If you’ve been a gamer for any significant amount of time then this has surely happened to you: you’re playing a game for what has felt like days, and you notice towards the end of the current level that all the goblins you’re fighting look just like the orcs you fought three levels ago. You begin to notice peculiar things like this about all the enemies, and then you realize that they’ve just been recycled through every level.
With the upcoming shooter from Epic Games, Bulletstorm, entire armies have been created from just one guy, and the People Can Fly developer blog post describes how they put that same character model to use (explaining that a single character model helps to combat memory limitations). The developer describes the way they avoid the “boring generic army of clones” routine by experimenting with body size, proportions, cosmetic variations, skin tones, and much more. With all the varied features, the developer hopes that they can make each enemy seem unique during each and every battle.
Head on over and read the blog post, and tell us what you think? When have you come across this issue?