As an avid gamer, nothing peeves me more than a mechanic that makes me stop thinking about outplaying the game and start thinking about outplaying the game code. There’s a big difference.
The first requires total immersion, like when you’re jumping from box to box on a Halo 3 map trying to lay down some BR love. You’re thinking about the environment, exactly as it exists in most cases, and how to navigate that environment for success.
In the second scenario the game world is more like a transparent film, like an image of the matrix sitting translucent over the scrolling green code, making real the ideas of the developers without totally masking the developer’s tricks. They want to scare you? Make a monster appear out of thin air. When does it appear? When you walk past that one crack on the floor. That was actually the exact scenario with Doom 3 and what players came to call the “monster closets.” You’d be walking along a space corridor, checking empty corners which have no apparent entry or exit, only to get ravaged seconds later by a monster that appeared in the area because of something you triggered by an event like your placement on the map. It was infuriating to play, in large part because it produced such a predictable gaming experience.
Well id says they’re done with that type of development, and they’ll be adding (gasp!) actual AI to the baddies in their up and comer, Rage. As id’s Matt Hooper put it (with some adjustments for clarity):
[In Rage] when you’re going to the RC-Bomb base [from the demo] to deal with the Shrouded clan they’re doing whatever they’re supposed to be doing. If they’re supposed to be defending against you coming there, they’ll be doing that. If they’re just tinkering or having a conversation they’ll do that. You will never see [a monster closet.]
To which I say, “Thank the sweet baby Jesus.”
