Richard: I almost think I’d rather have a point and click puzzle-adventure game than a generic third-person shooter; I don’t like puzzles, but at least it’d probably get more of the character of the license across. The least you could do with this license is some sort of action-adventure game with mild puzzles like Uncharted.

To call this scripting is a half truth, of course – it’s not scripting in the usual half-lifey sense, but rather in a sort of semi-simulation sortof sense.

Being a bit technical here will probably help: Even half lifes scripted sequences are unique when they playy out in that the player is usually able to control his point of view and perhaps influence the sequence in some way, though the outcome is always set in stone – it doesn’t matter to the outcome if you shoot your shotgun at a big green claw swooping out of the flaw an nailing a friendly scienist through the chest, but the narrative you experienced as a player would be different if you did (at least your character, Gordon Freeman, did _something_ in one case, whereas he could also have frozen in panic and done nothing!)

What Hitman does is, it introduces more “interesting” unique experiences, where the scripted sequences you see through a playthrough will actually be different – you get to choose which ones you see. Someone running for the safe-room when the shit hits the fan is a scripted sequence, and that same someone pulling a gun out and investigating a noise you made is also a scripted sequence, technically speaking – but the more adaptive this scripted sequences are, the more emergeance, the more feeling of simulation.

Now I’m not trying to pick a nit here – the AI will clearly play a major part in doing emergeance – but it’s also a question of having many adaptive reusable scripts. The AI examples are obvious – but for Michaels forays into kitchens and hardware stores to be interesting, there needs to be a variety of tools and supplies for him to pick and choose from, and they need to be able to interact with the environment in a variety of places. Most obvious is to allow him to use any and all tools as improvised weapons, but giving them general uses in addition to specific uses (batmans exploding gel in arkham asylum, his batclaw, etc.) obscures just how much you can do with them – implement a lot of more or less generalized paths and scripts to accomodate, and the player will no longer have to “guess” the path the designer thought of.

Commando’s – behind enemy lines is a great example of an early game that did these things…the decoy, for instance, was a remote controlled noisebox that could be used for any number of things because it simply attracts attention. The Germans were scripted to head to it, scratch their heads, turn it off and pick it up. But it could also be planted, hidden, turned on briefly, and then turned off – the AI soldiers picking up on it would go look, find nothing, and head back on patrol – for a cost of delaying them for a shorter amount of time, you could delay them again later. Another, more simply example – a hand grenade could be thrown if a weird location, making a huge ruckus, and distracting everybody – or it could be thrown at somebody blowing them up. Both are general scripts, but you could surely think of some specific ones too in the case of the hand grenade – for instance during conversations where someone is going to have a gun trained on your head.

In other words, I see the solution as dynamic scripting, which I feel is a level up in abstraction from dynamic AI. It would often be adapted to an individual level or location, but other times it would be completely general and something you wouldn’t really call a script at all…but either way, both would be required and would need to be associated with the same ingame objects.