I was doing a speedrun of The Ark on Halo 3, and I did what I call the “Scarab Jump” to destroy the Scarab. The Scarab exploded, and the framerate dropped tremendously as expected. In the aftermath, there were seven or eight Type-25 Rapid Assault Vehicles (Brute Choppers) waiting for me. There were a few Kig-yar (Jackals) and Jiralhanae (Brutes) waiting for me on the slope to the next area, along with Unggoy (Grunts) and more Brutes directly in front of me using Type-33 Light Anti-Armor Weapons (Fuel Rod Guns).
So what does all of this Halo nonsense mean? Frame rate lag, and a lot of it. I’m estimating that the game was running at about 20 FPS. Ever played anything at 20 FPS? It sucks, though it would’ve been fine if it didn’t stay like that for a few minutes, which is unacceptable for a speedrun. This made me realize why enemy numbers never scaled with difficulty, but rather only accuracy, damage, and defense. It doesn’t make sense that a battles for control over the most over the most important relic in the universe are fielded with a handful of units. At the end of the day, casualties on each side are probably about 100. I can’t help but feel that the XBox 360 would be able to handle more if the the graphic filters were toned down a little.
Games with would-be large-scale battles will have at least one of the two following qualities:
1)Terrible framerate
2)Mobs that do nothing
Anybody who has ever played Kingdom Hearts 2 or the Dynasty Warriors series will know what I’m talking about. The 1000-Heartless Battle is what I’m referring to in KH2. 90% of them do absolutely nothing until you run up to them. In Dynasty Warriors 2 to 6, you can surround yourself with ten enemies on Chaos Mode, and only one or two will try to attack you at the same time.
Dynasty Warriors has always had this problem, though with varying solutions. Nobody really notices the limit on the number of player-mounted animals that are saved during a battle, but MOB pop-up and terrain rendering is VERY noticeable. What then, has undoubtedly changed with every iteration of Dynasty Warriors that chokes the system’s resources? The graphics. I like my games to look nice, but not at the expense of gameplay. I’m fine with future DW games looking like DW3 if it means that I can actually experience the atmosphere of a battlefield in the Three Kingdoms era.
So the next time you see a game with amazing graphics, think about what the system’s resources are being used for and the factors as to why your game may lag every now and then, and why consequentially the A.I. is maybe terrible or erratic. Of course it’s not always the graphics, but personally, how something looks doesn’t affect how I play beyond 2D and 3D.
This reminds me of how with more powerful hardware comes newer revisions of software that whore the same proportion of a computer’s resources, but that’s an entirely different subject.