When creating games that involve technology, a question immediately arises among developers: "What they should be? Is it possible to destroy them??». After all, if you make a car model as one piece, like a piece of concrete, the player will feel discomfort and, as a result, will lose interest in the game. However, some games have the main goal of showing the player that he can destroy his entire environment, or build gameplay so that the player is faced with the task of destroying his vehicle. In my first blog on stopgame.ru I would like to show with examples how developers use game mechanics of damage in their projects.
Race to destruction
Racing is a game based on competition between land/air/water vehicles. One of the most ancient genres of games, because if you go very deep, then back in the old days, since the invention of the wheel, people tried to create an ever faster way to move. However, this blog is not about history, but about games, so let’s return to racing games.
FlatOut 2 Smell of engine oil and https://casino-instant.co.uk/mobile-app/ broken parts. Unbridled fun in single player, or car madness with friends. FlatOut is based on a fairly simple goal for the player: “Be the first in the race, or destroy all opponents». Despite the fact that the game is quite old (the first part was released in 2004), it is very popular in its genre, and remembering the destruction of cars, it is ingrained in the memory of many players. And all mostly because of the main game mode – Derby. Just like in real life, derby in FlatOut is a mode in which the winner is the one with the most complete (or at least just remaining) car. The physics of the game allows you to lose the bumper and hood, bend the body from strong impacts, leave the car without wheels, and of course, finish your vehicle to a state in which it can no longer move. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re driving a small sedan or a heavy SUV, but you’re not immune from damage.Thus, in a game where even though the cars had a frame, like a grandmother’s seedling box, the imitation of damage created the effect of the complete destruction of your car, which in turn was liked by the players so much.
Tanks are also transport
At the moment, when remembering games about tanks, players have two games in mind: World of Tanks and WarThunder (in addition to the old tanks on Dandy). Despite their similarity in terms of gameplay, the studio’s game Gaijin Entertainment has interesting mechanics related to damage. In addition to accurately recreating vehicle models, the game has a full-fledged damage mechanic, which directly depends on the location where the projectile hits. Thus, when you hit important elements of the enemy’s takna, you have a chance to destroy him with one shot, instead of shooting an iron box with shells for a minute. After a hit, information about the location of the hit will appear on the player’s screen, and the damaged part will be displayed on the victim’s interface. Having turned a simple registration of a hit into a whole movie, which is interesting to watch both for the average player who knows little about the structure of military equipment, and for experts who have deep knowledge in this field, the company has made a feature that sets the game apart from its competitors and provides an interesting process for tank battles.
Damage to vehicles that did not live up to expectations
Transport in all Grand Theft Auto games is the main component of the game. In all parts of the series, the player had to find, steal, break and improve various cars. Since the game’s transition from an overhead camera to full 3rd person gameplay, the developers have needed to show cars based on existing vehicles in the real world. In addition, weapons are available in the game, of various types and calibers, which, out of interest, or according to instructions, will be used on poor tin cans. RockStar Games thought about this point, and therefore in their games, when you shoot at cars, bullet marks remain on them, windows can be broken, and wheels begin to deflate when hit. Since the advent of three-dimensional graphics, and before GTA V, gas tanks were made in cars, when hit, the car instantly exploded. However, this is where the positive damage mechanics end. With prolonged fire from a weapon, the car will simply begin to smoke, and frequent impacts on different surfaces will simply crush the frame, which is made of a solid box. In the current latest part of the series, cars have more developed damage physics, when colliding with another car, depending on the speed, you will either simply collide with another car or fly out through the front window (which is new for the Grand Theft Auto series), and when you roll over onto the roof, the vehicle no longer ignites on its own, but nothing else new has appeared. Even if you hit a train that is rushing at full speed, you will not split your favorite foreign car into two parts, but will simply bend its body, after which you will calmly drive to the nearest workshop, where you can straighten it.
Another series in which vehicles do not have a realistic damage system is Watch Dogs. The two parts of the game from Ubisoft were received quite warmly by the players until the moment when they remembered traveling by transport. In both parts of the hacking adventures, the cars are pieces of solid concrete, to which wheels and a steering wheel have been added, and which break everything in their path except themselves. The fact is that in real life, cars have a fairly strong design to save the lives of passengers in a collision, but their body can bend even from a simple blow with a hand, not to mention in the collision of two high-speed speed capsules weighing several tons. In Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2, the main character’s cars easily knock down heavy poles in a collision, break other people’s cars, but after that they calmly drive on in the same direction, leaving behind only questions from players and low estimates of a potentially good series of games. And with this I conclude my article. I hope this was interesting to read. I’ll be looking forward to any comments on this topic. And most importantly… Don’t try to repeat tricks from games in real life, always buckle up in cars and follow the Rules of the Road.Thank you.