working on something:

Immersion vs Interactivity?

It makes me kinda sad how far movies have come, and how long the way for games still is.

I just finished Mass Effect 3, i played all 3 parts, and in the end i was realy close to tears. And i realy liked the ending.
But i´ve been with this series and this characters for more then 80, maby 100 Hours.

And then i watched the Grey, the same day, and i cried in the end.
I realy cried fucking hard.
This movie needet only 2 hours to make me feel for this characters so much that i cried.

And now i am realy dissapointed that the best gaming has to offer, as far as the writing goes, is beeing close to tears. after having more then 80 hours to attach me to theese characters.
and when you think of how much worse all those other games out there are, well you kinda start thinking there is something wrong here.
and dont get me with heavy rain or anything, i played that and i didnt feel a thing for theese guys. maby that is cause i hate kids, and its about saving a kid. or maby its cause you always have the feeling that if you didnt fail this or that quicktimeevent the story would have gone otherwise, and this is not how you build a compelling story.
its like fidel castro conquering cuba and getting shot somewhere, somehow. thats not a compelling story that you wanna live through, thats reality, and reality i can have everyday.
you dont get biographys from boring people that didnt achieve anything, cause noone cares about that. and with fiction you dont even have the constraints of something that happened so you should use that freedom. and by using i dont mean putting quicktime events and the possibility to fail in there.

SO we have to get to the bottom of this, how can games suck so hard?

The obvious reason is the gameplay-focus, because this is what makes games fun, right?
But movies can be so much more then just fun. And i gues everyone aggrees that you can have way more fun with games then movies, so i am certain there is a way to augment the other effects, movies have on people.
And this is why i love games. Its like if there were only 2-3 genres of movies fully explored yet, but we know there is much more out there, cause movies are sort of 100 years ahead and developed a lot of genres. Most games are simply build around creating fun. That works, and that sells. But there is so much more to games, and its just a matter of time for this empty space to be filled up.
I think the guys at Quantic dreams are heading in the right direction, and although they didnt manage to realy nail it yet, i think they will some time in the future, and others will follow.
The task of combining immersion with interactivity is not an easy one, but we will manage.
With movies beeing explored that much, it is time for games to step up.

random other stuff...

some sketches also

did some earth. clouds are moving and lights are turning on and off depending on daytime.

some headpractice before we go on to DSII weapons

unity trail goodness:

Small mistakes big effects

This is about skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and how 2 very small mistakes had huge impact on my gamimg experience.

So im into Skyrim 50 hours and Amalur 30.
Obviously i had a good time with both of theese games, but at some point 20 hours into amalur everything started reminding me of how much better everything(except the combat) is done in skyrim, and how i felt way more imersed into skyrim then amalur.
But i didnt stop playing amalur cause it had one critical feature skyrim is missing.

PUT EVERYTHING INTO JUNK.
I remembered how terrible the itemhandling in skyrim was, how i wasted atleast 3 hours of my gamingtime scrolling through my inventory, selling stuff.
And amalurs is equaly terrible, but in amalur i could put all the items im gonna sell anyway into junk, and then sell all the junk with one button.
But whats wrong with amalur? well there are lots of minor flaws like all the gameplayelemts that feel like they are just there because every big rpg has to have them, like lockpicking etc.
But the one huge flaw it has, wich would have been easiest to fix, is the camera angle.
All the environments are realy huge and make full use of the vertical spectrum so that everything should feel realy huge and epic.

IF YOU WERN´T LOOKING AT THE FLOOR ALL THE TIME.
Realy i didnt realise that the fat pillars in the starting area actualy were huge trees until 3 hours into the game.
and all the environments are this huge, but you will never know if you dont stand still for a moment and rotate the camera manualy.
And there are no camera settings were you could atleast increase the camera distance, because its literarely hanging 3 feet behind your character (and always facing to the floor).

And i think i know the reason why both theese mistakes never were adressed.
QA focus is mainly on functionality, not if a game is fun. Cause gues what, professional testers are not realy able to have fun with a game when they have to play it every day, and all the same parts again and again.
For the fun part they usually do focus group tests, but those people are no professionals. They maby recognize that something feels off, but they wont know its the camera. Or they wont get enough time to play, to recognize theese mistakes, cause they only start getting more and more anoying when you are realy deep into the game.

So for the developers this stuff doesnt realy matter, cause everyone who recognizes this mistakes already bought the game, right?
Maby, but theese are just anoying things that are so easy to fix, and that would significantly improve the image of the game and the developer in the long-term memory of the consumer.

As a closing statement i´d just like to say i will always remeber skyrim for the inventory-system from hell.