RIGHT: Using noclip in
Metro lets you see the
ruins of Moscow
without the gas mask
obscuring your vision.I
n the summer of 1999
I bought SiN, a
first-person shooter
by Ritual
Entertainment that
featured a hero named John Blade
and some dynamic, interactive
environments. It was released a
month before Half-Life, and thus
was completely overshadowed, but
Ritual did a lot of stuff Valve did—
and better. I loved it until I reached
a level set in an underwater facility.
I remember a lot of swimming,
frustrating enemies, and a labyrinth
of boring corridors.
Being a lot more impatient in my
teenage years, I decided to bypass the
level by activating noclip mode.
Noclip, as PC gamers of a certain age
will know, is a console command that
lets you fly around the level, passing
through walls and ceilings. The term
was popularized by id Software, its
first-person shooters often featured a
noclip mode—as well as many games
built on the Quake engine including
Half-Life and, yes, SiN.
Teenage me was delighted,
because I was able to breeze through
that stupid underwater level. There
was a feeling of guilt, a lurking sense
that I was cheating the game—and
myself. But over the years, in those
early days of PC gaming, I used
noclip regularly in a lot of different
games to get past sections I couldn’t
be bothered with or were too hard. I
figured if the developer put it in,
surely I should be allowed to use it?
BUG REPORT
I don’t use noclip to cheat these days,
but it’s still, often, a very useful
console command. In buggy games
where progress can be halted by, say,
a door or set-piece not triggering, it’s
invaluable. More than once I’ve used
the tcl (short for ‘toggle collision’)
command in Bethesda RPGs such as
Fallout and Skyrim to bypass broken
sections of a level. An inelegant
solution, and I really shouldn’t have
to in the first place, but at least we
have the option, unlike console
players who can end up stuck.
But my favorite use for noclip is
peeking behind the Wizard of Oz’s
curtain. I spend a lot of time
exploring videogame environments,
taking screenshots, making videos,
and generally admiring the art. It’s a
part of game design that has always
fascinated me. Which is why, when a
game has a noclip mode, I always
take the opportunity to escape the
bounds of the level and get an idea of
how it was built. Even if a game
doesn’t have a noclip command, it’s
usually possible to hack one in using
a tool such as Cheat Engine.
One of the first times I did this
was in BioShock. Its equivalent of
noclip is using the ghost and fly
commands, which gives you a
glimpse at how Irrational built the
stricken city of Rapture. During the
opening bathysphere descent I flew
out of the pod, soaring above the
entire sequence, getting a bird’s eye
view of it. It was beautiful, even
when viewed from angles a player
was never meant to see.
And it was possible to see how the
developers had pieced it together.
The whale that swims by waits
off-screen until the bathysphere
passes it, like an actor waiting for
their cue to go on stage. The amazing
Rapture skyline, with its blinking
neon signs, is mostly just flat images.You’d never know in the bathysphere,
of course. But when you get up close,
it’s like one of those towns in an old
western where the buildings are all
thin plywood facades. This ruins the
magic somewhat, but even knowing
the truth, that sequence gives me
goose bumps every time I play it.
Recently I used a camera hack to
access a noclip mode in Hitman 2. I
already knew IO had some of the best
environment designers, but beingable to move around those levels
freely made me appreciate their
talent even more. I don’t know how
developers feel about it, and I’m sure
some of them are mortified by people
seeing assets that were only meant to
be seen from afar up close. In any
game with a large, distant group of
people, noclip lets you see the ugly
truth. Weird, polygonal mutants that
were only ever designed to give the
suggestion of a person from far away,
who you half expect to say “Kill me!”
in a mournful voice. But for me it’s a
way to appreciate their work on a
deeper level. And if I ever replay SiN,
I’ll be using noclip to skip that damn
underwater level again.I ALWAYS TAKE THE
OPPORTUNITY TO ESCAPE
THE BOUNDS OF THE LEVELCOMMAND AND CONQUER Other legendary console commands
IMPULSE 255
If god mode feels a little
too cheaty, but you’re still
stuck in the original Quake,
this command will grant
you quad damage.NOTARGET
Another FPS classic.
This makes you invisible
to enemies, letting you
saunter through a level
totally unhindered.DNUNLOCK
A console command from
Duke Nukem 3D. Type this
in and every locked door
and the force field in the
level will magically open.GOD
It’s called a ‘console
command’ but let’s be
honest, it’s a straight-up
cheat, and I admit to using
it many times in the past.NOW PLAYING (^) I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO (^) I DIARY I REINSTALL I WHY I LOVE (^) I MUS T P L A Y
EXTRA LIFE