All this detail.. to what means? - by Scott Weiland
N'Al on 14/5/2010 at 08:29
Quote Posted by PigLick
there could have been 2 pages of interesting, meaningful discussion, but nah fuck that lets just wail at each other.
TTLG in a nutshell. :p
EvaUnit02 on 14/5/2010 at 10:00
Quote Posted by Aja
But more to the point, SS2 and Star Wars might have had gravity gun-like aspects, but no one cared or talked about them because they weren't as cleverly implemented as in Half Life 2. It innovated by taking something that wasn't really so interesting and making it worthwhile. Prey might have had portals first, but... well you get the idea.
That's popularisation. (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=125253&p=1965671&viewfull=1#post1965671) This was already more or less discussed to death relatively recently.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Also, It's not like your mainstream AAA titles are completely bereft of innovation or ideas. [sic] Heavy Rain
Really? Never mind Fahrenheit, now we're talking about something that's derivative of Dragon's Lair, 1990's FMV adventure games, point-and-click adventure games period, etc.
DDL on 14/5/2010 at 11:08
I can't remember, but were there any/many games pre-HL2 where physics puzzles were such an integral part of the gameplay? As far as sticking out in the mind, it's often this difference between 'you can' and 'you must'.
There are probably quite a few games where you can use the physics to achieve goals ("hee! I can throw crates at people and knock them off walkways!" etc), but HL2 explicitly forced you to do so on several occasions. Unless you figure out that stacking breeze blocks on the see-saw will counterbalance your weight so you can climb off the end, you simply can't proceed. And so on.
Thus everyone who plays through MUST at some point figure out these puzzles, rather than, say, the physics simply being something exploited by those who are experienced enough with games to start fucking around. It's not necessarily about innovation or iteration or whatever: it's what makes things memorable.
Prey had portals, but also had variable gravity fields, variable drawscale, and the whole thing was mashed up in a clusterfuck of alien food-conglomerates, borgtech and native american mysticism, combined with one of the stupidest player-death handling mechanisms I've ever encountered.
The portals don't particularly stand out amidst all that.
Portal, on the other hand, was basically ALL about the portals. Plus was funny. Thus more memorable.
Scott Weiland on 14/5/2010 at 13:50
Quote Posted by Enchantermon
It means nothing. The phrase you were looking for is "to what end".
I see, but I can't edit it.
Quote:
Either I'm a completely horrible game artist, or I just analyze things on another level, are we saying it was behind with the tech stuff, or behind artisticly?, I'd in any case say it was roughly at the same level as the other first era unreal engine games.
I guess textures in Unreal were better (deeper?), and it had more colors? There were other things, like the sky, in Deus Ex it was nowhere near as great looking as in Unreal, also Deus Ex had weak animations. I'm not saying that Deus Ex looked bad, quite the contrary, especially with high resolution texture pack applied.
van HellSing on 14/5/2010 at 14:58
Quote Posted by DDL
I can't remember, but were there any/many games pre-HL2 where physics puzzles were such an
integral part of the gameplay?
The Incredible Machine
Matthew on 14/5/2010 at 15:04
Bridge Builder, maybe?
van HellSing on 14/5/2010 at 15:12
Any artillery game - Scorch, Worms...
d0om on 14/5/2010 at 15:27
Thief crate stacking to explore! :p
Nameless Voice on 14/5/2010 at 15:33
This has turned into such a stupid conversation.
By some of the logic going around the only game that had any innovation was Pong.
Taking a commonly known concept and expanding it into a gameplay mechanic, or using it in a new and unusual way both certainly count as innovation in my book.
And it's not just doing something that no one has done before which is innovative, but also doing something that someone else has done before, but doing it really well when no one else has.
I'm not a great fan of HL2 (for some reason the overall game it never really did that much for me, despite it good points), but its use of gravity and physics mechanics was certainly innovative. Portal's gameplay consisting of a portals, (almost) no enemies and a completely enclosed environment hadn't been done before, so again, innovative.
Thief's stealth mechanics were innovative, Deus Ex's open-ended multiple-choice gameplay was innovative. Call of Cthulhu's lack of HUD was innovative. Just to name a few random examples.
I'm sure you can list other (earlier) games that had these characteristics, but these examples did an excellent job at what they did, making them true examples of innovation as far as I'm concerned.
Sulphur on 14/5/2010 at 16:19
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
This has turned into such a stupid conversation.
By some of the logic going around the only game that had any innovation was Pong.
This conversation wasn't steered there by my hand, but it's an interesting point nonetheless. It's silly yet intriguing that a reductio ad absurdum argument needs to be made to bring some sense to the discussion.
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
Really? Never mind Fahrenheit, now we're talking about something that's derivative of Dragon's Lair, 1990's FMV adventure games, point-and-click adventure games period, etc.
Buddy, when you use a [sic] in a quote, you use it after the part that's wrong.
At any rate, Heavy Rain might build off Dragon's Lair, but I thought its use of character interaction/narrative and story malleability (to a limited extent) were innovative in a mainstream title, given that most video game narratives are plotted along a straight line right up to the ending.
