This part of your post actually reminds me of the Librarians in Metro 2033, an outlier to the gaming norm. These mutants are obviously alive and healthy, still feeding on god-knows-what, but there’s not many of them, and they go through this little alpha ritual to determine if you’re a threat instead of just charging at you.
It’s like the whole gaming industry has created this meta-ecology that has to justify expending thousands of illogically occurring digital creatures because each game attempts to make you feel more powerful than the last by increasing the player’s apparent lethality.
A beautifully built world actually does a lot of the heavy lifting already, in my book. By bigger involving story I just mean the overarching world and how they pace the exploration, and how it is revealed to us. Just judging from that trailer, I think they’ve got parts of that already handled.
Last time I brought up Fallout 3 in a Rage thread I was flamed to hell. Teh world is unfair bwhaaaaa…
But Rage looks just the way I want it. :) A game about moving, driving and shooting, where those three things are executed perfectly and nothing else gets in their way.
Agreed. If I want to explore a post-apocalyptic wasteland and talk to people and do quests, there are other games for that. If Rage is a solid action game with a beautifully-realized setting, then I’ll be happy. I see all that technical skill poured into the environment and it doesn’t make me want to cry. It’s just great set design.
I caught a brief whiff of atmosphere a few times in the trailer: when he drove up to the abandoned city (which I didn’t know existed in this universe), hopped into the first combat area, and then looked at some of the destruction during a lull in fighting.
But I doubt they will let the game breathe long enough to have a deep effect. It will likely contain regular action/story beats like most modern game design. If they put in a location with nothing happening at all, I will be extremely surprised. And that’s okay.
I usually avoid competitive multiplayer to save time, but I can see myself hopping into Combat Rally with random pubs. I’ll pretend I’m playing TrackMania by taking my seething rage from another driving mistake and channeling it toward killing my opponents.
Well, he is technically correct, the coop mode is not the same as the single player campaign, but separte missions for two players. It’s more an interesting extra (they speak of puzzles that only two players can do) than a full featured multiplayer mode. The full featured mode is the combat rally, and even then… Rage seems more a game where the main dish is the single player. But at least it’s more than the anemic Doom 3 offering of multiplayer.
Calling the creation of additional content a lame cop out is certainly a strange choice of words though. Having a story-driven game not be playable co-op is to be expected.
This is one of those idiotic things that no one cares about when playing co-op. Halo has several big Spartans running around in its 4 player fully co-op campaign. No one cares about it breaking the immersiveness or ruining the fluff or whatever that bullcrap is. I know it might make the writer cry or whatever, but I’d rather get to run through the full content of the game with my friend(s), then worry about ruining someone’s artistic vision. It’s a cop out, because rather than ensuring that their scripts work in with multiple players, they just don’t let you play it, and instead give you a small appeasement by giving you a smaller subset of stuff to do.
Yeah that one was lots of fun with Alex back before the coop in [Prototype] was cancelled. Having a mutant as your main character will get you out of any narrative dead ends you run into! :)
But as Josh says, everyone is going to be so happy to get a full coop experience, they won’t even care about the narrative problem. The real issues with campaigns that support coop are in the development of mission scripting and special mechanics. Many assumptions you can make about the player state go out the window, and in open world games, the same goes for the state of the world around each player. Any resource limitation you introduce (one vehicle to hijack, ammo scarcity, etc) needs to scale. Your scripts end up with lots of special cases, teleports, dismounts and player state resets which all need to be tested in both singleplayer and coop modes.
I can’t blame a developer that doesn’t want to deal with that dependency and complexity nightmare. But that’s one more reason to love, praise and support Halo and Borderlands.
I agree with Josh. Halo in co-op is actually The Right way to play it. Solo is for chumps.
Does it matter that there are 2-4 Master Chiefs? Absolutely not. Just have the game act like there’s one. Only fucknuts who don’t deserve to play good action games in the first place will care about the “broken immersion” that creates.
I also don’t mind the narrative “sense” to be broken in exchange of playing coop with people, but i also understand the game not having it. First, it’s all the technical issues, second, i don’t think coop can be applied to every game, for me it’s something that can be applied to high octane action games or specific designed-from-ground-up coop experiences.
I wouldn’t have played it Stalker or Fallout NV in coop. Plot heavy, or exploration heavy based games are not for coop. I prefer to play at my own pace, not having to discuss with anybody where to go next, explore each place without anybody wanting to go faster (or the other way, not having to wait my mate if i want to fight fast and lethal instead of covering behind a crate slowly), talk to npcs and ejoy the dialogue, shuffle my inventory and sell & buy stuff, etc. They are for me more single player experiences.
