Fashion
Extreme Weather Gives Video Games a Powerful Adversary
Designers are increasingly able to render weather conditions as not just evocative visual effects but phenomena that physically affect the player.
The storms start off small in the vehicular survival game Pacific Drive. Raindrops fall on the windshield, as lightning cracks ominously in the distance. In a few minutes, the pristine Olympic Peninsula will shake with nature’s full terrible force.
Hollywood has long portrayed extreme weather, and 4-D screenings of the summer hit “Twisters” bludgeoned viewers with wind and water in gyroscopic seats. Yet video games have the power to truly envelop an audience in severe meteorological conditions. Players traverse a virtual environment thrashed by the elements, and are made to feel at the center of an awesome might.
Video games that feature extreme weather — including The Long Dark (2014), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) and Death Stranding (2019) — owe a debt not just to movies but to George R. Stewart’s landmark 1941 book “Storm,” regarded by some as the first ecological novel. He begins his story with a cosmic view of Earth and a gestating storm before cataloging its on-the-ground devastation. He gives the turbulent weather front a personality and even anatomy, writing about the “long arms of rain” that “ran miles ahead.”
Many decades later, game developers are rendering atmospheric conditions with similarly obsessive detail, requiring players to battle extreme weather alongside other more conventionally animate foes. But virtual weather is largely smoke and mirrors, with game makers using technological tricks to offer a convincing illusion.
Alex Dracott, the creative director of Pacific Drive, wanted to make the game’s setting truly feel like the Pacific Northwest, which meant focusing on the quality of light, the severity of downpour and the density of fog.
Dracott and his colleagues created a plethora of base-line effects: haze, rain, cloud cover. On top of those, the team added “weather overrides” for more intense conditions that might affect gameplay, like wind rocking the car. Finally, the team built big set-piece moments that tend to occur at the end of a game level — when supernatural elements cause the world to tremble.
