Inspirational Failure

Trespasser is one of many games in the Jurassic Park franchise.  Released in 1998, it was a commercial failure and winner of Gamespot's worst-game-of-the-year award.  Disappointing to see considering that it spent three years in development with a very talented team of designers.  Just to stress that last point, Austin Grossman (the writer for Deus Ex and Dishonored) along with Seamus Blackley (father of the Xbox) both worked on this game.  So, what happened?  In a word - "overscoping".

As is all too common in game development, the team behind Trespasser bit off way more than they could chew.  There were a lot of ambitious "firsts" such as large open outdoor environments, a diegetic interface, a physics engine, and a complex AI to give the dinosaurs life.  That last point is especially noteworthy because all of the half-dozen or so dinosaurs species (as well as sub-types) found in the game move and act in strange ways due to them literally being puppets on strings.  It's kid of surreal to see in action and hasn't been emulated since (the one exception being the creatures found in Rain World).  

The physics engine also ties into this due to how players interact with the environment.  Much like the mannequin dinos controlled by the AI, the main character has a single working arm that they use to pick up, manipulate and throw objects with via the mouse.  Again, it's kind of weird and not a game mechanic you really see outside of quirky indie titles like Octodad and Surgeon Simulator.  Nonetheless, Gabe Newell cited the physics engine in Trespasser as an influence on a similar system Valve used in Half-Life 2.

Not having any kind of HUD was hardly a new concept in 1998, but doing so in an action-oriented FPS was courting disaster.  To work around the lack of a health meter the protagonist has a visible heart tattoo that indicates their status based on how full it is.  Ammunition for guns is tracked by the player character vocalizing how many shots they have left after each pull of the trigger.  Weird as these ideas are, they eventually popped-up in games much later on.  Dead Space for example has a life bar on the back of Issac's suit.  Meanwhile Alyx (from Half-Life: Alyx) sometimes comments on her ammo supplies.  The official game for "Peter Jackson's King Kong" movie features a particular button that (when pushed) causes the player character to exclaim how many bullets they have left.  In truth, it kind of makes sense in that game since King Kong features a lot of teamwork.  Maybe you'd want to let your allies know how you're doing ammo-wise from time to time...?

Lastly is the outdoor areas which were quite expansive for the time.  For the most part, FPS games released around that era were of the corridor shooter variety.  Obviously, Trespasser was brutally difficult to run on 1990s hardware because of the sheer amount of geometry on-screen at any given moment.  Even so, the idea of wide open environments was a direction that game development would expand toward; Halo: Combat Evolved and the original Far Cry being two big steps the industry took that way later on.

While it certainly deserves to be called a very flawed game, Trespasser ultimately attracted a cult following of sorts in the form of mod makers and bug fixers.  These individuals actually poured in a considerable amount of effort in order to make the game run with fewer issues and even significant improvements.  In some ways the fan updated (i.e. current) version of the game feels like a VR title.  Incidentally, someone is working on a mod for that.  There's also an unofficial pseudo-remake of sorts in the works, but it's anyone's guess if the DNA of the original can be revived or if it will simply live on as little bits and pieces in games that have come since.