Kevin: This shot reminds me: You'll see games with forklifts and crates, but you won't see one goddamn pallet. You know what a pallet is right? Yeah, you worked at the warehouse, you know. But all these whiny bitches who go to college on their parents' money and then design games have never been inside a real fucking warehouse and have no fucking clue that in order to move a fucking crate, you need to have a goddamn pallet.
Sadly, there are only two forms of cover level designers seem to be able to work into games now: crates, and in a true sign of giving up, completely unmotivated chest-high walls, which apparently on the battlefields of the past, present, and future are just sort of treated like a basic decoration tool, like an "arch" or "window". ("Hey, hon, I cleared a space in the backyard, what should we do with it?" "Ever since I was a child, I dreamed of having a white picket fence, a dog, and a small maze of chesthigh walls in the backyard. Grab a shovel.") Now we're back to a TTC of approximately "whenever the first firefight" occurs, so, yeah, few seconds tops.
Ironically I think crates went out faster IRL than in game. I haven't seen crates in forever, barrels yes but not a true crate. Most things now are placed on a pallet and shrink wrapped like crazy. They'll stack a couple of these on top of each other and they remain intact.
The strange thing in games is that crates manage to get themselves into places where it just doesn't make sense. Like in Kingpin, they managed to get down an alley way with a small area for the buildings back doors. It was like some hobo was wheeling crates around the city with a dolly cart.
My problem with most shooters is that the crates are placed randomly. At least in Half-Life the crates were more often than not in a storage room/area/rack than piled in the middle of a room or in an obscure corridor.
Fallout 3 resolved the box problem too, in that most items were actually found on shelves. Something I hadn't seen since the days of isometric RPG's where tables actually found their heyday.
(I'm really not familiar with recent games)
The highlight for me though was their guest book. Rather than write their own, they and their entire readership would go and crash someone else's, with a new one each week. Here's a wayback link: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19991010010423/http://www.o...
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have archived any of the actual postings, but they were as deranged as they sound :)
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/02/old-man-murray-de...
I have no dog in the fight, Wikipedia arguments are dizzyingly pedantic, but I found the conversation interesting.