hi everyone,

i just played Jedi Knight II once again (in hardest difficulty :P), it's a neat game based on the q3a game engine. q3a couldn't handle terrains well, afaik there was no real terrain support as we'd call it today, all terrain has been made out of bsp geometry.

i want to compare JK2's level design with, say, stalker.

JK2 is a fairly untraditional fps, as you have a melee weapon (lightsaber) that you use almost all the time, a handful of "real" guns, and the mid-range force powers. during the game, the jedi gains power and learns to contol the force better, so he can f.i. jump further and move quicker.
many lifts exist in the levels, it's a constant up and down, you revisit placer over and over from different angles and floors, which saves a bunch of pollies and work, but doesnt feel like repetition.
in one level, you start in a hangar. over your head is an unreachable walkway with enemies, over that is a vent pipe. you fight your way through the hangar, get in some kind of supervising office, and open the hangar gates, which means that you have a grand view from the top of it all. then you can access the formerly unreachable walkway, and in the end, you move through that vent pipe.

then came the terrain. let's take stalker. eternal walks in the landscape. some houses here and there with 3, 4 rooms at max. military barracks that look the same on every floor. the indoor areas of the labs may look nice, but can't be compared to anything seen in JK2, leveldesign-wise.

many people consider this a great degree of freedom and an achievement. i call it downtime.

what do you think. did the terrain kill the old school level design?

I havent played the game but if the terrain is like stalker than I would tend to agree with you.

I agree with this too, but it isnt inherently the fault of the ability for nice terrain, but instead it is due to everyones want for huge outdoor environments which, i say is dumb, unless its used like in real life. In real life, you dont run from town to town, you get in a car, or you get on transportation of some sort, cross it as quickly as possible then work your way through large buildings (last part being less realistic, but you get my point.)

After playing ESIV: Oblivion for an ungodly amount of hours and am still playing. I think they solved both.

Massive explorable environments littered with hundreds of explorable indoor environments you can enter. Some are massive caves, some are small homes. The combat can take place anywhere. I think that is perfect balance. Of course running from one end of the world takes an ungodly amount of time, but if you have a horse there is a "fast travel" mode.

I want more games with that set up, or should I say done that well.

I think I have to agree with broozer, although I don´t think that it is the terrain to blame but the developers and/or publishers, the gamers that don´t seem to care and I think the most important is the time which somehow never stops, at least not during the last 100 years (with the exception which can be seen on the gs wiki).
Games which do have some great leveldesign but no real terrains are in my opinion "beyond good and evil" and "half life 2". Both do have outdoorlevels which aren´t blocky, but they aren´t very complex and not very big. But I think that those games do show that it could be possible to have great level design even with terrain.

I disagree, outdoor + terrain can look great in games. Not if you have lazy modellers and are satisfied quickly, but if you take some effort, games can be really great.

Take Uru as an example. Nobody was happy with this 3d non-photorealistic puzzlegame variant of Myst, but it was still beautiful. They made a whole MMORPG out of it with various ages, lands and since it's only about exploring and finding new stunning areas, the focus was on the level design.

Crimson skies for the xbox was also very beautiful IMO. You're flying in airplanes and zeppelins, so yeah, everything is outdoors and quickly reachable. But still, it looks wonderful. Nothing is repetitive.

So it cán be different, just not for all games.

I'd say it depends on the player, and you can't please them all!

There are those that want to be able to complete a game and brag amongst their friends saying they completed it in 6 hours, then there are those who buy a game and keep playing it for months, it's usually stating "complete freedom" on the box that will determine whether a player will buy it.

I think saying it's the terrain that kills a game is somewhat of a cliche that comes with outdoor environments. Whether you get huge environment packed with activity and non-stop adventure, a slower paced game designed for capturing emotion, or an empty field, a designer should be able to take each of these and make it work for the audience they're trying to target.

Terrains don't kill games, the inability to create playable environments that does.

(and btw FoxZero you fast travel without a horse )

Well I think it's not as simple as that and the terrain feature doesn't really have anything to do with this. Stalker just is a totally different game - you just don't follow pre set routes (as you said mostly indoor and if not you're in a tubular trench or something) but can walk "everywhere" and explore as you want. This can be connected to the downsides you mentioned but it also has its upsides - it's probably up to your personal taste what you prefer...

So I wouldn't call the terrain a design killer but just a huge possibility for different games. I mean imagine thinks like Operation Flashpoint or the Battlefield series without outdoor terrains - it just wouldn't work at all in an indoor environment. Terrain is just a feature and it won't work with every game type. With that said using big open terrains wouldn't be of much use in a game like Jedi Outcast (I guess this is what you consider as JKII) just as it's for games like F.E.A.R. or Max Payne. I think there are a couple of games which succesfully combined an open terrain with a highly linear gameplay and that would be games like Half-Life 2 or Quake 4. In those games you're not always in an indoor environment but also outside on a terrain. It still keeps that linear gameplay though by for example making you just drive down that aqueduct or however you may call it in Half-Life 2 and Quake 4 also only has extremely linear outdoor areas where you immediately know which way to go in order to advance...

So it's up to you as designer and your game. Terrains aren't of much use for linear, "story-based" shooters but for Multiplayer or games with a focus on exploration you'll really want to use something like that if it fits your design...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Call Of Duty 4 uses no terrain:
it has great graphism,but i prefer a lot battlefield Bad Comapany for it's bigger outdooors : allow you to really hide in the trees/plants far far away from ennemies : here the terrain is king !

Oblivion is great , big outdoors and great dungones/towns,
it's not simple : travel/kill monsters on terrains game.

But i agree lot of new games have just a terrain and assets just "posed" on it : empty games like some mmorpg.

In fact terrains allow to create very big outdoors with very good performances and AAA 3D engines have all the tools
to create/modify terrains in the fly quickly.
It's not the fault of terrains if some game companies make empty games with that great technologie.

Haha, people actually consider the huge lifeless 'random' world of Oblivion better than the more focussed non-linear setup of the world in Stalker?

Oblivion has 'the' dumbest use of vast terrain ever. Hell, the game didn't need it at all but included it anyway (what they needed was a better AI and gameplay). They could have gone for more FarCry like setup for the world which was more focussed and didn't involve you bashing your head against the wall after encountering another random dungeon with unintresting loot. Hell, even the houses didn't have any interesting loot.

You can't compare Oblivion, a poor excuse of an RPG with Stalker at all. Stalker gives you variation, sometimes subtle, sometimes huge. This in-fact has to be the first game ever which uses the vast terrain properly where every house/warehouse or city has a purpose, if not for gameplay then for the ambience.

No wonder FarCry 2 is trying to copy this same thing, even though it takes place in a generic world, but the design is still more focussed than anything Oblivion.