Very cool article. I haven't heard a new viewpoint like this in awhile. I suppose that was why ZombieU was popular. Once your character died, they were gone forever. I wish Skyrim was more realistic as well. Even though it was fun to be godlike in those aspects you mentioned, I found it strange that you could swim in the arctic ocean as well. heh
DayZ and the Future of Virtual Realism
The rise of simulated fantasy is all around us.
Facades
Another series I play for an immersive experience is Grand Theft Auto. GTA3 was a revelation to me. Driving through streets in the first-person driving mode, listening to reggae radio stations as rain poured down and pedestrians outside mumbled insanity – it all added to the ambiance. Sure, killing people and cops is fun in too, but what really does it for me, is simply driving around in another world – that, and car chases with the police.
With the clumsy weight gain in San Andreas, and the lame social activities of GTA IV, Rockstar fumbled in adding to this immersion. The most obvious place to start was all around them: the plethora of buildings that made up these giant cities. The cities may be big in these games, but they are predominantly empty. You can drive for miles before coming across a building that can actually be entered. The city is a lie – it’s all a façade of empty polygons.
One of Rockstar’s other titles, L.A. Noire, succeeded in other areas of creating player immersion – not with a typically stylized atmospheric experience – but with painfully realistic crime scenes and non-player character facial animation that made suspect interviews harrowing in their human accuracy and subtlety that is uncommon in current games, but is a sure sign of the future. However, this game too was limited by an empty world and only a handful of suspects in a supposedly living city of millions.
And this is why some realistic experiences suffer so – the technology and the wherewithal to create truly huge worlds just isn’t there yet (though it will be, in time). That’s another area where DayZ has the edge: most of that world is dead, except the player and a handful of living (and reanimated). The post-apocalyptic setting provides a convenient cover for the developer to focus on a finite amount of details, rather than a huge but vacuous world. The empty landscapes of DayZ are instead filled with fright and the constant possibility of hideous death at the hands of zombies or human bandits. Instead of being alone in this world, the player has the sense they are constantly being watched.
This is where Rockstar’s other game, “Red Dead Redemption”, succeeds. It makes sense for the West to be empty, because it was an expansive wilderness sparsely populated by both good people and bad. While riding through the plains, one might see nobody, or one might come across a person in honest need of help, or meaning only to harm.
Until the technology exists to truly fill up these open worlds with random possibility, they will always feel empty. A truly living 1940’s Los Angeles would be an exciting place to explore – but to create that intricate world is a nightmare. Sticking with understandably empty settings (the American West or decimated cities) is our best chance to feel like we’re in the midst of a realistic simulation.
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