Gameplay: What’s the difference between brutally killing a dude in-game and pressing X button to play a death animation?
Written by MM. Posted at 3:59 pm on September 11th, 2009
15 comments.
Post a comment.
You can brutally dismember someone by shooting him with a shotgun, and you can sneak to a guy and snap his neck with a press of a button – FEAR vs HITMAN gameplay-wise
Engagement in the game world. Are the causes of the guy’s death consistent with the setting, themes and mechanics of the game world? What about the way his death is displayed? Players like to become a part of the game world, whether they’re overcoming a challenge (winning a fight) or just taking out their frustration on a helpless victim, so it’s important to them that their actions are a consistent part of that world.
Even a kill-button (versus shooting or punching someone) isn’t necessarily bad gameplay, as long as you make it fun. In a game like Link-Dead, it would be cool to hack people’s suits and make their brains explode or whatever.
If it’s a death animation.. pardon the expression, but it’s less life-like. If the way that the enemy dies is a direct result of the method you use to kill him – I think there is much more satisfaction. I’ll use Doom as an example. You’re at level 5, but you keep getting nailed at a certain spot by the Baron of Hell (bare with me, I haven’t played Doom in a long time) or other powerful enemy. You’ve already killed a whole bunch of enemies. Each has a death animation. You finally kill the fucker at last, grinding your teeth in rage, but you’re not really rewarded for your effort. I mean you do get to continue on in the level, but you didn’t get the satisfaction of sawing the motherfucker or maiming him a bit after he falls or even descecrating his body after he’s dead. He just goes down like all the other enemies in a pile of pixelated guts n gore.
Unfortunately games where you can kill your enemy in different non-animated ways are few and far in between, so I have no good example atm. There are a lot of first person shooters where you can shoot an AI enemy a couple of times and they cripple a bit, but then get back up as if nothing happened to them and continue shooting at you. So let’s say Link-Dead has non-animated deaths. How you kill your enemy is completely based on what you do. You’re playing an offline game against some AI. One enemy happens to constantly rail you as you’re trying to get up a ladder to a ledge where you can kill the little bastard. Finally, you get pissed off, flank him and nail him from behind with a nade. The nade cripples him and he drags his broken body on the floor by his arms and hands. You walk up to him, and point-blank right in the back of the head, or light him on fire, of if it’s an online game, if the other player deserved it, a bit of insult either with a chainsaw or whatever.. whatever sadistic thing that comes to mind.
Hmm and after I wrote all this, I’m pretty sadistic too aren’t I? I dunno. I would absolutely love to see more games where you can take out in game frustrations out on an ememy and they react differently to it, rather than the same old repetative death sequence. It’s like if you’ve ever gotten repeatedly stung by a hornet, after it crossed your path while you weren’t even in it’s territory. You swat at it to give it the message to fuck off, but it just keeps coming at you again to sting or bite you. At that point, you’re furious and it’s time for revenge. You’re so pissed that you catch the thing with your bare hand and throw it into the campfire to burn. As you see the little asshole shrivel and suffer, you have some satisfaction that you punished him good. Yeah.. so that’s the kind of satisfaction I’d love to have in game. It doesn’t matter so much in game, how sadistic you are, since it’s not real. I actually hate killing anything that’s living, but in game.. where’s the flamethrower?
traps are guaranteed to make deaths more interesting. players will have to be able to manipulate the world around them with enough flexibility to come up with unique traps. examples:
strapping remote explosive charges to all of the light fixtures in a room, blowing them out. even if the enemy had a flashlight, he would be disoriented, making him an easy target.
soldiers and hackers teaming up. a soldier could place a decoy objective and an E.M.P. grenade into a small room. if the enemy were lured in by the decoy, a hacker could shut the doors to that room, and the soldier could detonate the E.M.P. the enemy could not call for help from a hacker, for his radio would be disabled. the enemy would have to commit suicide.
now, picture traps similar to these on a larger scale. also picture traps built into the maps themselves: garbage compactors, unstable buildings, gas chambers, the list could go on.
traps force players to think twice before entering a room or chasing an enemy. it makes the game less of a “pursue enemy, kill enemy, progress through level” type of thing.
niko brings up a good point. Will the environment be interactive in any way?
Just a bit off topic, but is it possible to give a class a tackle ability? Think about it.. You find an enemy soldier in your territory, he’s low on ammo and tries to run, just as he’s about to jump over a large hole you jump and tackle him, bringing him down the hole and using his body to absorb most of the impact, you still sustain mild damage, but unlike him you don’t have brocken bones.
“Most problems are side effects of solutions to other problems.”
– Wow, this sounds smart :O
What? What is the difference between what? You need to state two things. It is like saying, “What is the difference between apples?”. Well, sometimes they are different colors, sometimes they taste sweeter. Is that what you wanted to know? About fucking apples?! 😀
first one is much funnier.
Offtopic: MM, plz tell, watsup with sigvatr and his blog?
It would be nice to have ragdoll deaths.
perhaps being able to remove other players limbs to cripple them would be fun, like a grenade exploding near enough to shear off a leg would remove the limb, reducing the player to crawling around a level while slowly bleeding out.
More Interactivity->More Possibilities->More Fun
You should check out cortex command in case you haven’t already done so.
When it comes to combat, i always felt that visceral gameplay is much more fun than simplified “press X to explode enemy’s head”, or the VS-fighter style of “memorize 30 different combos”.
When i say “visceral”, i mean that when i bash an enemy’s skull in, i want to *feel* like i did it. It should feel like my character is an extension of my body. The trick is giving visceral gameplay enough depth so that it takes time to master all your skills. A game which does this well is Lugaru, which if you haven’t played, try the demo.
you are saying something like that you are a Predator in invisible mode, and snake behind an enemy or you wait still becoming camouflaged then when the enemy pass by your side you blow his head with a demolition charge in his Mouth or you stab him in the eyes OR else you can take his heart off the body and eat it…:D
the first one is way more “fun”, because u can chose HOW that in-game dude will die and how BAD.
although, the second choice aint bad either since u can still enjoy his death penalty. BUT, it will be very limited to kill someone with a X button.
Both are totally different, as they provide different emotions. Killing a dude in game refers to the gameplay accomplishment, which gives you a a feeling of power / awesomeness regarding the gameplay mechanics (strategy.. precision).
Pressing X to see a death animation gives a feeling regarding what is visually represented only, an emotion much more related to a movie than a game.