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'Variety is the spice of life' goes the saying, but it's a turn of phrase that doesn't seem to have filtered down to the games industry. Because no matter how many times you play most single-player games through, it's always the same every single time. The bad guys pop up in the same places, the same scripted sequences occur and there are no real surprises to be had. Take the second level of Ghost Recon for the X-Box, for example. You're charged with storming a farmhouse to apprehend a bunch of terrorists, insurgents or somesuch. You have the freedom to approach the farmhouse from any angle, and yet when you get inside there will always be an enemy soldier next to the window, there'll always be one at the top of the stairs, and another one in the room on the right on the second floor. Granted, the game does sport a decent multiplayer mode, but the lack of variation means there's no real reason to replay the singleplayer game.
It's not that hard to remedy this situation, either. It's true, you could program the computer characters to roam around and seek out the best vantage point from which to fire, but in fact there's a far simpler way of adding replayability to a game. Capcom nailed it when they were making Resident Evil 3 and it works brilliantly. In Resident Evil 3, the main bad guy, Nemesis, will regularly smash through doors and walls to get to you, and you never know when he's going to come at you. You can play the game through several times and you won't always encounter him in the same places.
It's not that there's some complex artificial intelligence driving him, it's that there are three or four spots in each area from which he will emerge and attack you, and the game randomly picks one of those spots each time you play. Hence you're on edge, expecting him to come at you but not being quite sure if he will or not. There's no reason this technique can't be used in other games as an easy way of boosting the replayability of a game. Yet still most games designers go with the same old scripting, making sure their games end up being pretty predictable.
Oh, and dire non-player character AI doesn't help either, but that's a different rant.
It's not that hard to remedy this situation, either. It's true, you could program the computer characters to roam around and seek out the best vantage point from which to fire, but in fact there's a far simpler way of adding replayability to a game. Capcom nailed it when they were making Resident Evil 3 and it works brilliantly. In Resident Evil 3, the main bad guy, Nemesis, will regularly smash through doors and walls to get to you, and you never know when he's going to come at you. You can play the game through several times and you won't always encounter him in the same places.
It's not that there's some complex artificial intelligence driving him, it's that there are three or four spots in each area from which he will emerge and attack you, and the game randomly picks one of those spots each time you play. Hence you're on edge, expecting him to come at you but not being quite sure if he will or not. There's no reason this technique can't be used in other games as an easy way of boosting the replayability of a game. Yet still most games designers go with the same old scripting, making sure their games end up being pretty predictable.
Oh, and dire non-player character AI doesn't help either, but that's a different rant.
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'Variety is the spice of life' goes the saying, but it's a turn of phrase that doesn't seem to have filtered down to the games industry. Because no matter how many times you play most single-player games through, it's always the same every single time. The bad guys pop up in the same places, the same scripted sequences occur and there are no real surprises to be had. Take the second level of Ghost Recon for the X-Box, for example. You're charged with storming a farmhouse to apprehend a bunch of terrorists, insurgents or somesuch. You have the freedom to approach the farmhouse from any angle, and yet when you get inside there will always be an enemy soldier next to the window, there'll always be one at the top of the stairs, and another one in the room on the right on the second floor. Granted, the game does sport a decent multiplayer mode, but the lack of variation means there's no real reason to replay the singleplayer game.
It's not that hard to remedy this situation, either. It's true, you could program the computer characters to roam around and seek out the best vantage point from which to fire, but in fact there's a far simpler way of adding replayability to a game. Capcom nailed it when they were making Resident Evil 3 and it works brilliantly. In Resident Evil 3, the main bad guy, Nemesis, will regularly smash through doors and walls to get to you, and you never know when he's going to come at you. You can play the game through several times and you won't always encounter him in the same places.
It's not that there's some complex artificial intelligence driving him, it's that there are three or four spots in each area from which he will emerge and attack you, and the game randomly picks one of those spots each time you play. Hence you're on edge, expecting him to come at you but not being quite sure if he will or not. There's no reason this technique can't be used in other games as an easy way of boosting the replayability of a game. Yet still most games designers go with the same old scripting, making sure their games end up being pretty predictable.
Oh, and dire non-player character AI doesn't help either, but that's a different rant.
It's not that hard to remedy this situation, either. It's true, you could program the computer characters to roam around and seek out the best vantage point from which to fire, but in fact there's a far simpler way of adding replayability to a game. Capcom nailed it when they were making Resident Evil 3 and it works brilliantly. In Resident Evil 3, the main bad guy, Nemesis, will regularly smash through doors and walls to get to you, and you never know when he's going to come at you. You can play the game through several times and you won't always encounter him in the same places.
It's not that there's some complex artificial intelligence driving him, it's that there are three or four spots in each area from which he will emerge and attack you, and the game randomly picks one of those spots each time you play. Hence you're on edge, expecting him to come at you but not being quite sure if he will or not. There's no reason this technique can't be used in other games as an easy way of boosting the replayability of a game. Yet still most games designers go with the same old scripting, making sure their games end up being pretty predictable.
Oh, and dire non-player character AI doesn't help either, but that's a different rant.