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By Michael Lowell
Contributions made by Biolithic, H4x, Surth, and weaselboy.
December 27, 2011
Serious Sam: The First Encounter
Lead Platform: PC (reviewed on PC)
Secondary Platforms: Xbox
Developer: Croteam
Publisher: Gathering of Developers
Released: March 30, 2001
Everybody forgets that “Doom: The Dated Relic” is not exactly a new or groundbreaking line of bullshit. They’ve been selling that fib for over a decade. In fairness, Doom only seemed dated because a couple of incredible years in first-person shooter development made a statement that the goals and vision of the genre were limitless. 1998′s Half-Life said the genre could do narrative. 1999′s System Shock 2 and 2000′s Deus Ex set visionary standards for video games, stating the first-person shooter could be stealth, role-playing, and narrative, and anything programmers wanted it to be. 2000′s Counter-Strike took the mano-a-mano world of competitive first-person shooters and introduced it to jocks who got their previous fix playing team sports. So even as 1999′s Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena set nearly-insurmountable standards for run-and-gun multiplayer that were only matched or surpassed in Unreal Tournament 2004, the public didn’t really give a crap. Quite simply, the genre built atop Doom did just about everything Doom could do. Therefore, “Doom is old, icky, and dated.” So much for the comically-overpowered weapons and labyrinth level design that built the genre, huh? Leave it to a bunch of dudes from Eastern Europe to parody the parody of Doom presented in 1996′s Duke Nukem 3D and remind everybody why Doom and Quake were so much fun in the first place.
All the talk about homage, all the talk about Doom and Quake, the real story of Serious Sam: The First Encounter is the savvy and ingenuity of Croatian developer Croteam. Sell me your nonsense about “indie game development”. Here’s a studio that took a limited budget, half-a-dozen employees, some contractors, and went all “Challenge accepted!” when they wanted to stand against the best in the genre. I don’t think it’s a surprise that most of the run-and-gun shooters to follow Serious Sam were developed by small, independent studios that borrowed the Croteam blueprint rather than the id Software blueprint. (See: 2004′s Painkiller, 2010′s Dreamkiller, 2011′s Hard Reset.) The story behind the manipulation of resources that created Serious Sam is almost as interesting as the game itself. You just have to understand how Croteam took a genre dominated by very specific design principles and made those principles appropriate for a limited budget. You wanted sugar with your tea, they gave you honey with your tea, called it “tea with sugar”, and you never even noticed.
The untrained eye says Serious Sam falls in line with the archetypes. The range of weapons is typical of the run-and-gun shooter, most of the ten weapons exceeding ridiculous, all of them remaining useful for some percentage of firefights and outcomes. (Yes, Call of Duty fans, there was once a time where “the gun you use in one-out-of-every thousand situations” could be useful, because there was once a time where you could carry more than two guns.) The single-barrel Shotgun retains its role for the moments where it’s more efficient to use a single shell to strike the killing blow rather than the two shells necessary for the more-powerful Double-Barrel Shotgun. The Machine Gun retains its utility in the face of the Mini-Gun’s superior damage rate because the Machine Gun is the only long-range hitscan weapon that fires instantly, making it the go-to choice for killing fragile enemy projectiles and fragile flying enemies. The Mini-Gun and Double-Barrel Shotguns are portrayed in the user interface as replacements for the Machine Gun and single-barrel Shotgun but the “inferior weapons” remain useful throughout the course of the game. The Shotgun gives you a faster rate of fire and the Machine Gun remains your most accurate weapon. If you want to save ammunition entirely, your Revolvers have unlimited ammunition. If all else fails, your knife is surprisingly powerful. When shit gets messy, you can start launching cannonballs everywhere.
Croteam gives you all of the options necessary to succeed. Everything has a niche. There’s no instant-win weapon (such as Doom‘s BFG9000 or Descent II‘s Earthshaker Missiles) and careful use of every weapon in your arsenal is critical for survival. That’s good. The bad? In most of the games that preceded it, the use of your armaments was a calculated assessment of your ammunition supply. The BFG 9000 could destroy everything in your path but remained interesting to use because it came at a price. That weapon’s Cell ammunition wasn’t always easy to come by, and shared its ammunition supply with the rapid-fire Plasma Gun. Numerous decisions about cost-effectiveness had to be made. Ammunition conservation may not fit the personality of Croteam’s overmuscled eponymous protagonist, but it’s been a staple of the genre since Doom left Wolfenstein 3D‘s universal ammunition model in a ditch. Proper use of the weapons in Serious Sam assures that you will never, ever run out of ammunition. Seems odd? We’ll explain why Croteam opted against ammunition conservation in a couple. So for now, fire away, sir.
Of course, with the expectation of excessive ammunition comes an expectation of opposition. Enemies. Lots of them. Tons of them. The number of enemies in the field of play often reaches dozens and will occasionally reach triple-digits. And with strength in numbers, comes an expectation of the open space required to navigate and out-maneuver the opposition. Let’s keep in mind that Serious Sam was created at a time when “three-dimensional open-world” was becoming the next hot commodity in computer video games. Look at 1999′s MMORPGs Asheron’s Call and Everquest, 1999′s first-person space-shooter Descent 3 (which used a pseudo-open-world mission structure in many of its levels), 2000′s real-time-strategy-shooter Giants: Citizen Kabuto, and 2000′s real-time tactics game Sacrifice. The massive, open worlds that would popularize everything from Grand Theft Auto to The Elder Scrolls to Assassin’s Creed were becoming the next big thing and Serious Sam jumped on the boat. Serious Sam expects the player to use open space and provides an unnecessary amount of space to do that. These gigantic war zones are separated by some half-assed urban warfare and the rare case of more traditional level design, but open-world firefights are the main attraction in Serious Sam.
It is in this way that Serious Sam is the polar opposite of Doom or Quake. In Doom and Doom II, monsters would always fire at where the target was standing at the time of their attack, lending the player his ability to circle-strafe the toughest enemies in the game without a hitch. The larger the space, the easier it became for players to mislead enemies and evade their fire. And for this reason, the best levels in the history of the series (created by the developers or elsewise) confined the player to very tight quarters. (Monster aim was so predictable that the game’s invisibility power-up actually made combat more dangerous, since it would make enemy fire erratic, removing the ability to easily predict where a projectile was heading.) Good Doom level design restricted freedom. Every one of the early first-person shooters used the design of their levels to restrict how the player could manipulate any crappy artificial intelligence, creating levels that played to the strengths of those simple monster designs. (And when a game like Descent featured a number of large open spaces, those rooms were host to enemies with homing weapon systems. That is, “levels that played to the strength of their enemies.”)
Where the enemies in Doom relied on barriers, doors, and traps in order to take down the player-character, the artificial intelligence in Serious Sam is designed exclusively for open-world combat. The pathing in Serious Sam can be described with the word “deficient”. It’s not designed for “level design”. In the game’s small number of traditional, more-maze-like game levels, enemies spawn out of thin air, lest they try to navigate the rooms that they do not have the capacity to navigate. Instead, enemies attack and assault the player with the help of primitive artifical intelligence. When enemies leap or fire at the player, they make an expectation that the player will be in position X by the time their attack is finished. In some cases, circle-strafing will be enough to evade these attacks. In many cases, circle-strafing will get the player killed. The player has to judge his position and make decisions accordingly. It all depends on the type of monster. Some enemies use melee attacks, some launch laser beams, some launch rockets, some throw flaming rocks. Seems predictable? Wait until these artificial intelligence routines begin to break down. Wait until the dozens of monsters on the screen are all in different states of aggression. The expectation is that these monster types and their methods of attack will continue to pile up, presenting the player with more unique attacks to dodge, more unique enemies to kill, more erratic fireballs to mow down with a Machine Gun.
Croteam did something really awesome here. Where the shooters of the nineties derived their depth through a combination of level design and monster placement, the monster intelligence in Serious Sam is a self-sustaining system, where all of the ingredients required to force players into a read-and-react playstyle are derived from the simple artificial intelligence patterns of dozens upon dozens of moving targets. In 2001, at a time when computer video game budgets are spiraling out of control and more and more resources are being spent on “teh realizms”, Croteam stood in front of any skeptics and said that “detailed level design need not apply”. In order to absolve themselves of creating detailed game worlds and spending lots of money on those detailed game worlds, they designed a system where ammunition can be found in “refill areas” and firefights are not defined by the shape of the room or the placement of enemies but the number of enemies. In Serious Sam, level design is harmful in the pursuit of entertainment. They’ve taken the concept of spawning enemies and run with it. All of these monsters are designed for optimal performance in the game’s open desert expanses and the game’s numerous “town center” arenas. Any conscious placement of game variables in Serious Sam levels are limited to a smattering of secret rooms and triggers that spawn enemies and equipment as the player walks over them.
(“If I can figure out where these triggers are located, why would I flip any of these invisible switches at all?” Because the goal presented by Croteam is to play the game for the highest score possible, sillyhead. The entire purpose of the game is to move as quickly and efficiently as possible from room to room and there are variables in place that are designed to measure your killing power. The scoring system even uses a timer to reward players for killing everything as quickly as possible. The scoring system rewards skilled players for being better than other players. That’s the way it should be. Yes, people played first-and-third-person shooters for score long before 2010′s Vanquish and 2011′s Bulletstorm revived the concept. And if you don’t go around pissing off every single bad guy in sight and finding every single secret room, you can’t get the highest score possible. I mention the significance of playing these games for score because the sales of and reception to Bulletstorm was the story of an idiotic community that thought you played the single-player campaign for “teh interactive experiance” and not for the highest score possible. Serious Sam is all about score. Deal with it.)
Now, the open-world combat generates an interesting predicament. One of the most difficult issues for the first-person shooter is the creation of spatial awareness. (It’s important to note that Serious Sam features an option for a third-person camera that can be used at any time, though it is certainly preferable to use the first-person camera and employ the superior accuracy that comes with it. For all that I know, your mileage may vary on this.) Many games have used many different mechanics (on-screen indicators for where a player is taking damage have existed since the Doom days) but most of them have had trouble getting it right. In a game where enemies can emerge from any angle, developing that spatial awareness is key. How is the player supposed to make any sense of a game environment and its carnage when enemies are constantly emerging from every angle, a game where enemies can teleport behind the player with little warning? The easy answer would be a radar, but in mid-2001, that hasn’t quite inflicted itself on the public-at-large and remains mostly a tool of console video games such as Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, games that need the forewarning due to their incapable input device. The more interesting answer would be the use of sound, which is on fantastic display in Serious Sam.
In most first-person shooters, the use of sound is used to highlight or announce that an enemy has entered play. Subsequently, the sound used by the enemy reveals its range of threat to the player. It does not continue to give away that position. This is why melee or close-combat monsters in first-person shooters are often classified as “stealthy”, ranging from Descent II‘s Thief Bot, Doom‘s Spectre, and taken to the extremes with the Headcrab in Half-Life, a monster whose use of sound was mostly a “fuck you” to the player that it just scared the shit out of. Valve proceeded to further expand the concept with the “Fast Zombie” in 2004′s Half-Life 2, possibly since Gabe Newell is far more evil than his jovial personality suggests. Serious Sam bucks the trend by using melee enemies everywhere, and they can murder you in a split second should you give them the option. And that’s where Croteam decided that a constant, harrowing dose of hooves, screams, and rattling bones are an absolute must. Anything to let the player know what is flanking him. Even with a limited Field of View, the player is given all of the information he needs just by listening to what he can hear, tying up that nasty little issue of being hit by what you can’t see. And while ranged enemies don’t emit a constant dose of sound, their weapons and footsteps do. On a proper sound set up, you get the second sense necessary to isolate targets, determine the type of targets, and determine the threat that they pose to your position. At which point, you can develop a blueprint in your brain for the attacking enemy’s path and plan accordingly.
If there’s a word that sums up the use of sound in Serious Sam, “distinct” would be appropriate. The system is deliberate and calculated. If they got sound right, the expectation is that they got graphics right, and they got graphics right. Yeah, Serious Sam isn’t much of a looker and isn’t much of a looker even when it’s compared to other games from the time period. It wasn’t designed to be. The game was designed so players could have dozens of three-dimensional enemies on the screen at any time without any problems concerning computer processing power. It was designed so players could immediately identify targets. Croteam does it right, imposing colorful enemies and their unique color palettes on a bland sand-and-stone Egyptian motif. Predictably, melee combatants lack color. It’s the blue and red alien walkers, red and yellow scorpions, green and red demons, the ranged monsters, that use the bright and colorful color palettes necessary for seeing smaller targets on the lower-resolution monitors of the time.
That’s an awful lot of nice things to say about Croteam and their design decisions. So why can’t I give Serious Sam: The First Encounter the honor of a five-star rating? I guess it’s only fitting that the self-sustaining system, the system of artificial intelligence that let half-a-dozen men code and create a lengthy single-player campaign, supply a level editor, supply a wealth of multiplayer modes, that stands in the way of the Video Game Pantheon. The game is not compatible with the tools of a skilled level designer and was never designed to be compatible. The skilled craft of a talented level designer has been the driving force behind every great first-person shooter since the genre took off, whether Half-Life or Deus Ex is trumpeting narrative, whether Quake or Doom or Descent are trumpeting single-player bloodsport, and Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament are letting you blow up your friends. Level design is everything. And Serious Sam was hard-coded to skip over level design.
There may be dozens of monsters on the screen at any given time and they may produce a lot of interesting patterns, but there’s only so much complexity that can be generated in a system built on circle-strafing, laser beams, suicide bombers, and not much else. It suffers from the same issue as 2011′s Bulletstorm, which was able to get a lot of juice out of “here’s fifty different ways to kill a single monster”. It consequently lost its shot at greatness due to its linear, shooting-gallery-style level design. The inability to insert a proper level designer into the fold prevents the Serious Sam game engine from doing things it was never designed to do. So consequently, you ended up with a top-down shooter crammed into a first-person shooter, a game that may have more in common with run-and-gun shoot ‘em ups such as 1990′s Smash TV or newer games like 2003′s Geometry Wars. Not much thought to given to ammunition, all the thought in the world given to “fifty enemies on the screen at any given time”.
That’s part of the price you pay when you don’t get born into a wealthy family. Sometimes, you have to make ends meet with the money that you have. And I have little doubt that if Croteam were given the financial greenlight from a company like Electronic Arts or Activision, the developer could make some artwork. (Though, in fairness, by the time Activision was done meddling in the development process, Serious Sam would be another crappy Call of Duty game. But that’s a story for another day.) Humanity’s greatest works have been created through collaboration and large budgets, and the business of video games largely follows the same suit. Serious Sam: The First Encounter is consistent with that reality and it’s a really, really damn good video game. The best? No. I’m okay with that, and I think a bunch of dudes who got on the map coming out of nowhere are okay with that, too.
4 out of 5
(Games rated four-out-of-five are very good. In a slow twelve months, they’re dark horses for Game of the Year. Even if you don’t care for the genre, you won’t feel like your money is going to waste.)