oh, europe
I came across an absolutely wonderful
quote by one of STALKER's developers. (via
RPS)
It
seems that to appeal to North America you need really flashy,
bright games, and you can see that every eastern European game is
very dark. In the end, I guess this just comes down to our culture
and history - we're just different people, and that's
that.
Yes, like the flashy and bright Half Life, where you spend the
first couple chapters watching your co-workers being slaughtered by
alien abominations in (literal) mute horror.
Or the flashy and bright Prey, where you have to murder your
girlfriend, before the machine she's wired into kills you
first.
Or the flashy and bright Half-Life 2, which
takes place in an
eastern-european country, and is mostly about
oppression.
The
flaws
preventing blockbuster sales of Stalker were showstopping; (or
rather,
should have been showstopping.) but herp derping
about how Americans are dumb and can't handle Serious Things isn't
going to help keep Stalker 2 from making the exact same mistakes,
now matter how devilishly pretty it is.
Also: In the comments of the RPS thread.
You
know, I'm really skeptical that they had the AI as active as they
claim. The final game seems to rely very heavily on set-path and
set-location respawns in order to keep the world feel like things
are going on. Surely they could have left just a few "ALifers" on
to purposefully wander around and stir things up. Right now, after
memorizing what the layouts of the zones are, I can easily avoid
all conflict because no NPCs will ever stray from their
paths.
AI, like audio, has stagnated for the last ten years. But unlike
audio, which stagnated not because it achieved parity with reality,
but because it is both very
very hard to do and because
you can't see good AI in a screenshot, or in a demo. A dumb
scripted sequence can look as brilliant as however many dev-hours
you want to burn on it, (viz. any CGI film ever made) and you have
be an insider to tell the difference. Every game have to bullshit
about how great their AI is (viz. oblivion, half life 2) because
talk is cheap, and nobody's going to follow up on the
marketing.