Graphics and Sound

Look kids! It’s a dinosaur!

Renegade has been in the works for a couple of years now (I remember seeing an early beta at E3 2000), and unfortunately, it shows. The engine looks like a Quake 2 mod rather than a modern engine. All of the models, from buildings to characters to vehicles are big and blocky. There’s next to no definition in any of them. In other words, there are very few polygons in the levels or models to show detail. The textures are just as bad. Even when on high-detail the textures are very simple. In terms of definition, Renegade is like a simple water color painting where most FPS games lately are as fine as electron micrographs.

GDI Ion Cannon

That’s backup

A “fleet” of ships

Renegade has serious problems with bounding boxes. Bounding boxes are the areas of a character model that you can shoot. If you remember Quake I, the bounding box was slightly larger than the character model, which meant you could shoot the air next to a model and still cause damage. Many games nowadays use the exact character model as the bounding box – if you hit the model you cause damage. In Renegade however, the bounding boxes are smaller than the character models. To make matters worse, the models are skinny to begin with. How do you overlook something so basic to an FPS? The worst problem this causes is that you can see an enemy peeking out from behind a structure, but since the bounding box is too small you can’t shoot him.

One design aspect that I can’t comprehend is the 3rd person view when using ladders. Every time you climb a ladder, the view automatically switches to a 3rd person view where you can’t shoot or look around. This may be “realistic” that you can’t walk up a ladder backwards or that you need both hands to climb, but nothing else in this game is remotely realistic, why make climbing ladders this way? This feels like something that got lost in the production.

General Locke

I’m blind!

Butting heads

Sound

Westwood is known to have some of the best music tracks in the gaming industry. I don’t know what happened during the making of Renegade, because the music is completely forgettable. There are plenty of FPS games have that a soundtrack that Westwood has been known to produce; I can’t understand why Westwood decided to cut Renegade out of the loop.

Most of the sound effects in Renegade are borrowed from the Command & Conquer games. Unfortunately sounds that work well in an RTS don’t necessarily work in an FPS. The weapons and explosions are the biggest disappointment. They sound like air rifles and fire crackers rather than machine guns and C4.