Architecture Appreciation

I’ve noticed I appreciate great architecture in a game– if I’m in a first person view. I have to remind myself to stop and look around in something like Final Fantasy XII or KOTOR, even with FFXII’s really fantastic art direction.

In contrast, marveling comes naturally when I’m playing an Elder Scrolls game (especially Morrowind), or Half-Life 2. Maybe it’s as simple as an easier upward view: 3rd person cameras encourage a lot more looking at the floor. Your towering statues, vaulted ceilings, long unbroken columns, and high stained glass windows don’t really do anything for me when I’m rarely looking above five feet. I think there’s a deeper problem with the 3rd person camera, though, a way they change your perception of the space that surrounds you.
Can anyone think of a good counterexample? A non-first-person camera game where you really marvel at the architecture? I occasionally do on gryphon rides in World of Warcraft, where they can engineer a fixed path for choice views (and force down time). Anything more interactive?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

TheOtherErik

Devil May Cry-style games (third-person melee, heavy reliance on rail and fixed cameras) are good at highlighting their world assets, simply because they often force the player to look at them.

However, that kind of developer-side camera control seems like The Wrong Thing to me -- a fundament of *interactivity* is "the player can look at whatever they damn well want to look at".
Matt

Interesting examples-- both games are really about the environment ,and manage to pull it off well with the provided camera. Prince of Persia had quite a difficult challenge, with a game that needs both the body awareness of a third person camera, and the environmental awareness of a first person.
Gordon

Shadow of the Colossus (a.k.a, perjoratively, Shadow of the Jumping Puzzle) has impressive architecture. It has a controllable, 3rd-person over-the-shoulder camera though so I don't know if that quite counts.

The camera was great for scenic landscapes, but it caused me to swear like a sailor when it would move in the middle of a jumping puzzle.
Geoff

that mangled word in the first sentence is suppsoed to be "particularly", btu eye katn' tipe ore spel gudly.
Geoff

I spent a lot of time looking around in the recent Prince of Persia games - but this was parcticality mixed with appreciation of the view. In a good room, I'd have to marvel at the waterfall, the broken set of columns and the line on the floor that was obviously a trap before I'd even figure out where exactly I wanted to get to, not to mention how to get there. PoP was an interesting game of perspective though... a room would always have a default "zoom out" view that seemed to be a relatively fixed camera set by the developers; and you could always go to first-person view to look around before moving; but I found the action (be it the combat or the platformy jump/climb/swing/vault) easiest in the close 3rd person view. There were definitely a few rooms (usually the outside ones) that had some great panoramic views - ruined palace in the distance, giant waterfall between giant statues, with birds flying around or something.

Back to my point, though - looking at a scene as a whole was part of that game. I had to plan my path through a "room" - run along that wall, spring to the column, up the column, twist around, jump on the spring board, make it to the other side... In doing that, I'd have to look at the scene in detail, figuring out what might be a valid path and what wasn't.

-geoff

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Architecture Appreciation