One problem with the first-person gaming perspective is that some people find it too disorienting to be playable. Fast-paced action moving across a screen can send vertigo-prone gamers’ heads spinning from motion sickness. The six degrees of freedom in the original Descent helped fill many barf bags—and is, no doubt, one of the reasons we don’t see many fully open 3D shooters developed. Instead, developers make concessions, such as the shift to the third-person perspective, the “flattening” of game environments, and, most recently, tweaks to accommodate gamepad-wielding console gamers.

Downplaying verticality in shooters is a terrible waste of potential. If you think about it, most modern shooters, though they’re rendered in three dimensions, are actually played out on two-dimensional planes. Generic firefights in warehouses, space stations, and even outdoor terrain are usually fought with your character firmly planted on equal footing with your opponents. Sure, level designers will occasionally break up flush map design with sloped areas or sniper sequences that require you to aim a few “floors” above or below the horizon, but for the most part, these games are stuck in the same kind of 2.5-dimensional shooting  introduced in the original Doom.


To avoid vertigo, the devs of Mirror’s Edge recommend fixing your eyes on a single focal point. Guess where we’re looking?

That isn’t to say there haven’t been any games that make good use of heights and vertical space. Portal and Prey come to mind, both premised on dizzying violations of the laws of physics. But while tears in spacetime and anti-gravity platforms are nifty level design twists, I think game design that simulates gravity and physics as we know it is more accessible and exhilarating, because our minds naturally understand the consequences. If I jump or fall off a 500-foot-high in-game ledge, I don’t want to be saved by anti-gravity boots or logic-defying portals. And I want to be firing guns while taking the plunge (like Trinity in The Matrix Reloaded), which is why Assassin’s Creed doesn’t fit the bill.

Fortunately, two free-falling shooters in development may satiate my desire for vertigo-inducing vertical duels. The first is Dark Void, a third-person sci-fi shooter I had a chance to play at this year’s E3. In development by the makers of the Xbox game Crimson Skies, Dark Void seamlessly combines the cover-based ground combat style of Gears of War with flight-based dogfights. In one short sequence I played, my Rocketeer-like character blasted through the hollowed-out interior of a mountain base, then leapt into the air at the summit with a sputtering jetpack to hijack an alien saucer ship. In another gripping sequence, a feature called “vertical cover” had me scaling the side of the mountain while taking cover underneath rocky platforms to dodge falling debris and the numerous enemies above me. This refreshingly innovative use of gravity and verticality didn’t just look cool—it added new dimensional challenges to what would otherwise be just another standard Gears clone.

The other game I played at E3 that emphasized verticality was Mirror’s Edge, a first-person free-running game I’ve talked about before in this column. I previously expressed my skepticism about the game’s ability to deliver a fun experience with gamepad or keyboard/mouse controls, but my fears were assuaged after some hands-on time. It’s definitely going to be a nauseating experience for some people (a wider-than-normal field of vision and “focus dot” in the HUD will try to counteract motion sickness), but I absolutely loved the thrill of barreling off the top of a skyscraper and then barely surviving by grabbing a rail on the side of an opposing building. Dark Void and Mirror’s Edge will help the shooter genre fulfill its three-dimensional potential, even if a few gamers have to hurl for it to happen.

August 25, 2008