The Game Developer Conference 2007 is under way and famous designers are discussing our favorite hobby. Gamasutra has a summary of Raphael Colantonio's lecture where, in some kind of Dark Messiah postmortem, he explained "many problems faced by designers in the realm of first-person hand-to-hand combat."

"Another problem was that by the time they found the right combination of elements that made the combat work, most of the actual levels had already been completed. Though they were able to make some changes to levels to be more in line with the finished combat engine, Colantonio felt that overall the level designs did not work out very well with the combat engine. Finally, Colantonio said, his other big regret was being unable to create a successful back-flip animation in a first-person game."

Now we know a little more about the causes of some of Dark Messiah's problems... and I must say I would like to see some back-flips in a first-person game.