Postmortem: DreamWorks Interactive's Trespasser (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Postmortem: DreamWorks Interactive's Trespasser (1999)

gamasutra.com

51 pointsHooke19 comments

For those who would like to dig deeper, a fellow who goes by ResearchIndicates produced a fantastic documentary-style Let's Play of Trespasser several years ago: https://lparchive.org/Jurassic-Park-Trespasser/

Over the years I've wasted a lot of time watching Let's Plays. I consider the one you've linked to be one of the few upon which I have spent my time wisely.

I remember so many of the games of that time made the exact same mistake: they would focus so heavily on a piece of technology that often just wasn't-quite-there-yet, and yet since that was the game's "thing" (especially since games were hyped so early in magazines), they could never really let it go. With Tresspasser, if they had gone with the initial vision of it being a survival-horror dinosaur game, but they had designed it more like a contemporary like say Half-Life, it's an idea that totally could have worked. Remember how scripted Half-Life was, especially some of those early levels that were almost like standing in a movie? (A new experience back then). I could totally imagine a dinosaur game working with that kind of model and tech. You can imagine showing a JP-style scene where the dinosaurs do something very clever in a controlled environment, and maybe having player's project more into the AI based on that; which would have been a much better investment than a state machine they ended up just having to mostly disable. (I remember people were very complementary of Half Life's AI, but I think it really boiled down to clever level design more than anything). The problem was that while the physics were really interesting, there just wasn't enough there to actually build a game on, and a lot of things that were interesting were awful gameplay wise (the weird floppy arm for instance).

I do have a lot of nostalgia for it though. I remember playing it when I was 13 or 14 on something like a K6-2 300mhz, and as disappointing as it was it was also really interesting.

I've never actually heard of this game until now, even though it was released during my "prime" teenage gaming years.

Reading the retrospective, though, I get the distinct impression that "gameplay" was left as an afterthought. The person being interviewed practically says as much at one point.

A lot of developers make the same cardinal mistake - assuming that some technical point of differentiation is enough to succeed.

The game, first and foremost, has to be enjoyable. It doesn't matter how realistic your physics engine is, how many sound blends your Foley system can create, or even how good your artwork is. There has to be some core, accessible gameplay mechanic that drives the whole game. It's not something you can just throw into the "we'll figure that out later" basket.

There is gameplay actually, but it is more of an adventure game where you are trying to solve environmental puzzles than an action shooter. Action shooters were incredibly popular at the time and anything remotely first person with realtime 3D graphics had the expectation to be one, so that also played a role (remember that even System Shock released earlier was often criticized for essentially not being a Doom clone).

These days there are more games that have similar gameplay where you are trying to solve puzzles with physics and i'm certain a remake of Trespasser that was mostly the same but with more robust subsystems would play great.

The main issue was really that the subsystems that the gameplay relied on were very janky - physics kinda worked (though they worked much better than what the article seems to imply), player control was wonky, IK/animations often spazzed out, etc.

> And finally, from a movie aesthete’s view, the Jurassic Park movies are among Spielberg’s (and original novelist Crichton’s) worst work

Disagree, in the case of Crichton. He wrote a lot of fairly bad books. I doubt I’d find much to agree with in a ranking of them that didn’t place Jurassic Park somewhere in the top half, at least. True that it’s not among Spielberg’s best work but Spielberg’s “mediocre” is still pretty damn good.

In the case of Jurassic Park, I think Crichton's book was a lot better than the movie. One major difference between the two was the John Hammond character. In the movie he's a lovable naive dinosaur-loving manchild who meant well, and survives the movie. In the book, he's a cynical profiteer who brings children to the island in an attempt to emotionally manipulate his critics, and gets devoured by the most petty scavenger dinosaurs at the end. Relating to this, the book puts a lot more emphasis on the disaster occurring due to corporate greed, not science-run-amok.

I think a lot of modern critics of the movie might conclude that Crichton's novel was meant to be anti-science (this viewpoint presumably being reinforced by Crichton's later statements concerning climate science...) however I don't think that's an accurate characterization of the book. In the book the disaster is caused by greedy businessmen who cut corners, while the heroes are scientists who use their knowledge of science to salvage the situation the best they can.

Hammond wasn’t a cynical profiteer. He didn’t care about the money, it was a pleasant after effect. The only thing he cared about was creation. Like a blind god he wanted genesis at all costs.

He ends up terrified of his own creation, startled by a tyrannosaurus roar over a loud speaker. Had he kept his nerve he would have died of old age chasing creation on his secondary projects. That roar pushes him down a hill that puts him in danger of an eternal sleep from compy venom as he tries to climb a hill with a broken ankle. The book ends well killing Hammond and implying the death of Malcolm. It wraps up with nature and science above human control and mathematical chaos, which makes way more sense as a closing piece than letting it go on forever like the films.

I think it's obvious, and I even believe he is on record confirming this, that Spielberg saw something of himself in Hammond. As such he wanted the character to be more sympathetic and more of a showman than someone in it for the money in the movie.

I remember reading about trespasser in a game magazine as a kid. The promises were high, an open world sandbox game with realistic physics was unheard of at the time.

Then the reviews came and I remember that they were quite disappointing. I never played the game in the end.

I do remember that the game had one novelty: you could see your own body as a player when you looked down. And since the main character in the game was female, you had some boobs to look at. On one of the breasts there was a heart shaped tattoo that was your health indicator.

Too bad the reviews put you off.

Despite major flaws, it was a fun game, and incredibly impressive back then. Way ahead of its time in certain regards.

You could shoot stuff out from under things and make them collapse realistically. If you shot a dinosaur on a hillside, his corpse would roll down. If you picked up a heavy object and swung it hard enough at the right moment, you could use it to fend off smaller dinosaurs. The bugs on the other hand were hilarious. E.g. if a wooden board got stuck in a door, closing that door might make the board turn at such speed that it slapped you to death on the spot.

It also had a very different take on inventory management for the time:

You could carry two weapons, and there were no reloads. So you had a submachine gun with most of a magazine left and a shotgun with two shells when you ran across a big ol' revolver with five rounds.

The SMG had a lot of ammo but only really worked against small dinos, the shotgun didn't have much ammo but it takes down most things with only a few hits.

Do you ditch either for the revolver (powerful, low ammo) or do you chance it with what you've got?

Now I can't help seeing the potential of the lever as a mechanism for a DIY suicide booth. Not the cheapest method in material or effort, though—if one wishes to ensure the efficacy.

Not sure it's a bug, though: I think I've experienced a variety of ‘stepping on a rake’-style effects back in the day, of differing severity.

Sounds like it was the No Man's Sky of 1999.

Trespasser was raw unadulterated ambition. As a teenager when it landed over twenty years ago, I eagerly anticipated its release only to let down by the tedium of the end result. But you could sense the future in it.

At the time, I couldn't help but dream of a day when virtual reality headsets would arrive to make such a game feasible and fun. In took a while, but I'd vouch that the recent game Boneworks (https://store.steampowered.com/app/823500/BONEWORKS/) is a contemporary reincarnation of Trespasser.

My take on this sort of physics-based game design now? it's feasible, if not quite fun. Yet.

Side note: Seamus Blackley, the producer of Trespasser, went on to become a key player in the creation of the XBox gaming console.

This audio technique sounds interesting, has it been used in other games since, or are higher-fidelity techniques now used?

> Another major system for Trespasser was its audio system, which we described as "real time Foley" because of its ability to generate collision and scraping effects between differing sound materials in real time. Although the system could have used more sound material data, even with what it had it resulted in some wonderfully immersive sound effects which most other games do not duplicate - things like scraping a board down a concrete surface or hitting an oil barrel with a metal bat sound just about perfect. Since the system doesn’t simply play two sound effects but actually chooses from a group of samples and sets volumes based on the underlying physics collision, it sounds much more natural than most other audio systems currently used.

Foley mixing is still the state of the art in the majority of cases, but there is a lot more DSP power to throw at spatial positioning and acoustics, which makes the resulting mix a lot smoother.

That's really interesting that the biped physics were originally intended for Terranova. I played that game a lot in 1996, and stole some ideas for levels from it for another game. Looking Glass was a great studio.

AVGN (Angry Video Game Nerd) has a fantastic episode on this video game. https://youtu.be/15pi8vrUx9c

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