The underappreciated art of furniture in video games
hopesandfears.com
hopesandfears.com
Bethesda also added a great (albeit hardly intuitive) base construction feature that allows you to build out dozens of settlements with farms, towns, and even 8-10 story tall skyscrapers which requires raw materials like concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, and adhesives to construct. In order to get these items you have to scrap hundreds of different "junk" objects placed all over the world like coffee cups, random widgets in factories that were in the middle of production when nuclear war hit, typewriters, hot plates, desk fans, cigarettes, children's toys (20th century wooden ones like derby cars and space ships), duct tape, wrenches, and many more every day objects. When you build out your settlements you can even scrap entire collapsed houses, sinks and toilets, cardboard boxes of paper, old rugs and mailboxes, trees, ovens and washing machines and every other obstacle short of bushes and rock outcrops. The result is a world that feels real, not because of any one specific feature but because everything just flows so well together from the furniture to the ineractive junk to the desolate landscape.
As any other multi million dollar projects it has its misteps, but I haven't been this impressed by the stylistic design of a game since Morrowind, another Bethesda game, which also had an absurd number of "junk" items that you could pick up and about half a dozen very distinctive architectural and furniture styles (with their own extensive lore!)
In typical games, most items including furniture are useless and only decorative obstacles, and only a few items like keys have exactly one possible use. If you see something that you can pick up, then you know it must be required for something important and obvious.
Minecraft has crafting and building, but not so much of a scavenging economy of recycling crafted and found items into raw materials -- it's more of a one-way entropic trip instead of a feedback loop.
But Fallout items have more tiers and finer granularity of usefulness than the binary "useless / essential" dichotomy of most games. It has a rich enough set of atomic crafting materials so some are common, some are rare, and most are in-between, but there aren't too many.
There are few enough kinds of raw materials that you can easily learn and remember what items are made of, and it's appropriately challenging to find enough different kinds of resources to craft a wide variety of items of different skill levels.
They've found a nice balance in the number of resource types, that there is a wide range from common easy-to-craft beginner items to unique hard-to-craft expert items, without having too many resource types that it would overwhelm users. To use the entire periodic chart would have been too much, but "earth, wind and fire" would have been too simple.
And it's funny how some items break down, like how cigarettes are made from asbestos, plastic and cloth. There's a lot of social commentary in that form of free speech. http://m.ign.com/wikis/fallout-4/Asbestos
The world is richly decorated in piles of inert but interesting junk, that you'd never give a second though to in most games. But Fallout has a scavenging game aspect to support its crafting game and building game aspects.
Most but not all of the stuff in the world is actually useful to scavenge and bring back to your settlements for crafting more useful items. The user interface displays an item's constituent ingredients so you can know what's worth picking up or leaving behind, and the UI makes it easy to manage junk as its own category of items distinct from weapons, ammo, apparel, etc. You can easily toss all your junk into a crafting table, and it will be automatically broken down on demand when you craft new items that require a certain number of raw materials.
Interesting to watch. The music of DX:HR is also lovely.
DX1's reputation is pure nostalgia. Standards have risen since then and now DX1 is below par.
Deus Ex 1 has still one of the best stories in a video game. It's a lot more complex and awesome you might think. And yes, the game has different endings and the player can decide if the visions of the intro becomes true. The while graphics aged though the gameplay is still great.
Heavy Rain has meaningful interiors with realistic furnishings.[2] They're in scale, they have detail, and they look lived-in.
Most games tend to look under-furnished. Especially ones with big rooms. Worse, in some the furniture is out of scale with the room or character sizes.
[1] http://secondlife.com/destinations/home/furnishings [2] http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-22/hr-ethan-house-kids-...
Even if you don't sit in a chair or less functional piece of furniture like a fish tank, it also serves as an obstacle that affects everything you do in that room, by participating in the A* "maze game" of getting the characters from one place to another and possibly making parts of the room inaccessible.
In more typical shoot-em-up games, furniture also provide cover for ducking behind when players are shooting at each other. Fallout 4 is a lot like The Sims with weapons and radiation, in that respect.
By adding a few strategically placed pieces of furniture, you can increase the time it takes for a character to take a shit and shower in the morning, so they miss their carpool, lose their job, and then finally have to stay home all day and actually have time to sit in the chair.
One of the early working names for The Sims was "TDS: The Tactical Domestic Simulator". As the design evolved, it became clear that building the house and arranging the furniture was an important part of the game, but it was difficult to come up with a way to objectively evaluate the "feng shui" of the architecture.
Will Wright realized that the simulated people could actually play that role in an indirect way by how the physical geometry of the architecture and furniture placement affected their use of time, space, and resulting happiness, etc.
If you can't make it to the bathroom in time because somebody's temporarily blocking your way, you crap your pants and dump a blue puddle on the floor, your personal hygiene score goes down, the room score goes down, and somebody has to spend their time cleaning it up.
That made it less of a materialistic game of simply buying as much stuff as you can to make your characters happy, and more of exercising restraint and leaving enough negative space and open floor and adjoining doors, that the characters can get on with their days, get from place to place without bottlenecks, invite more friends over, mingle around, dance and socialize with each other.
In order to use the toilet, the character has to be in the room alone, so it doesn't make sense to put a toilet in the living room in front of the TV for efficiency's sake, unless you live alone. If other people are in the room when they want to use the toilet, they will attempt to "shoo" them out of the room for privacy.
Here is one of my favorite bugs from unintentional emergent behavior, involving the toilet and the maid:
A dude walks into the bathroom, pixelates his crotch, pulls down his pants, sits on the toilet, and proceeds to take a nice leisurely dump.
But as soon as he pinches a deuce into the bowl, the toilet immediately clogs up and starts desperately advertising that it's dirty and needs to be plunged.
Of course that attracts the attention of the maid, who at the time was blissfully uninhibited, and cheerfully wanders into the bathroom, then reaches around behind her to whip out a plunger from "hammerspace".
Then she helpfully thrusts the plunger into the toilet bowl through the still-squatting dude's pixelated crotch, with the long hard plunger handle sticking up at full attention, and starts vigorously jerking the handle up and down to unclog the toilet while the lucky dude was still sitting on the toilet!
I'll leave it to your imagination what it looked like was really going on...