First impressions of Trespasser
Trespasser was a game that passed me by when it was first released. Though I found myself aware that it joined the hall of fame of games that suffered from overhype and underdelivery, my knowledge of it was, until recently, best summed up as “that Jurassic Park game with the physics and The Arm”.
With the arrival of proper physics simulations in games (and specifically, their employment as gameplay devices rather than eye candy) in 2004, most prominently in Half-Life 2, I wanted to investigate the lineage of physics in games. A significant new feature like physics opens up a wide landscape of possibilities for its use, so I wanted to gain a better understanding of the feature by looking at which areas of that landscape had been explored before and how successful those ventures had been. Based on my hazy knowledge of the game, Trespasser seemed like a great place to start. A trip to eBay and a mighty £1 (+ shipping) later and my journey to the Lost World had soon begun.
My early experiences with the game have filled me with something approaching awe at just how far ahead of its time it was. Many of the ideas it was experimenting with in 1998 have resurfaced as unique selling points for some of the biggest games of recent times.
At a time when other first-person games were stuck in tight corridors, Trespasser puts you in the role of castaway on a luscious tropical island, wide open areas whose horizons are capped with mountains and ocean and teeming with plants and trees. In this age of polygon exuberance, you have to squint and cross your eyes a bit when you first start playing, to convince yourself to take the mere hundreds of polygons on the screen seriously. But when you pull that off, you find yourself in a landscape really rather reminiscent of Far Cry’s stunning vistas.
There is no HUD. There’s nothing on the screen apart from what’s in the game world (oh, and a bit of tutorial text to start with that somewhat ruins the effect for a while). Ammo for weapons is tracked by the voice of your character - “3 shots left”, etc - after each time you fire. Health (which regenerates when you’re out of danger, much like Call of Duty 2) is displayed as a tattoo in the shape of a heart (in the right place) on your character’s body which slowly fills with blood as you sustain damage. It feels like something of a cliché.to start discussing in vague terms whether the absence of the HUD was ‘more immersive’ or not. For one thing, I’ve gotten immersed in dozens of games with huge quantities of HUD (though in that case I do find it something of a struggle, initially) through to minimal HUDs, so it’s a hard thing to measure, even subjectively. I would say that it certainly felt refreshing and novel and it certainly didn’t have any negative impact on my playing the game. (Some criticism I’ve seen of the feature suggests that it’s distracting to have to look down at your body to check your health in the middle of a fight, but I’m not convinced. Since most of the enemy attacks seem to be mêlée-based, it’s pretty obvious to a player when they’re taking damage and when they should retreat.) I look forward to seeing how the zero-HUD concept is handled in King Kong.
Wait, what was that I said? Health is represented as a tattoo on your character’s body? Since when did player characters have bodies in first-person games? They’re just floating guns, right? In this case, wrong. You look down and you can actually see yourself - a first-person body. Lacking the polygons to display a full body, but possessing the determination to have this feature, the developers struck upon a clever little solution - since you play the role of a girl, your ‘body’ comprises a pair of breasts which obscure the view of anything below them (and thus remove the need to render it). Though I’m uncertain of the benefits of a zero-HUD interface, a first-person body is one of those things that feels really natural. You don’t so much notice its presence, as you mourn its absence when you go and play a game without it. Subtle, but effective. I’d love to see it adopted by more games (even if it does present a formidable technical challenge, in terms of tying model animation to player view and movement with a very high degree of precision). It’s pleasing then to see it being picked up by both Thief: Deadly Shadows and F.E.A.R. recently.
Growing out of this body-concept is the one feature of Trespasser - The Arm - that appears to take what seems an otherwise alright game and turns it into a truly dreadful one. I say “appears” because this feature has thus far prevented me from completing even the first level of the game. The developers decided that a good interface for their physics implementation would be to give a player ‘full’ control over one of their in-game arms. It’s perhaps best if I quote from the game’s manual:
- Reach With Hand: Hold Left Mouse Button
- Grab Object: Hold Left Mouse Button + Right Mouse Button
- Move Arm: Hold Left Mouse Button + Move Mouse
- Rotate Arm: Hold CTRL + Left Mouse Button + Move Mouse
- Rotate Wrist: Hold Shift + Left Mouse Button + Move Mouse
- Drop Object: Click Right Mouse Button
- Throw Object: F
Hold two buttons and move the mouse around to control just one of three aspects of positioning The Arm? As you might expect, doing anything with it is about as practical as performing heart surgery while wearing boxing gloves and about as intuitive as walking when you first try it as a toddler. Trying to pick up an object in the world is tough enough, but apparently I’m expected to aim a gun like this? By looking at where the sights on the gun are and adjusting my wrist as required? While under the pressure of a velociraptor stomping in my direction?
Suffice it to say that I haven’t really racked up a reputation as a fearsome dinosaur hunter just yet. (But I’m glad someone derives some entertainment from my deaths - when I’m slain, the game just leaves me lying there, looking on while the dinosaur that killed me proceeds to toss me around and chomp at me, enjoying his meal - a nice touch on the part of the developers.)
It’s at times like those that you really appreciate the simplicity and elegance of Half-Life 2’s interface with its physics (the gravity gun). However thus far my mission to investigate Trespasser’s implementation of physics (and any other surprises it has in store for me) has been stopped in its tracks by this requirement to relearn how to control my bodily functions. Hopefully there will be more to come when I’ve managed this and made it beyond the first level.
Related reading:
- A postmortem of the game at Gamasutra
- The Trespasser Community remains active and has lots of further reading and information.
