2007-01-16 06:00:00.0 GameFile: Corpse Collection, 'Resistance,' 'Gears Of War' & More
Also: PS2 clobbers Xbox 360, PS3, Wii in holiday-sales rankings.
If you're a game designer, you'll probably have to face a key question at some point in your career: What should we do with all these dead bodies?
Since the good old days of Atari, players have been able to blast, chop, zap and smash video game villains. They've done this in virtual cities and battlefields, re-creations of Normandy Beach and inventions like the DataDyne skyscraper in "Perfect Dark." And almost without exception the same thing has happened when players have slain their foes. Their enemies disappear. Some blink out immediately. Some stick around a minute or two before fading away. And as with everything else in game design, that is intentional.
Last year, however, the PlayStation 3's "Resistance: Fall of Man" showed something rare, if not completely brand-new: bodies that stick around. "It was our main concern that we had to do something that went far beyond what previous generation games did," said Eric Christensen, principal engine programmer at "Resistance" developer Insomniac Games. Some sports games demonstrate next-gen power by dousing basketball players with realistic sweat. Some games try to bedazzle with advanced lighting and shadows. Insomniac wagered that, among other things, letting the dead bodies pile would prove an impressive trick on the PS3.
"There are certain conditions you can get into, especially if you're of a mindset of trying to break it or see how much stuff you can pile up, that I think things will eventually go away," said Al Hastings, Insomniac's chief technology officer. "But as a general rule, everything the size of a body or bigger will stick around."
Play a level of "Resistance." Blast some Chimera aliens. Proceed. Blast a few more. Get to the end of the level and run back through it, and every defeated alien — dozens of them, startlingly — is still lying where the player's grenades and energy bullets left them.
The Insomniac team refers to what it pulled off as "body-stacking," but there really are no formal industry terms associated with these issues. Josh Holmes, vice president and studio general manager at Propaganda Games — where a new "Turok" game is being made — uses different references. "At Propaganda, this is often referred to as 'corpse collection' or 'dead-body management,' which makes us sound more like a mortuary than a games company."
"We just refer to them as dead bodies," said Derek Daniels, a senior designer at Sony's PlayStation studio in Santa Monica, California. "Then from there we kind of apply the verbs 'fade out,' 'flicker' or 'poof out,' " said the veteran of the last two "God of War" development teams.
"Things like body vanishing I've heard referred to as 'game-isms,' " said Ralph Barbagallo, a veteran designer who now runs a games company called Flarb. "It's like, no matter how realistic you get, there still are some sort of video game clichés that have to be adhered to for gameplay or technical reasons. And these constantly remind you that you are just playing a game."
Dead bodies have been vanishing in games for decades because of technical difficulties. Old 2-D games — like just about anything on the original Atari, Sega and Nintendo systems — could only display a limited number of character graphics, or sprites, on a TV screen at one time. Letting a zapped enemy lie prone on the playing field caused problems, limiting the amount of new things, like new on-rushing enemies, that could be drawn onto the screen. "You would end up sacrificing one of your precious moving objects to display an essentially useless dead body," Barbagallo said.
Once games went 3-D via systems like the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, characters were drawn with a mesh of polygons. Each system's processor could only draw so many polygons at a time before getting overwhelmed and slowing down. Piling dead bodies would require the processor to keep drawing polygons on top of polygons. "If you were to allow an unlimited number of entities to enter and die within a given area and then failed to collect their corpses, they could drag the frame rate down to zero," Holmes said. No one wants a game frozen to a standstill.
Over the years, there were breakthroughs in dead-body management. Barbagallo recalled playing an arcade version of Sega's "Golden Axe" in 1989. He was impressed then that the enemies he axed didn't just scream in agony but dropped to the ground, turned gray and stayed on the battlefield "forever." In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the "Metal Gear Solid" and "Splinter Cell" games made a point of letting some bodies linger and incorporated that into the gameplay, requiring players to hide felled enemies for fear of alerting other enemy soldiers on patrol. But these games were the exceptions.
"Previously, having bodies stick around was kind of a luxury," Hastings said. "It doesn't really impact the gameplay. It more impacts the immersion. And so it was really quickly something game designers could say, 'If we make the bodies disappear, we don't have to draw them, we don't have to worry about updating them, we don't have to worry about if they die in a funny pose and it doesn't look good.' The best thing we needed to do was make sure they disappeared while you weren't looking at them."
To Hastings' point, a GameFile spot-check of 2000's N64 first-person shooter "Perfect Dark" revealed that enemies the player shot stuck around for a couple of minutes — an impressive mark — but would eventually disappear if the player wandered a few rooms away and shot a few more soldiers dead. One oddity of the"Perfect Dark" system involved gunning down a cluster of enemies. All the bodies would drop, but all but one would vanish immediately. In Insomniac's 2004 game "Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal," blasted enemies vanished in full view of the player within one or two seconds — a compromise, clearly, to the dazzling pyrotechnics ejected by Ratchet's ludicrously elaborate array of cartoon guns. Last year's Xbox 360 graphical heavyweight "Gears of War" stuck more to Hasting's standard: In one instance logged by GameFile, a dead body lingered for two and a half minutes, the entire time it remained onscreen. But another dead body was gone in just 40 seconds, because, for a few moments, the game's camera was pointing somewhere else.
"Gears of War" provided a different sort of dead-body innovation: The alien corpses stay solid as long as they're on the screen, and players can kick them around if they run into them. In "Resistance," on the other hand, players can walk right through them.
"The biggest problem from the bodies not vanishing is that you then need to decide what to do with them," Daniels said. "Can the player interact with them, and if so, how? Special sounds, animations, reactions and physics systems need to be created to handle all these decisions. Then from there come the bugs, such as the body getting stuck in a hallway not letting the player progress. Which becomes even more of an issue if the player doesn't have a jump button — do you let the player run over the dead body, and what sort of problems arise from there?"
Ultimately, there needs to be a point to leaving the bodies there, Daniels observed. "With 'God of War,' we decided to leave the boss bodies behind to complete the sell of the game being epic and how much of a badass [the player's character] Kratos is. Almost like a trophy type of thing, celebrating his kill in front of the player's eyes." To that end, the team made sure that after the player killed a massive Hydra they could walk right into the beast's mouth.
"It makes you feel more powerful," Christensen said of the body-stacking in "Resistance." "It gave you a sense that you were really doing something, that you had an effect on your environment and that you were solely responsible for the destruction." Hastings added that a trail of dead bodies can help a player remember where they've been in a game level, like breadcrumbs.
All this may sound horridly ghoulish to the outsider. And maybe it should. "Some people really enjoy blowing guys up into funny positions," Hastings said. "Other people do interpret it as sort of morbid and creepy." But the mandate of game designers is at least partially to simply find ways to make the game world work like the real one, to cut down on the "game-isms." They're making progress, and they don't want that to fade away.
More from the world of video games:
Late last week NPD — the research group that tabulates video games sales for the U.S. — released figures for the holiday-sales rush. In December, the Xbox 360 (1.1 million units) outsold the PS3 (491,000) and Wii (604,000), but all three machines were topped by the PS2's 1.4 million units sold. Old gaming machines that cost less than $130 don't die fast, it seems. As for handhelds, Nintendo's DS sold 1.6 million units in December, topping the PSP's 953,000 and the company's own Game Boy Advance, which managed 851,000. The firm also released a ranking of the top-selling console and portable games for the year, excluding PC games for now. That ranking follows:
· "Madden NFL 07" (PS2; Electronic Arts) - 2.8 million units sold
· "New Super Mario Bros." (NDS; Nintendo) - 2.0 million units sold
· "Gears of War" - (360; Microsoft) - 1.8 million units sold
· "Kingdom Hearts II" (PS2; Square Enix) - 1.7 million units sold
· "Guitar Hero 2" (with guitar; PS2; Activision) - 1.3 million units sold
· "Final Fantasy XII" (PS2; Square Enix) - 1.3 million units sold
· "Brain Age: Train Your Brain" (NDS; Nintendo) - 1.1 million units sold
· "Madden NFL 07" (360; Electronic Arts) - 1.1 million units sold
· "Tom Clancy's GRAW" - (360; Ubisoft) - 1.0 million units sold
· "NCAA Football 07" (PS2; Electronic Arts) - 1.0 million units sold
