Posts Tagged weapons
Bullet-point review: Jedi Knight.
Posted by The Management in games on June 3, 2010
Jedi Knight came out just a year after the original Quake, and was already showing its age upon release. Its development team was wise enough to include support for hardware acceleration and mouse-look controls (complete with a neat if archaic calibration of the axes that allowed for some very sensitive camera movement), but the low- poly count was much harder to mask.
Guarded by a force field -- with a rather obvious power source -- this area leads into a twisting maze of vents that all have a different idea of where the gravity source is located. Confusing, but fun.
Jedi Knight still received very positive reviews, though, and rightfully so. It wasn’t perfect, and hasn’t aged particularly well, but I had a blast with it.
Here are some of the points that stuck out upon replaying it:
— The level design in Jedi Knight is fantastic, and probably its biggest strength. Of course level design was a bit of a different beast back then: areas tended to be much larger with fewer scripted events, the player had an inventory of keys and other usable items that facilitated environmental traversal, platforming puzzles were quite common (although usually disliked), movement was much, much quicker, etc.
Within that framework, though, the levels were a treat.
Despite the game’s low-poly count, its geometry was quite complex and varied. Textures were often repeated, but new ones trickled in periodically and every map had its own unique motif. The player was also constantly operating large-scale machinery that dynamically changed the landscape.
It all made for a nice combination of action, exploration and some occasional head-scratching. The only complaint I had with the levels were the large, industrial looking doors that were virtually indistinguishable from walls. Since these had to be opened with a button press, there were too many instances where the player could easily get stuck simply due to dodgy visuals.
It's actually not as dangerous as it looks, and you can bet there's a secret room underneath...
— In-between level cinematics consisted of live-action actors superimposed over CG backdrops. They were rather silly and pretty low-budget, but did a decent job of conveying the story while showcasing certain visuals that were not possible to render within the game engine.
— The player was able to carry 10 weapons at any one time, and many of them shared the same ammo source. The limited ammo made becoming a Jedi and obtaining a lightsaber all the more rewarding. Visually speaking the lightsaber wasn’t anything fantastic, but it had unlimited power and the added advantage of lighting up dark areas and deflecting smaller enemy shots.
— Jedi powers were earned as the player progressed through the game, and they could be focused on neutral abilities, the light path, or the dark side. The powers themselves were a nice addition to both the singleplayer and the multiplayer, and were sometimes necessary to progress through a level (or at least take a short cut).
Force Pull was a particularly fun one as it allowed you to snatch weapons out of the enemies’ hands or grab healing items from far away.
It's possible to blow up those barrels from this location, but due to wonky ray-tracing so common in older FPS games, my shots hit the wall.
— All the enemies responded to basic in-world physics, even after death, which made for some cool effects like a dead body sliding along the current of a pipeline.
— A lot of the audio was taken straight from the Star Wars movies, including the iconic sound effects and the famous scores by John Williams. These greatly enhanced the atmosphere and helped Jedi Knight stand out from other FPS titles of the era.
A TIE/sa Bomber hounding the player mid-way through the game.
— The way the game’s secret rooms were placed was quite clever as they followed a pattern that went against the common funneling/guiding techniques of level design, e.g., a small nook embedded into the wall just above the entrance to a room was very easy to miss if the player ran right in without looking up and behind.
Enemies were often utilized to help the player spot these locations as they would often be placed in seemingly inaccessible locations, but with enough sleuthing, the player could always discover a way to reach his foes. A tally at the end of each level also informed the player as to whether he missed any secrets.
The impetus to discover the secret areas was very good as well. Not only did these locations often contain health, armour and ammo, but finding all the secrets in a level rewarded the player with extra force powers.
Jedi Knight is available for cheap on Steam, although everyone should keep in mind that it’s a very lazy port/re-release. None of the GUI elements have been updated for higher resolutions, the title screen and in-game cinematics must be viewed in a windowed mode, and the game doesn’t come with its original music. There’s a fix for that, but make sure to check out the forums first to get a better idea if it’s worth your money.
Borderlands bits.
Posted by The Management in games on February 5, 2010
Borderlands became something of a media darling when it was released late last year, and it’s currently being supported with lots of downloadable content. I could never quite bring myself to finish it, though, but I got close, and I jotted down some of its pros and cons along the way.
Borderlands' relatively seamless character selection.
- The intro of Borderlands — complete with the song that accompanied the TV ads — is filled with personality. However, beyond its first 5 minutes, Borderlands quickly loses its ambiance and becomes a fairly sterile game. The cell shading is pretty enough, but the world is very repetitive and its denizens seem to be permanently nailed down to the ground. My guess is that this was a conscious decision to simplify NPC interactions a la Diablo, but it comes across a little drab and uninspired.
One of the game's more impressive boss battles.
- The character classes in Borderlands are all actual characters, i.e., playing the Sniper means playing as Mordecai, which is a clever way of instilling some immediate flavour to the roster.
- Each character possesses only a single ability that is activated with a dedicated button press. This actually works out quite well, with all the other skills being either passive, “always-on” on traits, or bonuses that are activated directly through the player’s actions, e.g., receiving a bonus to the rate of fire once a few enemies are killed in a short window of time.
- A few of the quests have some scripted events like a mining facility blowing up, but the majority are rather dull. For the most part, the quests involve killing individual targerts and collecting items, and come across almost randomly generated rather than designed.
- The stores found in the game all contain a special “sale” slot. The items in these slots are mid to high tier early on in the game, and are a nice bonus to the regular inventories. They’re also accompanied by timers that count down in real time, creating a pretty effective “get ‘em while they last!” feeling.
Stylized characters with stylized intros, definitely a far cry from the Borderlands' space marine like roots.
- Borderlands’ enemies are often susceptible to certain “elemental” modifiers (corrosive, incendiary, electric, etc.), and some even contain specific weak spots. These might not be immediately obvious as they’re not exactly glowing red spheres, but damage amounts clearly indicate that shooting an enemy from behind might yield better results than unloading into its armoured head.
- Much like in MMOs, enemies occupy distinct areas and are grouped together by their power levels. These levels are not tied to their appearance, though, so it’s not uncommon to encounter the same scrawny punk at level 5 and level 20.
- The health of the enemies, especially the bosses, can be bizarrely high. The only way to defeat some of the quest targets with my character build was to get them stuck on the map’s geometry so I could safely shoot ‘em for 10 minutes straight, often running out of ammo in the process.
- Ammo in general is plentiful, although inconsistently distributed. It’s pretty common to go for long stretches of time without any bullets for the character’s main weapons, something that made my comparatively weak but rechargeable alien weapon indisposable. Well, that is until I found an apparently cheap item that respawned ammo at a lightning fast pace.
The less said about the game's vehicles, the better...
- Randomly generated weapons are one of the game’s high points, consisting of multiple visual pieces, elemental modifiers, and even unique bullet behaviour, e.g., the shotgun fires multiple projectiles with each round, while the alien weaponary launches energy beams that travel in expanding sine waves.
Of course the weapons also contain various statistics such as base damage, rate of fire, clip size, range, and reload speed, but the game doesn’t visually indicate how these attributes are affected by the player’s own skills. This makes it very difficult to gauge a weapon’s usefulness just from its description, which is a pretty big issue considering how often new weapons are obtained.
- The “Save Your Life” mechanic kicks in whenever the character’s health if fully depleted. During these phases, the screen goes monochrome and the stationary player is given a few precious seconds to kill an enemy in order to be resurrected.
This works really well and makes intense firefights less frustrating, although it can also be a bit annoying when the character dies while killing the last enemy in the area. A simple timer that auto-resurrects the player if left unmolested for a few seconds would’ve solved the issue.
About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I work as a videogame design consultant. I'm also the creative lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and write a lot of it down too, so I figured why not make it public?
If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line at themanagement@significant-bits.com.