I'm deeply interested in how this small work will play out, and will hopefully show all of our abilities to work on our own. The title for this 'MANCHESTER' and this is partially my theme for architecture and structure of the world. I'll be looking into Liverpool for photograph materials, alongside my photographs from Manchester.
Overall Idea/Theme
I've recently been playing Dues Ex: Human Revolution and Half-Life 2. Both games I've never played before. I've been playing these because they are games that I've been putting off playing, and also I thought that playing these will help me with this project. Here are my first thoughts on playing both games.
Initial thoughts on Dues Ex: HR
I haven't really enjoyed the game-play of Dues Ex at all. The aiming is awkward, and some of the controller layout feels strange, this doesn't give the player a huge deal of freedom in how the game is going to be played out in my opinion. If the player goes with a straight forward attack plan, I found that I was dying countless times. After playing with this method I tried using stealth and this is where the game-play became interesting, and gave me a real chance to explore the levels. This worked greatly and I was then thoroughly enjoying my time with the game. After doing the first mission I then ventured into the streets, and was literally walking around for hours just exploring and listening to conversations that NPC's was having. I felt as though this was a fully functioning world, with people full of their own thoughts and views, this got me intrigued in the whole Augmentation conflicts and gave me my own thoughts and opinions on the matter.
The city also had a huge amount of stuff to explore and I found myself breaking into any apartment to just see if there was any interesting eBooks or a computer to hack. These small notes and e-mails I was discovering was helping me explore - by giving me interesting things to read, that had only a small impact on certain things within the world, but gave a new view or sometimes spoke of the ongoing conflicts that I was hearing throughout the city.
All of this was constantly rewarding and it didn't feel like a chore - in which some games such tasks do feel like this, such as Assassin's Creed, in which exploring the city was needed to help transverse, but it didn't give me such a feeling and enjoyment that I was having with HR.
Initial thoughts on Half-Life 2
I haven't spent as much time as I have with HR with HL2, and there isn't any reason for this.
HL2 is a much different game, and does some very similar things to do with HR. It gives the appearance of freedom, but I felt as though I couldn't just wander the streets and have the same enjoyment, I felt as though I had to move towards the vague objective that I had. This is very similar to some of Valves other games. In Portal 2 I felt like I was exploring these large and impressive environments, but I knew that I was moving in pretty much a straight forward path. There isn't any problems with this and it gives a much more straight forward experience.
One thing I loved about HL2 was the Citadel which was always in view, it is such an icon in that world. With it always being in view, it was used a place to look at to know where I was going.
Idea Time
After all of that I've finally chosen what I want to do with this project, and that it try and create a environment/level that will be full of interesting things for the player to do, but while trying to keep on a much smaller scale than both of the above games. I'm not entirely sure about the objectives/story for this yet, but I want to go in the direction of these and use the time spent with each game to my advantage and try and push forward some of my own ideas.
I think the environment will have steam-punk themes, but I want this to feel more futuristic, but still keep to the themes and appearance of steam-punk. I'm not sure if I want this to be a totally different timeline to our own, or keep this based in Manchester and Liverpool with a whole new take on there locations and address some of the history of each city. Liverpool was a huge participant in the slave trade during when this was allowed, and maybe this would be used to help pick the theme and view of characters within this idea.
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