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Of Jetpacks and Skis

Being the sort of person that the mass media point to every once in a while while on the topic of violent games and go "He's what we're talking about!", a few days ago I was looking for something to soothe, or rather cater to, the savage beast within me, and so started hunting for first person shooter demos that would dispense the necessary amount of adrenaline to satisfy the fix that I so badly needed. And after a bit of hunting I rediscovered the Tribes Vengeance demos.

Also being the sort of person that people point to and say "He's what we're talking about!" while on the topic of nerds, I promptly started reading about the Tribes series as a whole after playing through and thoroughly finishing the two single player demos. And it was then that I discovered that according to the collective wisdom of Wikipedia that fans of the original Tribes games considered themselves to be playing the only true 3D first person shooter.

Also being the sort of person that can be entertained for a good amount of time by a Word Processor, this got me thinking about subject that I just spent an entire paragraph talking about earlier. But just so I don't alienate everyone else that isn't essentially a scholar when it comes to the Tribes series, I should probably just give a quick introduction to it (That was probably a bit of a stretch, really. I'm really not well versed in the Tribes mythos so I should probably stop talking like I am one.)

While there's a colossal amount of galactic history behind the Tribes series, all you have to know is this. There are jetpacks. These jetpacks are attached to people and this makes the aforementioned people fly. The aforementioned people, also aforementioned twice before, now having the aforementioned jetpacks attached to their aforementioned backs, decide that, quite logically, the thing to do would be to shoot other people with similar jetpacks while flying around (both of the groups of aforementioned people are doing so) while stealing the flags of the other group of aforemntioned people. But grammatical purity aside, the point of the Tribes series is team based objective driven games that also introduce one very important element: mobility.

Everyone in the game has a jetpack and, from Tribes 2 onwards, a set of skis that can be magically summoned to their feet by the touch of a button, though the characters in game don't seem to have to do anything at all, so we can only assume that the skis are in fact clairvoyant, and both are used to traverse massive, sprawling environments that usually consist of many very conveniently smooth hills and mountains. Jetpacks allow the player to gain altitude, while the skis allow players to take advantage of their gravitational potential energy by skiing down hills once they have ascended to the necessary altitude.

This, as you really shouldn't be imagining instead of actually doing so, is immensely fun. About half the fun (correct to about as many decimal points as is really needed) comes from traversing terrain, while the other half can be attributed to everything else. In other words, without jetpacks and skis, an incredibly bizarre combination that has never really been brought together in anything else other than in conversations that end in "that would be awesome" before this series, Tribes simply wouldn't be Tribes. It might still be called Tribes, but there would be a lot less jetpacks and skis, which really isn't the point of the game that would have existed. Never mind, forget that. The point is, the jetpacks and skis contribute a lot to the fun.

And seeing as how hardly any other games have really truly adknowledged the y-axis in game environments at all, one (I'm assuming that this is the current population of people reading this, sadly inclusive of me) has to conceded, at least to a certain degree, that the bold proclaimation made by Tribes fans is somewhat justified. While just about every game that comes out these days (Specifically which isn't really important, since the phrase "these days" seems to be completely acceptable even though the actual amount of days that is meant isn't specified at all. People just seem to understand what you mean and nod their heads in agreement.) don't really focus on vertical movement as much as Tribes did, despite the fact that a good amount of y-axis' are available for use. The 3D aspect of most games seems to be limited to where you aim, but the sensation of being able to move up and down has pretty much just been limited to jumping, usually to a meagre height that would warrant exasperation from the protagonist of Narbacular Drop. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narbacular_Drop) The technology of 3D environments seems to have taken a somewhat passive role in actual gameplay.

Which raises the topic of technology and gameplay. Why aren't technological advances, such as the physics engines of today's games, being more heavily implemented into gameplay? While the common expectation that something must move the moment it is hit in a game exists, this doesn't seem to have much of an effect in gameplay, other than the fact that it simply feels unusual and morally incorrect if a cardboard box refuses to yield a shower of bullets that would otherwise invoke a good and healthy amount of screaming from any enemy. It seems to be a practice that is done in game development simply to establish the fact that the game in question is clearly a next-gen game. But what if this technology was implemented into gameplay as a core element?

Portal, for instance, that probably doesn't need anymore polish from me on its critically acclaimed nails than it already has, took advantage of 3D environments and physics as a core part of its gameplay. Momentum, velocity, perspective were all elements of a brilliant game that could only have been done on an 3D engine with proper physics. Call of Duty 4 is another, with a proprietary physics engine with bullet penetration physics and a lot of other things that sound very impressive built into the game, that had an actual impact in gameplay. Cover was no longer something that you could simply loungue behind for very long because of its tendency to disappear after a while.

Physics engines are taking on a the role of an Edwardian chimney sweeper, poor and unnoticed and simply begging for more. We've all spoken of the fabled cone headshot incident in Halo 3 in hushed voices, something that wouldn't have been possible without today's physics engines, and while Bungie, in its intellectual torpor, hasn't had the good sense to take advantage of that IP, why not someone else? A game that implemented launching grabbing and tossing things at people would be very welcome at this point, and the fun derived from using the Gravity Gun from Half Life 2 is a testament to that. Physics engines are there to be made of use of, and we can't possibly pass by our duty to do so, can we?