Digital Extremes stays on the cutting edge of game development with Pariah. All images © 2005 Digital Extremes.

With the advent of id software’s Doom in 1994, who would’ve known that the now grandfather of first person shooters (fps), would’ve begun a revolution and cult following for the genre. Although the technology was stellar for its time, a few generations have passed since the pixilated wonder first graced our PC screens. Fast forward a few generations and we’re still blasting aliens and human enemies away with high-powered weaponry and equally high-powered software and hardware. But now with such a saturated market plugged with juggernauts such as Unreal, Halo and Half-Life, where does Pariah stand amongst the best of the best? How has it changed since the once glorified days of Doom and more important how does it stack up to the aforementioned hits? With that question in mind, let’s take a look at what makes Pariah tick and how Digital Extremes stays on the cutting edge of game development.

Pariah was roughly in development for about three years by developer Digital Extremes, which was later published by Groove Games. The game pits the player years into the future taking on the role as hero Jack Mason, a military doctor who has been called to Earth to transport a prison inmate who has contracted a deadly virus to an off-planet medical facility. The mission initially starts out as a routine transport mission, but as you’re escorting the prisoner off-planet, your ship is shot out of the sky and you crash into the wastelands surrounding the prison, In the process, the story unfolds and the player finds himself in a world of intrigue and heart-pounding action.

Pariah was crafted for the Xbox, PC and PlayStation 2. Digital Extremes brought Pariah to life with their core 3D application, 3ds Max, and Character Studio as their animation tool. Their machines consisted mostly of Pentium 4 processors running at 2.0 to 2.8GHz, coupled with NVIDIA’s GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and ATI Radeon 9800 graphic cards.

The environments are quite noteworthy and stunning most of the time, averaging anywhere from 70,000 to 500,000 polys. Pariah does a good job of pulling the gamer into its eerily organic world.

Digital Extremes utilized and built upon the existing Unreal Engine 2 technology. This gave the developers the unprecedented support they needed, utilizing the powerful editor, animation support and its scripting language. The rendering engine were the main significant modifications the developers had to improve on, simply because they needed to give the engine the power it required to accomplish their goals, which included such new advanced features as normal mapping, and their in-house scripted localized distortion for grenade and rocket explosions, full screen bloom lighting and full screen blur for healing and sprinting. With the addition of pixel and vertex shader support most of the rewriting of the render pipeline occurred on the Xbox version of the game, this coincided with additional new scripts were the bulk of changes.

The in-game characters and environments consisted of an almost surreal photorealistic look and feel to them. This is quite a surprising feat considering the highest poly characters on screen at a given time consisted of 5,000, whereas the minor characters averaged around 2,700. And according to James Schmalz (creative director at Digital Extremes), each main character in the game is composed of, on average, about 4,000 polygons, which he says is two to three times as many polygons as the studio was able to pack into a typical character in previous games. The vehicles are equally impressive, clocking in at around 3,000 polys per vehicle.

Although the environments garnished most of the on screen resources and in their own right they were quite noteworthy and stunning most of the time, averaging anywhere from 70,000 to 500,000 polys, they were still quite a few scenes where the sharp angular edges of the architecture deterred my gaming experience just a bit. But when it’s all said and done, Pariah did a good job of pulling the gamer into its eerily organic world.