The Siphon Filter series has been on the market for many years. The first games were created at a time when the developers studied many things from their own experience and were not always able to convey their vision to the players
In 2024, the Siphon Filter series celebrates its 25th birthday. Bend Studio did not forget about the significant date and congratulated the community.
Players still remember Siphon Filter today, thanks to the PlayStation Plus subscription you can get acquainted with the classic games of the series on modern consoles PS4 and PS5 (you can just buy games separately).
The author of the YouTube channel SirOldSchool has released a series of videos dedicated to Siphon Filter: he delved into the history of its creation, development features, gameplay and plot. He decided to ask a number of questions directly to the creator, game designer Richard Ham, who is now also a blogger and studies board games.
In the material about Siphon Filter 2, we talked about one of the types of enemies – snipers, who “always aimed accurately at the main character’s head.”
Richard studied the experience of the first Siphon Filter and noticed that players stood still and tried to accurately aim at enemies, at which point they took damage. However, the developers initially thought that players would be constantly moving. In an attempt to increase the dynamics, they came up with snipers:
SirOldSchool explained:
“The fact is that this type of enemy [ snipers] which many hate so much, was intended to build up the dynamics in Syphon Filter. Richard noticed that some players were used to just standing and aiming at enemies, receiving a certain amount of damage. But initially the gameplay was conceived completely differently: the player had to constantly be on the move and shower everyone around with a hail of lead, and the threat from getting hit in the head was very easy to throw off with rolls, and it was not necessary to stop firing.
But it just so happened that we treat this type of enemy completely differently – we try to peek out from behind cover with caution in order not to catch a stray bullet in the head, and all because, by analogy with the danger indicator, a headshot is not got the proper interface.”
Richard admitted there was a flaw in this moment, it was necessary to add a clear indicator:
«A huge failure on my part. And when I brought these snipers, I had to do the same for them. [During the danger of being caught] Headshot (headshot) the word “headshot” appears above your head with a small progress bar indicating that you have so much time [before the bullet hits the hero]< /em>“.
If there was a clear indicator, the player would immediately understand the rules: I dodged when I received a message about the Headshot threat – I gained time and can continue shooting.
With a different type of opponent – in body armor — a similar situation arose, SirOldSchool said:
«…impenetrable mercenaries had only to increase the number of cartridges fired from the weapon and therefore there was more than enough ammunition around — shoot, shoot and shoot again.
However, a percentage of players tend to avoid direct contact with armored ones and cover becomes the main solution in this situation: just hide and look out until the sight reaches the enemy directly in the head, or at worst – in the legs, again everything should have been the same to another“.
Richard explained the original idea and thought:
«I hid all this information in the top left corner of the screen and no one is looking at it. So why is it that when players start shooting at someone and it says “body armor”, I didn't put a little scale so players can see, “Oh, I can just keep shooting.” They have a lot of health points, because that's all they have”?
Here interesting thing: the more times you hit an enemy during a firefight, the less healing properties their body armor will have left, so if you shoot them in the head, this picked up armor will heal you 100%. If you try to wear them down, but then hide, and then you finish him off and he's only at 50% health. I mean, there's all these little things in the game that to this day no one knows about, and it's all my fault because I hid that information.< /em>
Instead of finding ways to get the interface on the screen, I put it aside because that's how interfaces have always been done up to Rainbow Six and other games“.
Video about Siphon Filter 2, others can be found on the SirOldSchool YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/v_PFo_sSPjI
