For the love of seams

These last couple of years one of the big technical improvements in game is the seamless worlds, like World of Warcraft. Everything sticks together without any loading screens and you get the massive feeling of being in a real world.

Some games would greatly benefit from this - like Witcher - where the seams break the pace a lot. But there are also games that makes the most out of the seams instead.

Often these games are referred to as "episode games". You play one part in a confined area with a big "out of game" pause in between. Recently I have played two old games where this is a good thing namely Homeworld2 and Hitman.

Hitman in a seamless world would be a lot like GTA or Assassins Creed. Instead it makes the most of the confined area. The great reward in a game like hitman is the scripted events which are scripted in such a fashion that you don't think they are scripted but more like a stroke of luck.

I climbed a scaffold on the outside of the White house to look into a window. Two carpenters are chatting inside. I hang on for a short while and one of them leaves while the other turns his back to me and continue using his nail gun. I sneak into through the window, just before the marine on patrol below sees me, and sneak up behind the now lonely carpenter with a syringe dripping with a sedative.

A couple of rooms later I look out through the window onto the lawn. As I do this I can see my target, the conspiring vice president, exiting the West Wing to walk the dog in the rain. From the window I have a clear shot with my sniper rifle.

The good thing with these scriptings are that I don’t know where I trigger them and don't have a clue what scripted behaviours I can trigger at the start of the episode. But they make the game feel like a movie where the story unfolds while I progress through the mission.

When gaming is good it is like this. I could rush through ant mission with guns blazing and probably make it out alive. Or I can try to sneak and only hit the marked targets and even make it look like accidents. Most maps can be rushed through in 10 minutes but in reality it takes about a couple of hours since I sneak, fail, get into gun fights and need to reload.

To make it especially worthwhile to play properly is that there are myriads of options to take out the targets. Poison their food? Snipe them from distance? Garrotte the from behind or feed the to the piranhas?

The game facilitates for me in such a way I don’t notice it - only feel like there is a good pace in the story.