The Renaissance of System Driven Gaming

After over a year of the new generation of consoles, an ugly truth has surfaced: graphically the new hardware isn't much of a leap above the old. There's improvement, sure, but nothing liberating like the jump from Playstation 2/Original Xbox to the Playstation 3/Xbox 360. Then the leap opened huge new opportunities for realism; this time the quality increase is just enough to push things ahead, but there's nothing fresh to sell the next-gen(in some cases next gen is struggling to keep pace with the old standards like High Definition output). So the triple A developers have to look elsewhere to prove these new machines are worth buying.

From this video you can tell there is a generational difference, but it's not really so great that it impairs gameplay. Watch in fullscreen 1080p to get the most accurate picture.

Enter System Driven Gaming. While the jump to better hardware doesn't mean too much for graphics, there has also been a huge boost to memory which means a game can run alot of intelligent stuff in the background. And this is what alot of designers have been taking advantage of. Things that go beyond the core game to expand on the worlds they create and give the impression there's something larger going on.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a great example of this. Released this year, it was a standard hack and slash game set in the Lord Of The Rings universe, but with a twist in the form of the Nemesis System. With this, a real, hierarchy of Orcs battled not only you, but each other in their own tribal warfare. If any foot-soldier got a win over you, they had a chance to move up this hierarchy. You could affect the confidence of leaders by killing their subordinates. You could even possess Orcs and guide them to the top then topple the structure from the inside.

The games characters were randomly generated from a collection of "interesting" traits and as you battle your foes they would react to your past encounters.

To download a video describing these systems click here.
On top of this, a blend of procedural generation and hand-crafted content meant that every Orc in the hierarchy had fears, hates, strengths, weaknesses and even grudges specific to your encounters, affecting both game-play and story behavior. This system was exclusive to new consoles as it ran in real time and relied on the extra processing power; and as such was a showcase of what the new consoles could do.

Other games are pursuing this kind of design as well. WWE2k15; the latest in the series, has a career mode where your wrestlers ability to win is based on how interesting their character arc is. In some cases it's actually advantageous to lose and be the underdog for a while because it improves the long term appeal of that character to virtual audiences. The Metal Gear franchise has always boasted attention to systems that interact with each other, but they're going a step further in the latest series, with a base you must secure that can be broken into by other players in real time while you're away on missions.

All in all this is great news for more traditional gamers because it puts the focus back on the design rather than distracting people with graphics. We can look forward to a whole new generation innovative games that build upon the core principles that the last generation chiseled to perfection, such as shooters and open-world games, now with a cornucopia of extra content augmenting it. If there's any other games that fit the bill let me know, I really want to get into some in-depth games over the holidays.

What new game artist's can learn from old

The visual component of games exists in a very special place compared to other visual mediums. While most art exists with no limitations all of the art in games are limited by the technology of the time. A very interesting dynamic comes into play because of this, because while in normal art mediums perfection is absurd because of the infinite possibilities, the artificial ceiling on game art means that while no game can be visually perfect, it can be the perfect game for the specifications, giving the illusion of perfection.

To achieve this perfection, the artist needs to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the machines they work with, making it a blend of art and science. And only once a generation of hardware has been left behind and all creative avenues exhausted, will the strongest works be clear. An obvious example of this is the style of pixel art; when games were in their infancy and artist could not work in detail, and had to convey the visuals through large blocks of colour. In this article I'm going to focus on a different piece of hardware however: the Dreamcast. And the art: JET SET RADIOOOOOOO!!!

The Game

At Tokyo Game Show 1999, Jet Set Radio was revealed to the world. It was a game about the Japanese punk scene that where players fought for control over Tokyo by spraying graffiti and doing cool tricks with their electric Rollerblades. It was vibrant, lively and made you feel cool. It told the story of a small kid gang expressing themselves in the face of oppression from the literal fun police and presented the protagonists it such a way that you couldn't help but empathize with. And before you knew it you were tagging territory and back-flipping over riot police in the craziest future.

So with this high energy story to tell the question remains, how did they pull it off visually?

The Specs

The Sega was released just after the  dawn of 3D for consoles. There had been alot of stumbling before it in the older consoles, but it was still fairly technically stunted. There was a low amount of polygons in models and this meant smooth surfaces weren't quite there (though developers would definitely try and fail on the xbox and playstation 2). But after years of work in 3 dimensions one thing was clear: you could put alot of bright colours on the screen and big triangles.

The Process

The character concept

So with that knowledge the artist's of Jet Set Radio set about the task of translating their punk style to fit the tools they had to display it. They made very deliberate decisions about each edge and face of the models, and used large blocks of colour to distinguish features, much like the days of pixels. They had the luxury of scale with models though this time thanks to higher resolutions, and so characters didn't undergo spatial deformations. In fact artist liberated by the polygonal style contorted their characters to  possess gangly legs and arms so as to convey the athleticism of the characters.

The character in game. Note the cel-shading rendering technique.

The one liberty they took was in the lighting department. They used some smart rendering techniques to pull off cel-shading, I style of lighting commonly used in animation. This was one of the smartest choices they made in their work, because once people were viewing the art through this lense, they unconsciously disconnected it from reality and stopped making that impossible comparison. Now it was only viewed relative to other animation.

The Results
All these different factors blended to make an art style that stood tallest in its medium and perfectly fitted the music and culture it was trying to portray. If you're into games at all you should check this out; it's cheap its fun and it's visuals are so well tailored to the limits of its time that it still looks great.

If you're interested in picking the game up it can be purchased and downloaded via the Steam game distribution service here. Tell me what you think about it, or any other games that work well within their limits.