[HEADING=1]In-game environments and gameplay[/HEADING]
by Geno DCLXVI
by Geno DCLXVI
One thing I liked about Fallout 3 was how you could go on missions at night if you wanted to, and that it would actually be useful. Going on a mission at night meant that you got a +10 to your Sneak checks, i.e. you would be less visible. In Minecraft and Terraria, the strong baddies came out at night: the creepers and their ilk in the former and the zombies and Demon Eyes in the latter. In these games nighttime actually meant something other than a change of color in the scenery.
In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, there were many situations where changes in the environment directly affected gameplay, most notably the destructible cover. When the wall you're hiding behind got shot up and wrecked, you'd need to find something else to hide behind or get filled with bullet holes. In the Thunder Sniper mission, you had to time your sniper shots with the cracks of thunder that come every few seconds so that you weren't detected every time you blew someone's head off. In the snowy mountain levels, being in the cold too long would eventually kill you, and you had to warm up at a fireplace every now and then.
So what brings all of these games together? Well, the games I've mentioned are pretty rare examples of good use of in-game environments. In mainstream games, nighttime is one excuse for developers to claim that the scenery is "varied", when it's actually the same thing with a different color scheme. In Far Cry 2 for example, enemies can pinpoint your exact location at night just as well as they could in the daytime, silenced weapon or no. This doesn't just kill immersion, it also breaks flow. One moment you're stealthing around in the darkness, the next you're running around dodging fire from enemies who apparently have IFF, GPS and night-vision all built into their brains, yet still run mindlessly toward you like zombies who've had nothing to eat all week but broccoli and shell casings. Hence, the importance of an in-game environment is paramount in games that rely heavily on interacting with said environments, like first-person shooters and RPGs.
So then, what makes a good in-game environment? Here's what I think, in no particular order.
Good environments should be interactive --- a player might reconsider destroying an enemy encampment with a rare Fireball scroll if the same result could be achieved by simply rolling a huge boulder down a cliff towards it. A player seeking an indirect, flanking path to his objective should be able to clear a path through the nearby patch of overgrowth instead of being restricted to Road A or Road B. An interactive environment is one that responds and changes as a result of player action. We've all seen the explosive barrels prevalent in every bog-standard shooter around; this is actually going in the right direction, but it has plenty of room for improvement.
Good environments should affect and be affected by a player's decisions and actions --- a player in a good environment is compelled to ask himself, "Should I climb the side of that mountain and wait for nightfall to strike at that secret base, or just blast through the front gate with the sun at my back?". Similarly, if a player keeps striking bases of the same organization exclusively at night, the bases would then be more heavily-guarded at night. At best, environments like these could have the potential to be very immersive. If a player checks the in-game weather report to see if conditions are good for a night strike at 11PM on July 14th, then you've got it right.
Good environments should affect other characters, not just the player --- as I mentioned in the Far Cry 2 example, even at night every enemy in sight turns to shoot you the moment you fire your first shot, and they always seem to shoot at you and only you despite the fact that you're wearing the same kind of tourist shirt every other mercenary in the game is wearing and you're hiding in a 3-foot tall bush and can't even see your own feet. Even enemies have to be rattled if someone gets shot at night when they don't expect it, and should obviously look around a fair bit before spotting a crawling patch of grass. Also, since snow and rain play hell with visibility, unless your enemies are rocking thermal and have incredibly sensitive hearing you should be able to sprint in such a situation without being detected.
Good environments should be memorable and unique --- I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who played World of Warcraft and thought that some places in James Cameron's Avatar were pulled straight out of Zangarmarsh, Nagrand and Un'goro Crater. The fact that I even thought of this connection is proof that those environments were deeply burned into my memory, and thinking that made me proud to have the privilege of being a gamer. Also, these environments pushed the medium forward by showing that RPGs could work in a different setting than the classic dungeon, forest and dungeon-forest combo that was the hallmark of many a game in the past decade. Of course, unique doesn't just mean that they should only just look different, but that they also have to present to the player a unique experience for every variation. You lose the effect of changing the locale from a desert to a tundra if all you'll face in the tundra are recolored versions of things you found in said desert.
Good environments should not restrict the player without good reason --- While certain restrictions do have to be made to environments for technical and story reasons, the game should provide players as much access as possible to the environments created for them. Another big immersion-killer is when you're exploring the local surroundings and hit a large invisible wall for no good reason. Map boundaries should always be demarcated in a sensible way. Assassin's Creed had the grace to tell us that the mysterious smoke walls you encountered in certain areas were areas not yet unlocked in Desmond's memory, and some multiplayer maps in Modern Warfare 2 were bordered by deadly nuclear radiation.
These are just some of the criteria that I think should be considered when envisioning in-game environments, and I'm pretty sure that I've missed some details, but that's all I've got for now. To summarize, in-game environments should be alive and interactive, but not at the expense of accessibility. Players should still be able to attempt stealth missions in the daytime and loud missions at night and the like instead of pigeonholing certain mission types with certain environment types because it encourages them to figure out for themselves which go well together. This ultimately reinforces player freedom and makes for a more immersive gameplay experience.
And those are my 1,148 words on the subject.