The Next Evolutionary Step

For the past year and a half, I’ve put videogames aside and decided to take school just a little more seriously. Why? Because not only did I make the tough decision to apply to grad-school, which requires a different gamut of classes, from the department I want to pursue my M.A. in, but I also wanted to finish strong. Both of the above I have done.
So, with the purchase of my new graphics card and “Battlefield Bad Company 2” I find myself doing what I always did prior to buckling down: claiming sanctuary in the only holy place in my house and the only area of my humble abode my family would grant me asylum: my room.
Yes, between writing for the “CV Weekly” during the day and working late nights on the weekends I spend my twilight hours shooting down brick walls and machine gunning down my opponents.
First and foremost: the world must know of BFBC 2! Why? Because it’s guiding gamers down an avenue which is slowly becoming the path all video games are taking and that is: destructible environments.
Total destructibility has been only a recent addition to videogames and for good reason. Prior to our graphics cards becoming super computers and our processors doubling or quadrupling in cores our rigs didn’t have a grasp of the technology required to make the calculations that would cause a wall or building to tear apart piece by piece.
One of the most crucial variables in a videogame is the obstacle. Take the obstacle out of a video game and you no longer have a video game. By obstacle I mean anything that obstructs the path of a gamer when in a game. The obstacle can be a wall like in “Mirror’s Edge” or something as simple as a Big Daddy in “BioShock.”
But the advent of destructible environments has the potential to completely reinvent how the user approaches obstacles. Videogames are changing and my bet is that the Frostbite Engine is the proto-engine for all games to come.
Just think of it like this, if we were to use the rat in a maze analogy then we would find that yes: games in the past have implemented soft spots in the maze that have been preset by the programmer to destruct on mark. But what if said rat in said maze could claw a hole of any dimension in any wall of the maze. Or what if collapsing one wall had a ripple effect on all the other walls in the maze?
I’m not just talking about collapsing bricks in a physics demo, I’m talking about cracks, splinters and shards all unique to how and when an object falls. Even the new expansion to “Empires: Total War”, “Napoleon: Total War”, has tweaked its gaming engine to allow crater formations when a cannon ball impacts on earth.
And what about Nvidia’s PhysX application? Granted for the time being, it’s only being used for aesthetics but the application has the capacity to support all the things that the Frost Bite Engine does.
On top of all the video game theory I just laid out, one of my philosophies when playing Bad Company 2 is: why go down the road when you can carve your own path? The possibilities in destructible environments are endless.

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Hellgate: London's Afterlife

I own two copies of Hellgate: London. Both of them are sitting in my closet, neglected, with little chance of ever being pulled out again to be installed on a PC. Sure, the game has a single-player mode, but the defeat of Flagship studios and the loss of Hellgate: London game servers in the United States left me relatively disheartened, and certainly not in the mood to play alone.

Hellgate: London had some great graphics. It had a great combat system and the perfect mix of Action and RPG. But the launch of the game brought with it a ton of bugs, a few unpolished design elements, and a sadly disappointed community. The strengths the game had, though, were enough to keep it living long after it was dead.

First off, there is a site called hellgateus that houses a group called Hellgate: Revival. Their main goal is to bring Hellgate back to the US with a bit more dignity than the game was left with when it was abandoned here. They plan to do this by doing two things:

Modify existing Hellgate: London Single player modes (which are still very playable) so that they have the same content and updates that multiplayer modes had and were going to have received had Flagship not tanked.

Bring LAN gameplay to Hellgate: London.

They have even gone so far as to establish a timeline for these goals, and have done a great job meeting their dealines thus far; first goal has all but been accomplished. They have various single-player patches available for download here.

The most recent update to their patch was released on February 14th! This is good news, as it shows the project is very active and alive.

With plans to have LAN play fully functional by 2011, the development is certainly moving along at a pace that can be expected of a mod project like this one, but there may be one thing that will bring this project to a screeching halt:

Hellgate: London is not really dead. It simply decided to stop living in the United States. At least for now.

Hanbitsoft had acquired SouthEast Asia publishing rights to the game and has been successfully running servers in Korea. These servers are still running to this very day. So, Hellgate is still very much alive in Korea.

In addition to this, Hellgate: Tokyo was recently announced and will be launched on March 16, 2010. Relatively little is known about the continuation of the Hellgate story. It takes place in Japan and will bring a few changes to the game in addition to location. All I have to say is that I really hope they do a good job improving the many factors that added to the monotony of the first title.

Hanbitsoft plans on bringing Hellgate back to the United States and Europe, but they will need to do quite a bit for the game to overcome its reputation here. I, personally, would love it if Hanbitsoft were able to pull it off.

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