think. Operation Flashpoint went so far as to model the speed of sound, and things like this, although a bit extravagant, inspire believability, which is good. But when I laid a bomb under a tree in the same game, it merely blackened it. Passable physics for all objects would inspire believability, whereas the lazy indestructible physics for many objects don’t.
CHARACTER INTERACTION
This partially comes under consistency, but it’s such a major problem that it can be addressed as a fault in it’s own right. In just about any game ever made you will come across NPCs. Computer controlled characters that are either necessary for game completion, or just add colour to the scenery. Once again the problem lies in the fact that the only NPCs you can talk to or interact with in any depth are inevitably the plot-essential ones. Admittedly some games have made a real effort, Deus Ex comes to mind for it’s ability to talk to almost everyone in the game. And Unreal Tournament is just one of the many games that manages to effectively use orders for the team-based modes. But many, many games either lack such depth in interaction, or they fail to put interaction there in the first place. Even in Half-Life for example you can only give two basic commands, follow and stop.
But it’s also important not to overstep the mark a bit, as the Discworld series does in some cases. They give you so much dialogue to listen to that it becomes tedious just sitting listening to characters rambling on about some
half-wit conversation of their’s. Long, tedious conversations do promote believability, but they sacrifice some of the Fun & Gameplay in the process. I think the nearest game to perfection in terms of character nteraction has to be Deus Ex. It’s system of letting you speak a few lines with all the non-important characters yet have in-depth, but not tedious conversations with major
characters has yet to be beaten. Creating believability without sacrificing other elements of the game is the key, and Deus Ex does that with near perfection. I salute it and point to it for any future game developers worried about character
interaction.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI is one of the biggest, deciding factors on how good a game is. How frustrating was it back in the original Commandos when you turned your back on one of your men for just a minute and some enemies spotted them. Your men
would start screaming at you for help, while they just stood there swallowing the lead that the Nazis were shooting at them. They didn’t even run for cover or
defend themselves. That sort of niggle in a game’s AI really spoils the enjoyability in playing it, as you know that in real life your men wouldn’t be so pitifully, suicidally thick. One of the games famous for it’s AI was Half-life. Battling the Marines was one of the most exhilarating experiences in gaming history. Why? Because
heroically diving across hallways with your gun blasting while dodging their grenades and tactical advances created an immense amount of believability and immersion. How else can you explain the fact that everyone who has played
Half-life comes away babbling “Red Team, Recon”, “Go go go”. The AI is actually an extremely long distance from total reality, but what does that matter if the believability is extreme? Half-life’s AI has been improved on with all the recently released FPSs to create even more intelligent AI. ‘Medal of Honour: Allied Assault’ probably holds the ‘Best AI’ flag at the moment because it manages to increase the intelligence of the AI considerably without affecting the Fun & Gameplay other than raising it.
The perfect AI then, as partially achieved by MOH, would consist of 4 main elements:
1. Different personalities for soldiers, aggressive, defensive etc.
2. A host of offensive and defensive tactics that they use appropriately to good
effect.
3. Realistic shot accuracy.
4. Their reaction to the world around them.
That last element can add a great deal to the feeling of immersion in the game if implemented properly. The Nazis in MOH are a prime example of this, they react ealistically to the physical world that they exist in, making use of obstacles, walls, open spaces etc, to aid them while fighting, or whatever else they are
doing. This idea would be expanded even further in the perfect game to cover use of darkness, shadows, colour camouflage, height, and also managing things like
locking doors behind them if retreating into a building.
I feel that AI like this would create a huge amount of immersion and believability
while managing to achieve maximum Fun & Gameplay.
LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT
The current lengths of development range from about 1.5 years to sometimes over 4 years. To go to the lengths of creating an ultimate reality game in any genre would take a very long time. All possibilities would have to be accounted for, both visually, in the graphics, and physically, in the programming. I would estimate that an ultimate reality Half-Life would take approximately 10-16 years to create, and then at least another year or more QA testing. The final result would probably require up to 4 DVDs, and a whopping amount of hard drive usage. The extra time in development means that the price of the game would
more than double to cover all the costs, and wages of the developers. Is that really what we want?
A Half-Life that met all the requirements of our perfect game however would require only 4 - 5 years development, 1-2 CDs and no unreasonable demands upon our gaming system. Game price might increase, but not by very much.
CONCLUSION
So that’s it ladies and gentlemen. You know my opinion of how realism in future gaming should turn out, but now it’s time to form your own. You have 2 paths to choose from.
1. Gaming should attain ultimate realism, ridding itself of anything that wouldn’t happen in the real world. Nothing should be spared to create total simulation.
Development times will increase substantially as will game prices, meaning that we have to wait longer and pay more for our games.
2. Our gaming future will shun realism when other precious gaming elements are at stake to create a rounded out and more enjoyable game. The basic guidelines are: Believability is the essential part of a game rather than total realism, because total realism sacrifices a lot of the fun & gameplay. Intense believability, immersion, fun & gameplay are basically what compromise the perfect game, and so are to be strived for at all costs. Development times and prices will naturally increase, but only by small amounts.
Whatever happens, we are riding the tidal wave of technology, and we can look to the future with slavering anticipation. Half-Life 2 anyone.......?