I went out for my first run of the year yesterday and damn I’m glad I bailed out of doing the two half marathons I’d entered earlier in the month. But anyway. The later stages of March always seems to be a good time to go outside with it being early spring and the primroses are blossoming in the hedgerow and the birds are singing in the trees. It’s still cold in the shade but generally, once you get into the direct sunlight it’s quite warm (unless, of course, you’re a vampire in which case you just go poof! and transmogrify into a neat and tidy pile of dust.)

Of course, yesterday it was snowing here. And it was cold. Very cold. Not just “Brrrr! I’m a bit chilly. Better put another jumper on and stamp my feet a bit” cold but real, brings tears to your eyes, “Oh my god, oh my god, it’s so cold! My toes have gone black and my legs, my god, I can’t feel my legs! Don’t leave me mother, please don’t leave me! I can’t feel my legs and oh my fucking god it’s fucking freezing!” cold. Still, not one to be put off by an unexpected cold snap, I went out for 45 minutes with the dog.

Now this is the point where just as you think I’m going to talk about my run, I change tack completely and talk about something even more mundane.

While I was jogging through the woods, bemused by the numb feeling in my teeth of all places, I was thinking about weather effects in games. They’re not uncommon and even World of Warcraft managed to introduce them in patch 1.10 last year. Rain, snow and sandstorms all feature depending on the zone you’re in. Of course, it’s not new. SWG had weather effects a plenty - the sand storms on Tatooine were quite impressive. One of my favourite effects I’ve come across, however, was in Jedi Outcast. During the course of one level (probably on Yavin IV), it rains constantly but the neat thing was that whenever you lit your lightsaber, every now and then it would spark and fizzle as if rain was hitting it. Lovely little touch that added a little something extra to the game.

(As I write this it’s just started snowing again. Come on people! It’s nearly April!)

However, it occurred to me that the problem with all these weather effects is that they don’t have any impact on the world. I started thinking about this while playing Oblivion last week and I’ll come back to it again in a moment. I went to the top of a mountain and it started snowing but what I noticed was that it wasn’t settling on the ground. The weather effect is just that, an effect. Even though it might seem like there’s a torrential downpour, there are no puddles forming, the rivers aren’t flowing faster and the small village isn’t being crushed by a landslide. What’s more, you’re not being affected by the effects. The rain doesn’t make your gear heavier and the hailstones don’t reduce your agility or cause you temporary pain.

Another example: last night, in Oblivion again, there was a storm raging all around me. It was all very dramatic and there was thunder rolling, lightning flashing (especially effective when I was underwater) and the rain was visibly lashing down. It was a portentous storm and I half expected to see the Kurgan or a Black Rider on his horse on top of a rock. The storm demanded Drama, with a capital D. There was a mist which indirectly affected me as I couldn’t see as far as normal into the distance, and it was extremely overcast. So overcast that I thought it was night time (time of day or night affect quite a lot in the game so you tend to keep an eye on it) It got even more impressive when I noticed a tree that was being battered by the wind. It wasn’t just swaying, it seemed to be one moment away from being torn out by the roots and smashing itself through the windscreen of a famous TV sitcom actor! I half expected to see the thatched rooves being torn off buildings and cows and other livestock flying through the air followed closely by a farmhouse occupied by a ponytailed girl and her little dog.

But no, none of this. The NPC I was speaking too didn’t seem phased at all, even though the tree behind him was about to be uprooted, and my character didn’t suffer at all. I mean, you’ve tried walking in really strong wind haven’t you, wind so strong you can lean 45 degrees forward and not fall over (until the wind suddenly drops and so do you, flat on your face and hoping beyond hope that no-one saw). It’s difficult. It affects your movement speed. But not in a game.

In some games (Jedi Knight 1, Lego Star Wars, um.. others that don’t come to mind at the moment) the use of some type of wind machine or vent to help you jump higher or farther are common place. While you can’t run against them, you can use them to help you get to places you couldn’t normally. Actually, thinking about it, there’s one part in Jedi Knight 1 where the wind is a problem, while you’re traversing the outside of a particularly tall building. If you don’t hug the building enough, the wind catches you and it’s adios muchachos as you plummet to the ground screaming your own interpretation of the Wilhelm scream. But these are all uni-directional vector pushes (although that may not be what they’re actually called as I just made it up) and are situated in one place. What you don’t get is random occurrences of these pushes that correspond to a random weather effect. And you don’t get hurt by the weather - any occurrence of a sandstorm is just going to ruin your visibility, not make you run for the nearest shelter.

I’m sure that there are plenty of technical reasons why this can’t necessarily be done as well as playability reasons (especially when it comes to implementing them in an MMO) but for a location like Tamriel in the game Oblivion, which strives for a virtual reality, it would add to the feeling of being in another world.

And as I draw to a close, the sun is out again. Wait, one moment, it’s getting darker… Yup, it’s started sleeting. Oh well!