Why Do Games Still Have Levels?

a.d.venturer writes "Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 - when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Angband)? Why do games still have levels?"

Yawnfest

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't give -- what most Western Civilization scholars would term -- a flying fuck about this topic.

(But I cared enough to share it with you, losers.) CHECKMATE.

Re:WTF

[QuantumG]

Did you say elevator?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/16 [penny-arcade.com]

Re:WTF

[ninjapiratemonkey]

Except that while you are riding in this elevator, in first person, the game locks your ability to move, and a box in the middle of the screen shows up that says "LOADING..." but you know, maybe that's not a load screen, maybe it's just part of the plot, and GLaDOS temporarily poisoned you with neurotoxin or something...

Why do Books Have Chapters?

[InfinityWpi]

I mean, seriously, I can understand that books had chapters back when they had to hand-set every letter in a printing press and had to have some way of designating where to stop printing and bind the pages into a book, but we have things called 'printers' nowadays that can handle collation, printing, etc, much faster and more reliably. Why the heck do books need chapters? Personally, I enjoy books that go n and on and on and don't give me any indication that I've moved on to the next significant chunk of the storyline; it makes saving my progress with a bookmark so much more fun when I don't know if I'm past the good stuff or not yet...

Re:Accomplishment

[Beardo the Bearded]

It's because you get more XP when you convert the co-workers to your side. Didn't you play Syndicate with just the persuadatron? It's a little like that.

That's why they're looking at you funny. You're doing it wrong. It's a classic newbie mistake.

Re:Well on computers at least

[Hamilton Lovecraft]

As a game programmer who is currently having to deal with the complexity of memory management in a streaming open-world environment, I'd like to say shut up, I hate you. Or to put it a little more politely, once you take away the known-memory state checkpoints that you reach between levels, you start having to worry about fragmentation of memory, so you start instituting fixed-size memory "slots" for assets, which deals with the fragmentation problem, but then you sometimes aren't optimally using memory, and then the designers start wanting things to follow you through the world, or allowing you to carry things back and forth through the world, so you have to manage memory outside of the slot system as well as within it, so you have the fragmentation problem again, and then you have to sneak into the designer's house late at night and stab him to death with an icicle.

Re:Because they are useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Quickly PATENT this idea and get RICH :p

Re:Well on computers at least

[Anonymous Coward]

and then the designers start wanting things to follow you through the world, or allowing you to carry things back and forth through the world, so you have to manage memory outside of the slot system as well as within it, so you have the fragmentation problem again, and then you have to sneak into the designer's house late at night and stab him to death with an icicle.

Did you have to get the icicle from your house, or his?

Re:Well on computers at least

[Chris Mattern]

Did you have to get the icicle from your house, or his?

Actually, you have to get the icicle from an ice gnome. But the gnome doesn't want to give to you, so you have to get the sleeping herb to put him to sleep to get it. But the apothecary that sells the herb only takes Borgrovians Drikkits for payment. So you have to travel to Borgrovia and..

Chris Mattern

Re:Because they are useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Tramp Tramp Revolution?

Re:Because they are useful

[Tim MacDonald]

I think you'd have to relegate that to adult-only arcades.

Re:HL2 Has Levels?

[Andrew Kismet]

"The adventure of the man who has never used the toilet. Ever."

Re:HL2 Has Levels?

[aichpvee]

HL2 was the worst in this area. Each episode takes like 2 years to load!

Re:HL2 Has Levels?

[McFadden]

Presumably he's got one of those nappies, similar to the ones used by astronauts inside that fancy suit.

Oh no, wait a minute, he doesn't exist, and I'm just making stuff up.

Re:HL2 Has Levels?

[Nurgled]

Gordon! Weren't you supposed to be in the test chamber an hour ago?

PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

Re:HL2 Has Levels?

[CharmElCheikh]

Now, on a modern PC, the load times in Half Life are so short that you won't notice them - you'll get a really fast blip of text saying "now loading", and that's about it.

Dude, i feel life is so unfair reading this. When I still played HL2 loadings on my computer were so long that I used to roll a joint and smoke half of it during it.

... Well, that was actually good.

Re:Toilets are overrated (in games at least)

[dintech]

Duke Nukem used the toilet. Look what happened to him.

Constipation. He's stuck on it 'forever'.