The Details of Dead Bodies in Gaming

Via Stephen Totilo's Second Player blog, his most recent post at MTV concerns dead bodies in videogames. This rather morbid topic may seem like a small concern, but it's a big deal for the people making the games. From the article: "Dead bodies have been vanishing in games for decades because of technical difficulties. Old 2-D games -- like just about anything on the original Atari, Sega and Nintendo systems -- could only display a limited number of character graphics, or sprites, on a TV screen at one time. Letting a zapped enemy lie prone on the playing field caused problems, limiting the amount of new things, like new on-rushing enemies, that could be drawn onto the screen. 'You would end up sacrificing one of your precious moving objects to display an essentially useless dead body,' [game designer Ralph] Barbagallo said." With the advent of the newest generation of consoles, Totilo explains, we now have the luxury of corpses as far as the eye can see.

Total War.

[maroberts]

AFAIK, the Total War sequence of games has no problem tracking dead bodies, and there may be thousands of them!

Certainly Rome:Total War leaves the dead on the battlefield, even if they are simplified. Even missiles, such as arrows are tracked into the ground and only disappear after a while.

I fail to see the problem with letting the dead pile up, they're just objects like everything else.....

Re:This will surely improve DOOM

[My Iron Lung]

There certainly were corpses in DOOM.. they just looked the same from every direction!

Re:Thief

[Kelbear]

They were also around in Hitman games, I never cared for the silent assasin, stealth, 1-kill-and-exit approach. I just killed everybody and piled up the dead in the bathroom. Good times.

Die by the sword had persistent corpses, along with dismemberment. So you could cut off a kobold's head, throw it at it's partner, then hack off the kobold's limb to beat the partner to death with it. Fun.

Re:Thief

[Lehk228]

there was a bug in the game. if you let a guard chase you through a door, shut it and stand part way blocking the door. as soon as it starts to open the head pokes through the door and you can hit the model with your blackjack, but the line of sight test to make sure you KO with the blackjack tests from the other side of the door and so you can KO dozens of guards in a row at a door.

Re:Realism

[antime]

In the old C64 game Nemesis the Warlock [c64.com] you had to pile up corpses to make platforms to reach high parts of the levels. In some levels this was the only way to reach the exit.

Re:UOZaphod

[Cervantes]

Yep, Mage, that's it!
Nice game, I liked the open system... it wasn't "learn this spell to do this many points of this damage to that opponent"... it actually gave a chance to use some creativity in the game.

Re:Yeah That's Always Bugged Me...

[Speck'sBacon]

For a console game that gets this more or less right, see Metal Gear Solid 2 and up (and the GameCube MGS: The Twin Snakes). Bodies can still disappear for garbage collection under 2 conditions:

• The body is discovered by a guard, who presumably checks the body's pulse, and when he finds him dead, the body is cleared from the playfield, and he guard radios in the alert.
• The body was a member of an attack team sent in to find and attack your character during an alert. The bodies are cleared to keep from cluttering the area, and to make consessions for RAM limitations since reinforcements will continue to arrive for each attacker killed until a preset limit have been taken out, or you manage to elude your pursuers for a set amount of time.

Soliders will notice the dead or unconscious, and react accordingly, so hiding these dead or KOed soliders in lockers, dumping them over the side of the ship, or hiding them behind those crates over there, etc. becomes important. And if you opted to go non-lethal, you need to often act quickly since the soldier will wake up at some point, and either call in an alert, or go back to his partol route (depending on how he wound up unconscious). There are limitations, but the developers worked well within them I think.