Incidental animals

 

Animals, the world is full of the buggers, we watch them, eat them, keep them as pets, we wear their wool and skins for warmth and grind their bones for soap.

As a species we have always depended on other lower animals on the food chain to survive and prosper.

 

In the hollow and artificial world of computer games though, these creatures are reduced to repeated patterns of behaviour and movement, yes sometimes there is effort put in to animal AI, Fable 2 for example has the best NPC creature I've seen in a game- this is in the form of you faithful dog. This dog follows you the entire game, it can do tricks, dig for treasure and feels like a genuine companion on you journey round the world of Albion. Its a testament to the creature design that when you get the choice to trade its life for a million in gold, the money is not even an option.

However,  it's all too often the case that creatures are added at best, to give a lifeless world a bit of spark,  or at worst, give the player something to kick off a cliff and laugh as it sails to its doom.

Submitted bellow in no particular order are the critters and beasties that serve no purpose other than ascetics or distraction for the player on their journey to find the mystical relic of who cares from the temple of meh.

 

Nali Bird - Unreal

Lots of games have birds, these winged creatures that soar and swoop across the purple skies of alien worlds or adorn the ramparts of gothic castles. However Unreal was the first game I played where you could take aim and blast their feathery bodies out of the sky and watch them tumble to their deaths on the rock bellow.

Chicken - Fable 1/2

 

Chickens, providers of eggs, KFC bucket meals and Mc Nuggets. These harmless feathered creatures do nothing to the player in the fable series other than potter around the city looking for worms or dropped crumbs to peck at, and yet the game goes out of its way to get us to kick the poor little blitters!

There's awards for how far you kick them, there is a special name you get for kicking ten of them. passers by even ask you "Chicken chaser? Do you chase chickens?" what the hell have they ever done to deserve this shabby treatment?

 

Rabbits - every RPG you can think of.

I hope that's just carrot juice!

 

 

Rabbits are everywhere, they breed like...well ..rabbits! and as such most RPGs put them in somewhere to add a bit of movement and verity to the vast open plains and grassy fields you quest through.

field rabbits, forest rabbits, Easter bunnies, World of Warcraft  has them by the hundred. Back in the day players could whole sale slaughter the buggers and skin then to get their leather work for 0 to 100 in a matter of an hour or so- Blizzard, the games creators got wise to this however and removed the skinning option and made then just another ambient critter for passers by to cleave in twain with their plus 400 broadsword of pointlessness.

However there is one WOW rabbit that you can win from the Darkmoon fair that turns the tables, anyone who has seen Monty pythons holy grail will know what in talking about, 

 

Fable 2 added an interesting dynamic to the player/rabbit relationship, evil. The player has a safety mode on their actions that mean that if they are strolling in the country and see a guard, towns person or even a bunny they have to turn this option off in order to blow the fluffy little cotton tail back to watership down- this is all well and good, however choosing to do this leaves a rabbit shaped stain on your karma and pushes you ever closer to the dark side- that will teach you to kick Mr hoppy wont it!

 

Hound eye - Half-life

You looking at me?

 

 

This ones a little different. When Valve the creators of half-life designed this multi eyed tripod legged beast they envisaged a friendly mutt who would run around the level barking and generally acting like the littlest hobo's alien cousin- however Beta players of the game made them change their minds about this harmless little freak.

It seems that the play testers just slaughtered them anyway- so valve gave them teeth in the form of a devastating sonic attack that turned their bark into the sound wave equivalent of a frag grenade! get too close and their howl blasts you to bits.

 

So with all this taken into account, are people just blood thirsty nut jobs who go around the real world stamping on kittens and kicking chickens? no, they are not, its an odd thing about games that you give people the option to do something in game and they will instinctively do it. It's like prostitutes in GTA- the option is there to use them, pay them and then beat them with bats and retrieve the money you paid for their services from their battered corpses, in no way would gamers do this in real life, but put the option in a game and people will do it for no reason other than they can. 

There are hundreds of videos online of players jumping their in game selves into walls or up mountains at the edge of virtual environments trying to find ways up them or through them due to a glitch in the coding.

 

If you give people the option to do something in a game they will try it as no matter how big your game is, or how complex your conversation trees are, there will never be as many options open to players as in real life, and that's why they kick chickens.