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Scale/Size in Video Games

by Sheldon Manny Felipe · in Game Design and Creative Issues · 02/19/2008 (5:51 pm) · 1 replies

Ive Always Knoticed that in Video games(Mostly Shooters), The sizes of objects such as Vehicles, Tanks, Helicopters, Jets are not exactly scaled down to a proper size in video games. Take for example battlefield 2, The Character Seems Almost as Tall as the Helicopter , he can almost jump from to the top of the chopper, this goes for the other vehicles aswell which in real life are way bigger than Most people.

I could come up with a bunch of reasons as to why that is the case and why the sizes of these vehicles such as the helicopters arent made to reflect thier real life sizes compared to humans but is there a reason why Game Developers choose not to scale the sizes to reflect thier real life counterparts?
Im curious because this is going into An idea for a game Im thinking of.
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Torque Owner Michael Welch
#1
02/19/2008 (9:12 pm)
The first reason I can think of is that developers (and gamers alike) want the main characters to be the center of attention. In any form of art you want to accent where or what you would like the main focus to be. In, let's say, a still of flowers, you may make the vase smaller and the flower buds larger to draw attention away from the vase and onto the actual flowers.

In comics, scale is used to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys. The bad guys always seem to be larger, giving them a menacing look and a false advantage over the heroes. Peole want to believe that the underdogs are going to win and that the heroes can overcome stronger, larger opponents.

In cartoons scale is used simply to escape realism. Giving the characters odd proportions gives a certain silliness to the theme of the cartoons.

In games such as Battlefield 2 (although I have not played it) I think that scale is used to add a subtle sense of power to the main character, making them larger than life, so to speak.

Obviosly there are many reasons to vary the scale in a game. Just a thought, perhaps the design team just wanted to get more on the screen at one time, perhaps they didn't even realize there was a significant scale issue. All these things are possibilities, and the key here is really that the decision comes from the design team and thier reasoning behind the decisions they make.