Yesterday I mentioned that Sparki was the second Kickstart project I’d backed, and I thought it was worth pointing to the first. Sui Generis is, to quote the project page”an original open world RPG for the PC featuring dynamic story and physics based gameplay.” So what made it stand out from the crowd?
Quite a lot, actually. They aren’t kidding when they say “physics based gameplay”. The world has weight. Swords swing and clash against each other with a physicality I’ve never seen in another game. People react and fall realistically. When a human got kicked by an ogre it wasn’t just a knockdown animation and a red “-34 hp” floating away over his head, you could really feel the impact.
Other games have tried physics, with varying degrees of success, from the wildly popular (if slightly overdone) puzzles and gameplay Valve does so well, down to the comedy physics of Oblivion.
More than the physics though was the weather. Honestly. Weather, environment and ambiance can make or break a game, and Sui Generis looks like it is going to totally nail it. Skip to 5 minutes into the pitch video to see what I mean. Or just look at the image over there. Procedural! Volumetric! In a game with a top-down perspective!
The latest post-Kickstarter dev videos are looking very promising. The character editor lets you be anything from short and fat to tall and skeletal. Somehow they’ve also managed to solve a previously insoluble programming problem, and female characters can be fat too, rather than just “slightly curvy”. The water rendering and animation look gorgeous, which makes me tingle with joy.
In the end what really sold it to me was the rain and the lightning. Maybe it’s part of being British, but I just love bad weather done well in a game. Nothing will ever compare to my first time walking through a city in the snow in Daggerfall 17 years ago, but damn if this doesn’t look like it might come close.