A reader reacts to the Unreal Engine 5 tech and explores how visuals, sound, and interactivity can inspire an emotional response in players.
Waking up one morning, before starting my usual routine of seeing Pierce Morgan ripping into his latest guests, I had a thought, or rather a feeling, of a woman running through cavernous structures. Light played and bounced endlessly against finely detailed rock structures and warm, brightly lit areas gave way to cold dimly lit shadowy ruins. The more I think about it, the feeling was the result of an emotional connection that I had to Epic Game’s Unreal Engine 5 demo running on PlayStation 5.
The feeling I had was one of hope, hope for a new generation of technology. Technology that will finally deliver us mere peasants from the current generation into a new world of gaming experiences.
The demo was amazing, everything from the birds flying off at the start, to highlight the hero’s isolation, to things like the contextual animations used to show her looking back at the rock she’s just climbed. Or brushing her shirt off casually as she stands and the small gasp of exasperation she lets out while cowering in fear of the bats flying overhead – it all helped to create the amazingly atmospheric experience.
Sure, these are arguably all easy things to contrive for a small demo, and nothing we haven’t already experienced in games of past generations, but put together with the real-time global illumination, the audio, and the rich world detail, they elicit an emotional response that no other next gen showing has done so far.
We will remember this demo, it will last in our memories, certainly for weeks, possibly for years to come.
Emotional connection in games is a very important tool, it’s arguably one of the most important aspects of a character driven narrative.
Games like Ico, Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons, Luigi’s Mansion and many others all share this common theme, placing the player’s emotional connection at the heart of the experience.
Everything down to character design, sound design, level design, overall atmosphere, and even the choice of colour can affect the way we as gamers experience what we play.
Games have been doing this for years though, from early games like Cannon Fodder and Lemmings on PC, to some of the first PlayStation 2 titles like Ico, which used empathy and atmosphere to great success and had the player protecting a strange girl from evil shadows, featuring beautiful (at the time) isolated environments as a backdrop.
And then there was Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, which took character development, immersion and storytelling in games to greater heights. Abe’s Odyesee pitted the player character Abe, from a peaceful and underpowered race of beings, against a regime of evil aliens and asked the player to save their fellow enslaved beings using only telepathy as a weapon.
Another example is the developers of the 2018 God Of War reboot, who did a fantastic job of transplanting emotion into Kratos, a character who during all of his previous outings can only be deemed as one-dimensional at best. Santa Monica Studios, the developers of God Of War, created a growing emotional bond between the father and son, and used this throughout the story as a mechanism, which also serves to elicit emotion from the player (it also helps that the game itself was absolutely fantastic).
Looking towards some of the recent cultural moments in film and TV, take for example The Mandalorian. It’s a brilliantly written, acted, and directed Star Wars spin-off series from Lucasfilm, which plays with the guardian/protector dynamic constantly, to the point where the viewer is often left wondering who is actually protecting who (and that’s a good thing here). It also constantly toys with the viewer’s emotional desire to know the identity of the hero and delivers in a much-celebrated revelation in the later episodes.
We can see a similar revelation in the Avengers movies, where the ‘worthiness’ of its characters is constantly teased throughout all four movies, with a final and ecstatic emotional revelation in the last movie.
But back to games, we ask ourselves will the next generation of games technology, with its major strides forward in positional audio, richer more detailed worlds, and characters allow gamers to connect more emotionally with the subject matter in ways thought previously impossible?
Will experiences like virtual reality ever drop the moniker and simply just become reality? And will it ever be accessible enough to allow the masses to enjoy this fully immerse experiences currently reserved for the hardcore?
2020 has proven to be a challenging year so far, to say the least, with Brexit, a political issue of its own monumental scale creating economic and social uncertainty for millions across UK and Europe, now being reduced to blip on our radar in comparison to the current global pandemic. The question is whether gaming will become a lower priority for consumers more focused on life’s essentials, or if gamers will need an emotional connection with the games they play now more than ever?
But If the Unreal Engine demo serves as nothing else it reminds us that our hopes and dreams of having emotional desires realised in games is closer than ever.
By reader Anthon Thomas
The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. As always, email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk and follow us on Twitter.
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