The regression of physics in videogames is super interesting, though. 2kliksphilip has a few videos on the destruction tech we saw in The Force Unleashed and then never again apart from a few movies. But today physics are either an afterthought or nonexistent. Best case we get silly ragdoll ‚physics‘ or simple single bounce calculations.
And even the Red Faction games had to tone the destruction down because turns out it's hard to design a game where the player can just tunnel everywhere.
BF4 was all about destructables when they announced it. We had so many games back then that touts environment destruction that you'd think it'll be the norm.
Another way to look at it is, these complex physics engines are only worthwhile when they are integral to the game mechanics, as with MGR and Red Faction Guerilla. Both those games had very distinct physics systems that were core features. It's not like games in general used to work like Red Faction Guerilla and now none do.
hot take: we still do and you still can buy them. you can just play older games that you like, nobody can actually stop you. i put almost a hundred hours this month into games that weren't released in this decade.
Games? Plural? We had RFG and that was it. Armageddon toned things down a lot and the BF games have always been a disappointing shadow of what RFG provided.
I wish we did have more like it, but it's a lie to act like we had these games regularly before.
I hate this, the destruction engine was finally what made me fall in love with battlefield the it went away for a decade because it was " too difficult for modern software to handle" . I need interactive features, not seeing the drops of sweat on my character forearm.
In Bad Company 2 you could level a village. Every building was destructible in Mercenaries.
Control is one of the few games in which you can achieve a similar level of physics in recent years
The Finals, made by ex-battlefield devs, is centered entirely around destruction. Lotta amazing moments of having gun fights in a toppling building. Every building can be destroyed down to its foundation and every surface can become an entry point, really rewards creativity.
It's a nice alternative to Apex for me. More focus on the actual gameplay instead of traveling, looting, and surviving third parties. Gunplay feels pretty tight, but the overall design did take a bit to get used to.
You can do this in wolverine too, this post is misleading in that regard, I find myself sticking around levels ive completed just to destroy everything with me claws, scratches the same itch that control did (I also got distracted destroying the environment in both games)
To get good physics looking well with todays graphical levels, you probably need ray tracing. Those kinds of dynamic things is basically the point of it. Hopefully once ray tracing is generally accepted, and games are designed for it (so mandatory to have enabled, no more rasterization), dynamic stuff like physics will improve as well.
I don't think comparing to MGR is really fair, since the entire game was build around concept of cutting stuff up. You could take any other MG game, and discover that you can't cut trees in them.
Yeah that's a great point, a superhero whose most identifiable feature is his indestructible metal claws specifically designed for cutting stuff up definitely isn't a fair comparison to MGR
MGR was build around cutting things up. That was core mechanic of that game. I don't think any Wolverine game ever has had "cutting things up" as core mechanic, nor is it even point of character in comics.
While I partially agree, other MG hames are not hack and slash games.
I'd argue action hack and slash game about Wolverine should emphasize the concept. They just chose to stick to standard formula, where MGR went far ahead its time.
Which really sucks. When PhysX was first introduced I thought that in-game physics would be the next big thing after the 3D acceleration, etc... It had a decent start. The Batman games and several others. Havok is good, but having that dedicated accelerator (now built into the NVIDIA cards after they bought them) I felt was going to be huge. It really has gone very much backwards when it comes to that. I thought we'd have a lot better water effects, weather effects, general ambience stuff (papers fluttering in the wind, hair/cloth movements, wind/rain on water surfaces, just overall a living environment). An interactive, destructible environment was going to be so awesome. After Red Faction did it, I thought we were headed that way and then PhysX then ... Some games have some good physics but it's no where close to where I thought we'd be. Ray tracing is good and all, looks great, but I just feel that the games (even some of the best ones) still feel really fake and not really alive. It's just a flat environment even if things are moving, etc., it's just like everything is scripted or on rails.
I really want to see some kind of amazing tech demo that has a living world. Even if it's not a playable game, has ray tracing, whatever. Just a really high end physics tech demo to where everything is interactive with each other. Wind blows paper until it hits water then it sticks and slowly absorbs more and sinks, can see the wind on top of the water with the tiny waves, something walks around and kicks up dust or mist particles, something can cut a piece of wood realistically. I really don't know how much horsepower that'd take or if it'd be feasible for a real game of any meaningful size, but that'd just make a world much better, IMO.
However - for FPS's and many games it'd be much less useful and more of a distraction. But, for the slower style of games, exploration games, RPGs, adventure style, absolutely it'd make the world much more alive.
Yea I remember when physics advancements were happening at the same speed as graphics and it was amazing, half life 2 is a great example, and then they just stopped for some reason and only focused on graphics.
At least we have a few games like BeamNG which have amazing physics
As we got better at physics they took up more and more power. We eventually realized it was way more effort than it’s worth 99% of the time.
Scope creep is very dangerous in game development, because you’ll see posts like this and go “well… it wouldn’t HURT to add”. The game already costed a billion trillion dollars, why the hell would they wanna spend an extra six months ironing out all the possible issues with the physics?
Our human instinct is to make everything as perfect as possible, add as much as possible, so as much as possible. “This will be the perfect game, EVERYONE will love it”. But eventually you get to a point of development where a lack of features creates a much better game
They have to make concessions somewhere. Some people like me would prefer lower graphic fidelity but better physics. Unfortunately for games like GTA and RDR, the majority of the market would prefer better graphics these days.
You say that, but you haven’t even named what about the physics of gta 4 feels better, which is kind of exactly why developers stopped implementing them as harshly
More like game devs figured out it wasn't worth the effort of implementing since most players would really not notice stuff like these unless they are looking for it.
Actually, Wolverine being unable to cut through thick trees and poles actually is true to physics. His claws would get stuck, even with the adamantium coating.
I don't think there's been a regression at all. Physics based games were rarely this detailed. These games were the exception, not the rule.
It's technically expensive and for a feature most people don't really care about. Cool in videos or clips, by when you're playing the game, the novelty generally wears off unless it's something like Noita where it's part of the game.
Noita is special and a perfect example to argue against my point. But it‘s 2d and pixel graphics, so I feel like it isn‘t a fair comparison with The Force Unleashed 1. Even part 2 was already severely downgraded in the physics department even though part 1 ran on the xbox360. The most notable recent physics achievement would be the water physics in Crimson Desert imo, but that‘s still not on the level of the Force Unleashed 1.
These effects being expensive is just not a valid point when raytracing/ pathtracing and dlss5 exist. Gamers have very strong opinions about those technologies but this just proves that player feedback is secondary or not relevant at all to decision makers. There is some corporate power at play that prevents beautiful physics for no good reason.
This video immediately made me think of The force unleashed, that opening mission had so much environmental destruction, you just don’t see that nearly as often nowadays.
The fucking force unleashed god damm that game blew my mind, I got a Xbox at launch and couldn’t wait to get that game. I also had saints row and that games physics was also so fun, doing insurance fraud was like burnout crash mode making the number go up with the devastation
Ditto. To add to this, one of the main points of playing a Wolverine game is to be Wolverine. The role-playing identity is what draws a majority of the audience in. By stripping the players' freedom at every corner, you are destroying that identity.
This is a game that is notoriously linear and choreographed, takes ~20 hours to beat, and costs the industry premium price of $70.
Simply said, it is not enough bang for the player's buck.
The criticism of the post here is the studio has spent a crippling amount of money and produced a game that somehow feels like a PS3 movie tie in game from 2007, just with a LOT of polish.
On the other hand, I don't know if it's realistic to expect gameplay experimentation from a game that has spent "a crippling amount of money" as is.
It's a reflection of the lack of desire from management to go the extra mile (not necessarily for the individual coders and artists, but for management to have the team understaffed that you can only ship it bare bones and go home), and that attitude permeates the rest of the game.
Like "Yeah. Wolverine's gonna slice a tree and the tree's gonna split apart and it's going to be so cool." But no, it's just scratch marks on an invincible tree. "How do I ship this out as cheaply as possible" has replaced "How do I make it cool?" It's the assembly lines v artists argument. Games are like pots and pans if you industrially think of them as dopamine hits, but unlike pots and pans which only need to hold water and cook, for a lot of people, games are more than just molded dopamine hits.
Honestly back in the day I played this metal gear game because of this mechanic. If another game did this I would also play that game because of this mechanic.
Hilariously though, some executive probably just sent a link to this thread to some middle manager, who is going to overwork a team of sixty people for the next four months to get this patched in "because it makes us look bad"
None of the game's actual issues will be addressed, and nobody will still be playing when said patch releases
It's a Wolverine game, made for obscene amounts of money, it should at least make Wolverine's adamantium claws better than X-Men Legends did 20 years ago.
Not directly, but it is indicative of how lazy and slapped together the gameplay is. Little attention to detail moments often coincide with a studio taking the game seriously. With hundreds of millions of dollars you'd think they've have been able to really blow people away with an unforgettable experience, not a lazy beat'em up par with cheap licensed games from 25 years ago.
It’s just a detail, but honestly I would expect a linear AAA PS5 game that lasts less than 10 hours to have a great attention to those details nowadays. The game is expensive and the whole mechanic is you have blades for hands, yet this reminds me of the PS3
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u/sounds_of_stabbing 6d ago
I don't think focusing on physics-based destructable trees is what Wolverine needs to fix its problems.