Comments on: Architecture Appreciation

By: TheOtherErik

TheOtherErik — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:20:43 +0000

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”.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 16 May 2007 20:49:23 +0000

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.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:14:21 +0000

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.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Tue, 15 May 2007 19:53:54 +0000

that mangled word in the first sentence is suppsoed to be “particularly”, btu eye katn’ tipe ore spel gudly.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Tue, 15 May 2007 19:52:41 +0000

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