I had to see the crash before I understood it in its entirety. All afternoon I had been watching a game that seemed made of fascinating bits and pieces. An MMO about exploration rather than levelling. An homage to The Wind Waker and Skies of Arcadia in which you race around floating islands utilising Icarus wings and a grappling hook. A survival game about crafting and salvage in which every part of harvesting and construction is tangible, in which trees are sliced into individual logs that start to roll away from you the moment they hit the ground. As the ideas piled up, as the logs rolled, and as one of the developers I was sat with took the controls of a huge airship and showed me how you could use the craft's in-game control panel to steer it through the clouds, right down to navigating via the artificial horizon sat snug in its brass orb, I pretty much gave up. I caved and asked what Worlds Adrift is actually about. He couldn't really give me an answer.
And then the airship crashed, and I understood.
It wasn't a straightforward crash, but still: one of the developers used a debug command to delete the airship's spine, and I suddenly realised that everything the ship was made of - all the timbers, the battered plating, the cannons, the B-25 engines strapped incongruously on the sides - were separate physics objects, and they all started to fall, collapsing inwards as the skeleton that held them together disappeared.
0 comments:
Post a Comment