Falling Down

Ragdoll physics are cool. That’s just stating fact, fact which is clearly proven by the sheer obscene number of games which seem to incorporate it in any way possible. For those of you not familiar with the term, ragdoll physics refers to character animations interacting with the environment independently, as opposed to scripting.

Hack and slasher? Ragdoll physics would really make slicing through the hordes satisfying! Space marine kill-a-thon? What could be better than throwing the desecrated corpses of alien nasties around in zero gravity! Cooking simulator? What a powerful life lesson it would be to send the character hurtling through a wall because they decided to have a cigarette after leaving the gas cooker on overnight!

My point is that a decent physics engine can make the world of difference when making a game; it enhances the feeling of immersion in some ways, making players feel as though they are having a tangible impact on the surrounding environments as opposed to just watching scripted events play out in reaction to a button being pressed.

Take Rage, for example. As a game, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but I, for one, couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing the lovechild of Borderlands and Fallout. This would have ruined the experience for me somewhat, had it not had some of the most fantastic ragdoll deaths ever. There was something unbelievably brilliant about shooting a slavering mutant in the head, and rather than seeing him collapse stiffly as though medusa had challenged him to a staring contest, seeing him stagger over to me in an uncoordinated effort to reach me before his brain finally shut down, rolling head over heels past me and down the stairs, stopping near the bottom crumpled and defeated. It was brutal, realistic, but most importantly absolutely awesome. Fallout was a phenomenal game, I really enjoyed playing it, but I’m sure I can’t be the only person who thought that the physics were a bit crap.

Decent physics engines don’t make the game necessarily, but there is undeniably something about them that gamers generally seem to like.

This is no more notable than in the rapidly growing popularity of the game Sumotori. As a “game” it offers very little that could be called substantial, the controls aren’t bad, but they’re not great, the graphics are so-so, and the levels are varied enough thanks to the saving grace of community made content. But people don’t come to this game for the rich storytelling, the sprawling game world or the innovative move list. No, people who play this game play it solely for the hilarity of watching several cubic men bump into each other and fall about in a display not dissimilar from student night out in Leicester.

And that’s it, no one playing it expects anything more than this, and strangely enough it manages to stand up on this single premise, ragdoll physics.

And it isn’t even the only one of its type; Garry’s Mod is another example of a game that manages to sell unbelievably successfully simply through offering a similar type of environment to exploit the hilarious potential of ragdoll physics. Yes it offers a bit more than that to players with the patience, but I for one generally just pose characters in hilariously compromising positions and then nuke them with explosives and the like, hardly an intelligent way to play it but I doubt I’m the only one.

The thing with this; something which I’m sure will no doubt cause much debate; is that they break the conventional molds of what would classify as a game, your standard formula a la FPS, RPG, LOL etcetera. The completely unstructured nature that leaves us to exploit the physics engine is still fun, and if that much is true then adding this untamed fun to a game with more substance could in theory be nothing but a huge success right?

Funnily enough it seems that there are certain developers that actually agree with this statement, and even choose to base their games largely around it. Given my rant up to this point, you probably think that games like this would see me frothing at the mouth in joy, and that would have very well been the case, had the games I’m speaking off in question been handled better.

The games in question are Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and its sequel. I don’t understand where it went wrong to be quite honest, the games on paper sound fantastic; I genuinely can’t think of a cooler game than one that lets you play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, and when you include the fact that it used the Euphoria engine (at its peak in games like GTAIV or Red Dead Redemption) you literally have a recipe for success.

But, sadly it is a cruel world we live in, and the fate of these games was less than savory, the games felt stagnant, repetitive, and underwhelming to the point of feeling “by the numbers”. When I have the capacity to pick up a storm trooper like a doll and use him as a screaming ballistic missile, boredom should not even be a word that creeps into my mind. Yet it did, and I was.

The games were by no means failures but for me at least they never felt like what they should have been, and that’s a shame because it dumps all over my “all games made better with cool ragdoll physics” theory.

So what can be taken from this? Contradictions seem to be everywhere; games with little to no structure in empty environments seem able to do be better received than games that have some of the best physics engines ever incorporated into mediocre games. It seems that at the very least physics engines aren’t always magic fix all to a game that isn’t great to begin with, more a delicious seasoning that can complement the flavour. Or perhaps more correctly, physics engines are like cake icing. They go perfectly on the cake that is a videogame so long as the cake is relatively tasty, but every once in a while people just like to eat the icing itself.