Trespasser - the game everyone else wants to be

Let me admit to the world that I thoroughly enjoyed the massively maligned 'Jurassic Park: Trespasser'.

It's *still* the game with the most 'AI'-ish creatures - ie they look less scripted than anything else out there (they weren't scripted at all, really), and somehow, despite being kind of retarded in their behaviour, they seem alive. Also it had the best water ripples ever.

I bring the topic of this game up because I just read an interview with the Gavin the Geeky about Obligon, and I note that another feature of Trespasser (apart from its physics) is only NOW being talked about as some cool new thing - its sound, which back then was dubbed (heh) 'real time foley':

Gavin said:

Gavin Carter: One of the new features that really improves the game experience is the use of physics-based sound. We associate sound categories with material types on objects and have ways we can mix and match up sounds depending on collisions that occur in the game. So dropping a sword on the stone floor of a cave will sound different then dropping it on the floor of a wooden house. The system is global, so even things like combat sounds get modulated by it. So striking a guy in full armor will give you a nice clang, while smacking a goblin with a warhammer will give you a satisfying flesh impact sound.

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Trespasser was awesome.

Except when I walked into a room and impaled myself with my rifle and died.

I trespassed your mom's panties

Hey awesome you brought this up! I thought I was the only really that LOVED Trespasser.

Perhaps I got past the 'issues' and looked towards what it offered as a total package.

Perhaps I was also the only one that figured out that you had to muck with the graphics settings right from the get-go to get the 'shadows' to show up. No really, I read full reviews where they bitched about there being no dimension and no shadowing to the gameworld...well sure enough when you installed the game, the default settings were set to "Crap.tm", and indeed looked terrible.

I loved the IK hand/arm and actually implemented that system in one of my early tech demos for Phoenix. The feeling of having to aim down the sights manually was very compelling.

Realtime bumpmapping and bipedal physics (not an ounce of premade animation in the game) and reasonably dense foliage....all WAY ahead of their time.

I loved the feeling of coming down the hill towards the harbor town...and further on, the compound that Hammonds offices were in. That small worker-town. The sense of isolation, knowing these animals could be anywhere hunting you. Spectacular. Oh, and seeing the final mountain in the distance, walking towards it and climbing all the way up to the summit and end game, seamlessly, was just amazing...wow


These were just streams of thought so please excuse the randomness, but yea I loved this game.


Cheers

I remember at the time it came out that most people were simultaneously lauding the "brave" technical aspects, and lamenting the fact that it sadly wasn't much fun. But really, if any game deserves a play just to marvel at curious design and implementation, then this sounds like it. I'm going to try and track down a copy.

For god's sakes get the patch before you play it, it makes all the difference. I swear to god, those dinos seem REAL, and when they are chasing you (the game actually gets better as you progress) you WILL feel shitscared.

EvoG said:

I loved the feeling of coming down the hill towards the harbor town...and further on, the compound that Hammonds offices were in. That small worker-town. The sense of isolation, knowing these animals could be anywhere hunting you. Spectacular. Oh, and seeing the final mountain in the distance, walking towards it and climbing all the way up to the summit and end game, seamlessly, was just amazing...wow

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Yes, yes, YES!

So glad to hear someone else appreciated it. I simply couldn't understand all the bitching that 'it looks terrible', it had fantastic open environments, (aside from some bad repeating textures on the landscape), and great jungles as you said. The system that converted far-away stuff into 2D worked a treat. I have yet to experience more convincing water, because the ripples were physics based rather than canned. The dinosaurs themselves are also the most convincing game creatures I have ever encountered.

The reaction to the game I thought was interesting. Whilst there was an understandable response to the un-patched game, the physics of which were still wonky, a lot of the reaction was due to the pre-release hype (the publisher releasing rendered concepts as screenshots which were completely unlike the final game didn't help). The game was nowhere as open-ended as promised, and gameplay relied on a lot of gratuituous physics stuff like box stacking and boulder dropping etc, (but shit that was amazing stuff back then!)

But there was more to it than that. There was a definite herd-mentality in the bash Trespasser phenomenon that snowballed after its release. It became the source of glib put-downs for their own sake.

Far more interesting though - and you capture some of this with your comment "The feeling of having to aim down the sights manually was very compelling":

The game was NOT flattering to the player. Game reviewers coming from quake et al, which give the player superhuman speed and dexterity, simply could not handle adapting their play-style to someone who held a rifle shakily. How hard was it to get over the one-armed thing? It wasn't a terribly difficult game, there were tons of guns around, but it was still loathed for being different to every other shooter.

Of interest to me as a side-note is the fate of the lead designer, Seamus Blackley. I was aware of him from years back as Looking Glass were what brought me into PC gaming. He was some kind of wunderkind, did the physics for Flight Unlimited 1 (which to this very day gives a sense of exhiliration and real flight which even the current MS FSimulator comes nowhere near), and did stuff on UU, SS, etc. So I had plenty of expectation for Trespasser - and I still enjoyed it thoroughly. The outcome of that game seemed to drive him away from software development, so he got that XBox gig. Then he left it saying 'I want to get back to making games', but instead formed some kind of venture-capital company, which failed, and now he's an agent for a game developer recruitment firm, or something like that.

It just seems like a real shame that he never got back into making games. Perhaps his forte was technical work and not game design per se. Havok et al has made his pioneering physics stuff perhaps redundant, but the AI stuff in Trespasser I have yet to see replicated or improved anywhere else....

Hehe, you sound like you experienced the game the same way I did. I was also obsessed with the image cacheing system (for development reasons) and followed Seamus during those times as yea, he was that kind of genuis I wish there were more of in this industry.

I was rather baffled that Dreamworks just locked the engine away, rather in perhaps investing in it for version 2, and used for other games. For all intents and purposes it was outstanding, and the physics would've worked themselves out over time (as they have) so being THAT myopic was ridiculous.

Ah well, here's a bunch of stuff to check out :D


Cheers

wow.... thanks guys. because of reading this thread, i went ahead and found a copy of trespasser, and.... wow. great game. so many neat ideas that should be given another try with today's technology.

on one of those trespasser sites i saw something about someone porting it to the doom 3 engine. wonder how that worked?

Jennifer, just make sure you tweak the graphics settings...I just can't recall what they are, but I believe you have to run the brightness ALL the way down, and another setting all the way up, and seemingly by magic, the game looks 1000x better simply because shadows then appear! :D

Perhaps now I have to reinstall it...first FO, then U7 and now Trespasser...omg where does it end! Hehe


Cheers

But there was more to it than that. There was a definite herd-mentality in the bash Trespasser phenomenon that snowballed after its release. It became the source of glib put-downs for their own sake.

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Yeah, I hate that rabid pack mentality as much as fanboyism, although I can only assume that falling victim to it back in the day is the reason I've never played Trespasser. Notable examples:

"OMFG! dont get pools of radeons 2, it will uninstall windoze!!!"

Very unfortunate for about 3 customers, and quickly remedied. Can't say much for the game itself though.

"Daikatana sux0rz so much, omg romero you l4mer lol"

Okay, so Daikatana didn't live up to it's hype. It was never going to. But neither is it the worst FPS in the world. Still, it's hard to have much sympathy for Romero, since he did dig his own hole.

"Anarchy online is t3h suck! I red it on somethingawful!"

Can't say it ever interested me, but basing an "opinion" on a humour piece is hardly informed.

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I'm still trying to track down Trespasser, but it's sounding more and more interesting through your reminiscing viewpoints. I'm actually looking forward to it more than most "coming soon!" titles, even if only out of morbid curiosity.

Section8 said:

I'm still trying to track down Trespasser, but it's sounding more and more interesting through your reminiscing viewpoints. I'm actually looking forward to it more than most "coming soon!" titles, even if only out of morbid curiosity.

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http://abandonware.the-frenchkiss.biz/i ... che&id=872

When Trespasser came out, its looked awsome.
Now many years later the only neat thing left is the Physics and AI.

Both of which are still nearly state of the art. (for dinos at least...)

look at HL2 and see people pushing boxes over, they (no doubt)think OMG!

Heh I see it and say. DATED. Tresspasser had that in '98. And you could push a trailer home onto a Raptor if you timed it just right.
You still can't stack crates in a pile and climb up to higher ground and whack the buggers with a chair mercilessly until they wander off in search of easier prey.

With HL2 every phyiscs part of the game was either pre-scripted or limited in some way.

With talk of physics acceleration chips, and AI acceleration chips perhaps its time for a new Tresspasser?

Also...make sure you guys get the patch first


Then get the ATX modification, was allows resolutions over 800x600 and increasing draw distance with a slider in the video options, plus, it seems to let the dinos stay active at over 4x the original distance (for those that dont know, they turned the dinos 'on/off' a certain distance from you, I imagine for CPU savings.


Overall, thanks to you guys for bringing this up, as I just spent the last 3 hours making it to Hammonds compound, which, for what its worth, has an AWESOME 'Fallout-y' feel to it, especially with the music that kicks in.

Being objective about this, while it may not have continuous interaction with the environment every second of gameplay, its not as if its completely devoid of it either. I personally consider exploration a BIG part of gameplay, and factoring in the tension of their being raptors lurking, its some very stressful exploration, and fullfilling. You soak in the atmosphere. When there is a 'fight' its gut wrenching as you're not a warrior, so you do not want to get anywhere near them in a fight. Desperately aiming down the sights hoping to get that glorious headshot to drop them, but more than not just thankful for hitting the body, I never saw the arm as an issue, but just other skill I had to develop. The game was balanced as such that not having a 'dead accurate' crosshair system meant that the dinos were also not rabidly aggressive and always accurate themselves, so it works well.

Another thing I love is the transition graphically of both the time of day, terrain, foliage and 'human influences'. It starts off with sparse indications such as abandoned vehicles and their monorail system, and slowly you come across more and more significant structures until finally you make it to what is my favorite parts of the game, the habitations such as, again, Hammonds compound, the harbor and the labs.

For those of you familiar with Project Phoenix back on DaC, Trespasser was initially a heavy influence for what I wanted out of my post apoc RPG done in first person. Conversely, DaC then became a heavy influence for me making PP top down and turn based so...well...thats another story. Hehe.

Cheers

they were gonna do that sound thing with Doom 3 but never finished it.

That abandonware link you posted Baley nets a dud. It asks for the CD, and is way too small a file to be the whole game.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's still available 2nd hand on Amazon.

It's a RIP isn't it? They might have an ISO on their uploading list,who knows.

There should be a .reg\.key file or something,use it.

Or you could try a torrent site,it seems to be abandonware.

Ah. Excuse my ignorance. Nice work in finding the link.

My friend let me barrow it long ago and I got pretty far. Downloaded the ISO and been playing with patches and add-on.

Is there a way to quick-save?

Your items get cleared between each level?

Don't know about quicksave. But yes, your items get cleared, another aspect that led to its pillorying. The game clearly needed a lot more time.

After playing Trespasser for about a week, the novelty soon wore off. It is amazingly innovative, and has more fucking balls than any commercial game I've seen in recent times, but the gameplay tends to get a bit "samey" after a few missions.

The first couple are brilliant. You're discovering a unique game for the first time, any combat is tense, because you tend to be fairly unskilled at actually shooting things effectively, and the level design gives a great smoke and mirrors effect of non-linearity. It seems as though you can explore anywhere, but following the monorail is the logical conclusion.

From there, the missions either become decided linear, or little more than key card hunts. With better firepower and more familiarity with the system, combat becomes dull and non-threathening. On top of that, it seemed entirely too easy to avoid conflict. Don't want to fight that T-Rex? Run past it, and try to forget it's supposed to run at speeds up to 30 mph (something the game actually reminds you.)

The puzzle solving elements run out of steam too, after a few missions of creative crate stacking, or throwing things to knock down things you can't reach, it loses it's charm.

Of course, from a design perspective, it's probably the single most interesting FPS ever.

All exactly right, (wasn't it 60 mph for the T-Rex or some shit?!)

But did you reach the end-game, where you ascend the mountain? Bulk heaps cool dominos-with-the-ancient-statues-minigame on the way up.....

i've just gotten to the town in the game (i've been playing it on-and-off), and it is beginning to get a little repetitive, yeah. still having fun, but i have a feeling it'll get to be a chore if there isn't more variety later on.

plus i'm pissed because i tried to use one of the little keycards in the town but i accidentally dropped it and it disappeared into the wall :shock:

still, once i restart the level i'm sure it'll be fun. that ghost town is damn creepy to walk around in.

I liked Trespasser. I didn't get ahold of it until after the patch, so I was never subjected to the horror of it pre-patch and never bothered trying it without the patch just to see.

I still have my copy. Been awhile since I've played it though. Maybe I'll give it another spin. I remember many a "OH SHIT!!!" moments in that game. And I love "OH SHIT!!!" moments. They make me go "OH SHIT!!!" and that's cool.

But did you reach the end-game, where you ascend the mountain? Bulk heaps cool dominos-with-the-ancient-statues-minigame on the way up.....

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I've just reached the lab, and I intend to finish it, but its charms are fading.

I still have my copy. Been awhile since I've played it though. Maybe I'll give it another spin. I remember many a "OH SHIT!!!" moments in that game. And I love "OH SHIT!!!" moments. They make me go "OH SHIT!!!" and that's cool.

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Very much so. I played one level with a couple of mates watching, and all three of us were screaming like bitches and babbling "ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit" throughout some of the early missions. I think this would have been used to even better effect if the dinos were more lethal. Having a raptor jump at you is a pretty classic "Oh shit!" moment, until you realise that they're not quite the brutal killing machines they should be, and that jump has a pretty slim chance of actually hurting you.