ydal

There is always a bit of metho­lo­gi­cal slow­ness when it comes to the first per­son shoo­ter genre of com­pu­ter games: deve­l­o­pers are lazy to try­ing some­thing new, lest they fall flat on their faces. This is sort of true when it comes to advan­ces in level design and gra­phics, where there’s a bit of ten­dency to move along, but only on known lines — next to nobody really adopts open levels. If they do, they are eit­her of (next to) no impact at all (I’m loo­king at you, Front­lines: Fuel of War), or they change the whole game into some­thing that gra­vi­ta­tes around cer­tain hot spots, as in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Cher­no­byl, for example, or the first actual FPS doing this, Strife. And some­thing so open like Ope­ra­tion Flash­point, even though sporting quite impres­sive gra­phics, was never as suc­cess­ful as a rehash like Cry­sis which just slap­ped supreme gra­phics on old and pro­ven FPS concepts.

Then, there was the other extreme, wer some­thing radi­cally new was tried. Games like Tre­spas­ser, which was a game set in the Juras­sic Park uni­verse with some rather nice gra­phics, and a very fre­aky con­trol sys­tem. In this, you directly con­trol­led the arms of your cha­rac­ter, moving them around, rota­ting hands and clen­ching fists manu­ally to grab levers or push buttons.

It was horrible.

But the thing which hasn’t chan­ged at all for quite some time is how your cha­rac­ter inter­acts with the world at large. The big chan­ges in this category:

1. Doom star­ted out with using your key­board arrows to move you along, and PgUp and PgDn for aiming up and down.
2. Quake intro­du­ced the mouse into the mix, which still took some time to get adop­ted, though.
3. Then, Half-Life intro­du­ced the WASD key lay­out to accom­pany its ple­thora of spe­cial keys, which also popu­la­ri­zed the “use” but­ton to inter­act with environ­ment objects, instead of just run­ning into or shoo­ting them.
4. Recently, game­pad con­trol­lers are often used, and there’s a shift in lay­out map­ping to con­form with the limited amounts of but­ton avail­able on a controller.

And that’s very much it. For eons, you run around using your use but­ton to make stuff do other stuff. Besi­des just activat­ing swit­ches, you have your use key trig­ge­ring dia­lo­gues, opening doors, picking up things, and just about ever­y­thing you can ima­gine. If you do anything that bor­ders on com­ple­xity, you’d pro­bably get a pop-up dia­lo­gue explai­ning your opti­ons to you, totally brea­king game immer­sion and, in a few sorry cases, actually kicking in the fourth wall with a vengeance.

This was the case even with my beloved com­plex games like Sys­tem Shock, even if they tried to be some­what immer­sive in their inter­face. But then, there came the least likely can­di­date for reform ever: Doom III. Nobody expec­ted D3 to be anything but a new “shoo­ting demons” thingy; yet not only did it come along and intro­du­ced story to id Soft­ware games (which Quake IV con­ti­nued to flesh out), but it also intro­du­ced a revo­lu­tio­nary immer­sive way of using com­pu­ter con­so­les: instead of activat­ing them with your use key and then cli­cking around on the screen, D3 just chan­ged the cross­hair into an arrow when you viewed at the con­trols of a ter­mi­nal and allo­wed you to push and mani­pu­late but­tons wit­hout ever brea­king immer­sion into the universe.

An example (just the first few seconds, really):

Example screen­shot, bla­tantly sto­len from the site in my post scriptum:

But it didn’t last. And I won­der: why? Was it too com­plex? Did it alie­nate the tra­di­tio­na­list that he had to do more than push ‘e’ to use a com­pu­ter? It’s just so good, yet nobody seems pre­pa­red to adopt it to their games. Bioware’s Mass Effect is quite good at try­ing to keep immer­sion high and making the player expe­ri­ence the game, rather than just play it — but they, too, resort to brea­king immer­sion when it comes to com­pu­ter ter­mi­nals, using a com­bi­ned inventory/data sto­rage sys­tem on a sepa­rate screen.

The ques­tion remains: Why? It’s good, it works, it’s not hard to learn — so why avoid it?

P.S.: While sear­ching for good screen­shots, I found an arti­cle cal­led Through The Loo­king Glass — Fully Inter­ac­tive Sur­faces In DOOM3 by Bernd Krei­meier, which explains things in a bit grea­ter detail.

A small rant about the lack of good interaction in First Person Shooters.