Will TimeSplitters 4 Flop?

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Cortez from TimeSplitters holding a lootbox.
The bad timeline

Update: Never mind. Free Radical is dead once again. It is not, after all, time to split. Perhaps it never will be. This essay is still interesting reading though. Well worth a read-through. RIP Free Radical, one of the most abused great game development studios in the industry.

TimeSplitters is a cult classic and for good reason. For many who played it in the glory days of the PlayStation 2, memories of TimeSplitters stir them with nostalgia. In the years since Free Radical went bankrupt, there hasn’t been anything quite like it.

Over a decade later, Deep Silver has reassembled Free Radical Design and set them to work on a reboot of this beloved franchise. This is exciting news for fans of the series, but there is also an air of trepidation.

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Naming the ‘GTA Clone’ Genre

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Grand Theft Auto artwork with the subtitle "clones".

Grand Theft Auto 3 had such a huge impact on gaming that it essentially created a genre of its own. Since then, Grand Theft Auto’s presence in gaming has only gotten bigger and its domination of the genre has remained uncontested. A few competitors have sought to challenge the GTA series. So far, none have succeeded, with most failing to survive the attempt. Other games, meanwhile, have not sought to challenge GTA’s dominance but have nonetheless taken heavy inspiration from the GTA games and created experiences that are recognisably GTA in style yet different enough not to be seen as direct competitors.

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The GTA 4 vs GTA 5 Vehicle Physics Debate

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Accurate representation of driving in GTA 4

Every driving game can be mapped onto a spectrum. At one end are those with arcadey vehicle physics. Vehicles in these games do not handle realistically at all; they are typically cartoonish and deliberately silly. At the other end are those with realistic vehicle physics; these games aim to recreate the experience of driving actual vehicles.

The Grand Theft Auto series has leaned more on the realistic side of the spectrum since GTA 3. The PS2 games featured vehicle physics at their most arcadey, though they were relatively realistic by the standards of the time. The physics and damage models are simple compared to modern GTAs. They would undoubtedly be considered outdated if alternative urban sims such as Watch Dogs and even many dedicated racing games weren’t still lagging behind Rockstar’s earliest efforts.

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What’s the Point of Open Worlds? (MGSV Analysis)

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Fair or not, many gamers have long considered open worlds superior to linear ones. If it can be said that a competition rages between linear and open world games, it has been seen as open world games’ game to lose.

Open worlds promise greater freedom, gameplay depth, replayability, immersion, and content. They allow players to go where they want, do what they want when they want to, approach objectives from any direction, and take a break from the main story to mess around in the world and do side activities. The idea of all this freedom makes it easy for open-world games to generate excitement.

Linear games, by contrast, have long been associated with gameplay limitations, short runtimes, and overly scripted cinematic sequences.

In recent years, however, excitement at the news that a game will have an open world has tended to be more subdued. Excitement is still generated relatively easily, but are now met with more skepticism than ever before.

Many open-world games have been released in the past ten years, plenty enough for gamers to better understand the advantages and limitations of open-world level design. Now is as good a time as ever for game developers and consumers alike to take a step back and ask ourselves: What do we actually like about open worlds, and are they really necessary?

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The Untapped Potential of San Andreas’ Gang War System

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GTA San Andreas’ gang war system had a lot of untapped potential.

In San Andreas, the Los Santos suburbs were divided into territories, each belonging to one of three gangs. The goal was to win territories for your gang until no more enemy-controlled areas were left to launch attacks against you. You killed a few gang members to start a war and then killed three waves of enemies to take the territory. You did this for every territory until everything was yours.

It was a simple system but repetitive. Fighting three waves of enemies became tedious after the first few times. There was no strategic difference between the territories – no rewards for taking one over another. The only effect taking a territory had was that the enemy gang members in the area were swapped out with your own. This was a neat instance of your actions having a tangible effect on the world – but being neat was all the gang war system could achieve. And considering your territories occasionally came under attack, requiring you to defend them personally or lose them, the gang war system could be frustrating. Whether or not you enjoyed San Andreas’ gang war system, it should be easy to see plenty of potential for improvement.

So what improvements could be reasonably made? It’s easy to brainstorm crazy ideas – but broadly speaking, I can identify three prominent areas of improvement that future GTA games or other open-world games with factions could make.

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How Small Scale Battles Made Bad Company 2 Special

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Battlefield Bad Company 2
Still the best Battlefield

The Bad Company spin-off series limited its battles to 24 players on consoles and 32 players on PC. This distinguished the Bad Company series from the mainline Battlefields (the ones with numbers and no subtitles), which focus on large-scale battles involving 64 (and now 128) players.

Bad Company’s smaller player cap was a necessary compromise for the consoles it was developed for back then. Contemporary console hardware couldn’t handle 64-player servers without serious sacrifices. Even Battlefield 3 and 4, both mainline Battlefields, were limited to 32 players on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

At the time, many PC gamers considered the Bad Company series inferior to the Battlefields that had come before for this very limitation. Even I, a console gamer then, thought 64-player servers would improve Bad Company. I was jealous of PC gamers with their beefy rigs, their flowing white hair, and the awesome chaos I imagined 64-player battles to be.

Since every Battlefield following Bad Company 2 has had at least 64 players, it’s possible to look back and ask if I was right. Would the Bad Company series have been better with 64-player servers?

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Multiplayer Games Need Bots

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Apex Legends win screen with NPC meme face on two of the three characters faces
Me and the bot-boys earning that chicken dinner

Bots could never replace actual players.

There’s something about the co-mingled intelligence and stupidity of human players, their skill and lack of skill, their unpredictability, and the awareness that they are real makes them the best multiplayer allies and enemies.

But while bots can never truly replace humans, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot to offer multiplayer games.

(I’m focusing mainly on the FPS genre here.)

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Souls Games Don’t Need Easy Mode

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Dark Souls hollow vs SpongeBob
I’m a goofy hollow yeah

Souls Games Are Not As Hard As You Think

People calling for From Software games to have an easy mode are missing the point: Fromsoft games (which I’ll just call Souls games for convenience from now on) already offer the means to make playing them easier.

Souls games let you summon players and NPCs. If a boss is too hard, you don’t have to fight them alone. Beating a boss this way isn’t as satisfying as beating them yourself, but neither would be beating a boss on easy mode, so it’s a wash.

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Why San Andreas Feels Bigger Than GTA 5 (Map Analysis)

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San Andreas girl with POGGERS face looking at San Andreas map
San Andreas POGGERS

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ map is roughly a third of the size of GTA 5’s Los Santos, yet it somehow feels much bigger.

How big a map feels is obviously subjective. Nevertheless, many people have expressed this view since the post-release hype surrounding GTA 5 began to wear off. Google comparisons between the maps of both games and the sentiment is everywhere.

It’s an interesting quirk of perception. How can a map that is significantly smaller feel larger than a map which is, in fact, nearly three times the size? Is it just nostalgia? Or is there some fundamental and learnable difference between the design of both maps?

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Player Insignificance In Large-Scale Multiplayer FPS

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Planetside 2 soldier confused by chaos
Good luck to this guy lol

Quantity has a quality of its own, but, in the context of player caps in multiplayer first-person shooters, there are limits.

The announcement that Battlefield 2042 would have 128 player servers was met with excitement by many, but almost immediately after release, opinions soured.

This is not to say no one liked the vast increase in player count, nor that it couldn’t have been implemented better. But there are fundamental issues with player counts beyond 64 (the standard cap for ‘large’ multiplayer games) that are not easy for developers to mitigate.

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