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A Gamer's Manifesto
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon May 30, 2005 10:05 AM
from the ten-things-i-hate-about-you dept.
from the ten-things-i-hate-about-you dept.
Krimszon writes "The top 20 things you always knew were wrong about games, but were afraid to talk about, since you thought that was just the way is was."
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Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:5, Interesting)
The most annoying part of FPS games, which require you to take a break from gleefully blowing the crap out of your enemies to make meticulously-timed jumps across platforms, like you've suddenly turned into Mario or something.
Personally, my biggest pet peeve is that the AI in strategy games hasn't advanced significantly in the past 10 or so years. More annoyingly, playing "harder" settings on these games doesn't change anything about the AI, it just lets the computer "cheat" to produce things quicker than you do.
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:5, Informative)
Games use finite-state machines for AI simply because the range or variety of moves in each game is limited. And for each move or state, there is a logical reaction, not unlike rock-paper-scissors. It's hard to move forward on intelligence without expanding the variety of plays. Black and White worked because the range of abilities was far greater than any FPS.
However, for people like myself that prefer strategy and thinking over gfx, we still have the time-tested games of chess, go and sudoku.
Parent
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't talk about loot glint. No really.
R.
Parent
Spoiler Warning: Star Wars movies have it too (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, I am not a gamer and I hadn't seen Clones until last week on TV, but I am interested in graphics and adventure/SF/fantasy/whatever-the-heck-Star-Wars-i s-supposed-to-be. I also channel-flipped into Clones about halfway through, where in a great piece of Lucas dialog, Padme orders Anakin to "follow my lead" and they go into the battle droid factory.
Something about that part of the movie seemed so cheesy for something as big-budget and hyped as Star Wars, and I couldn't put my finger on it. Padme and Anakin go down this long corridor when suddenly all of those buzzing winged monkey creatures come out of the walls, and then Anakin defends himself and Padme by hacking them up with his light saber. I guess Padme leads by crawling through a hatch to fall into the actual droid factory with Anakin following that lead into the same mess, where they have escaped the buzzing winged monkeys but Anakin not only light saber all of the droids but also dodge these stamping presses of the droid assembly line while Padme rides around in a foundry ladle.
If it weren't for all of us being fans of the Star Wars franchise, when you think of it, this kind of hero and damsel in peril cliche gets much, much better treatment by the Indiana Jones movies. But there was something I just didn't get about the Clones scene until I read the Gamer's Manifesto post. The hero triggered the alarm and had to fight off hundreds of BWMs (buzzing winged monkeys), for no good reason to the plot or the character or the story apart from when you walk down some long corridor with nothing in it, hundreds of BWMs will appear from seemingly nowhere -- it is just the formula. Also, after escaping the BWMs, you will have to fight droids and have to engage in what I guess is called a jumping puzzle -- avoiding the stamping presses, and I guess, also jumping across moving platforms now that I think about that scene in Clones.
Not only is single-handed combat against hundreds of BWMs followed by a jumping puzzle a gaming cliche, it has crossed over to become a movie cliche, and I guess it is just as lame in the movies as it is in games.
Parent
The greatest game...the best AI..highest realism (Score:5, Funny)
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it. Just sign up. You start by running around endlessly and having some guy yell at you for trival things. This goes on for weeks while you learn the rules of the game.
Then, the playing action begins. You get physically relocated to some hot-dry shithole on the other side of the world. Surrounded by thousands of the enemy. You can't tell them apart from ordinary people, but it doesn't matter because everyone hates you just for being there. The enemy has hundreds of years experience fighting new gamers like you. They know all the tricks. They communicate in a special language that you or anyone on your game team can't understand. But they know how you think from watching your television shows and movies. They have a secret religion that enables them to kill anyone without remorse and to accept their own and their fellow gamers deaths without hesitation.
Such incredible realism in this game. And your enemy's gaming stategy is based on the experience of a permanent hot war that has been going on there since you were born. They were gaining combat experience while you were watching cartoons. They've already made all the mistakes in this combat game and they won't make them again, but you will.
Just like an arcade game, when you're done playing, you get sent right back to begin again.
And just like every other video game, no matter how good you get, in the end, you always lose.
Sign up now!
Parent
Re:The greatest game...the best AI..highest realis (Score:5, Insightful)
The part about them always winning maybe? This is mostly true, they do usually win. The reason is because for them to win we just have to leave, for us to win we have to establish a functional democracy and then leave. That's not usually actually feasible. Usually we either get sick of it and leave, or stay forever. I wouldn't call either of those winning. The last time we succeeded in putting a country to together that we could actually safely leave was in WWII.
Yeah, he's pretty sarcasdic there, but also pretty much dead on.
Parent
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:4, Funny)
When they die, the guys who came up with these puzzles will go to their own personal hell. This hell will consist of a sea of molten, red-hot lava a hundred miles across which they must cross. To get to the other side, they must jump across moving platforms, elevators, and little tiny ledges. The tiniest mistake will cause them to fall into the boiling lava, and then they will have to go right back to the beginning where the last save point was. And they'll be forced to do this for all eternity.
Parent
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't play Half Life completely (I didn't like it), but, as far as I got, jump puzzles weren't a problem either. That said, why can't I see the feet of characters in FPSs?
Metroid Prime should hardly be called a FPS. It's first person, and you shoot, but it's more a FPS / Platformer hybird. You don't really aim so much as you lock on, and dodge / fight like a platformer. It's unique in the field.
If you didn't even finish Half Life, you're concerned about your feet in games (Halo 2), and these are the only two examples you give, I'm guessing you don't play too many FPS games. The end of Half Life had some really horrid jumping puzzles, for example.
The problem has lessened since older games though, Alice was the last really jump-happy game that instantly comes to my mind. Doom 3 had some tricky jumps / platform fighting, but not a heck of a lot. If done right, jumping can add to the complexity of an environment and give the game depth. If done wrong, you are indeed jumping from floating / moving platform A to floating / moving platform B, C, D, and E for no good reason.
Parent
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, personally I'd say that has to do with the game type, as well as the reasons you listed. Metroid prime did had great jumping control, it was easy to do, and the camera flowed so smoothly. Metroid Prime was a platformer by design in many ways. It was something you expected from the heritage, something the game planned for and allowed for. The jumping was to get to a new area, or to expand the level design upward and outward, in a more 3D manner.
In your average FPS, you're not a bounty hunter in a power suit leaping and flipping like spiderman, you're some joe carrying a ton of weapons. When all of the sudden you go from Gordon Freeman, sneaking around Black Messa to Xen, suddenly trying to pointlessly leap around, it's just not built into the game. It kills the belief when you're suddenly leaping over bottomless pits onto little platforms.
Basically I'd say in your average FPS, it's not just annoying when you miss, it's out of place. As the original poster said, suddenly you turn into Mario. A perfectly normal game starts giving you really silly jumps to make across obviously preplanned routes. It's like if all of the sudden, I was required to start jumping on enemies' heads.
Parent
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Unreal AI is *dang* good (Score:5, Funny)
The bot then hid for the entire rest of the round, and waited for the time to expire.
It ran away from him, and waited out the clock, causing it to expire.
They also say that UT2k7, they're completly revamping the AI, to be much, much, much harder. That's perfectly okay with me, I could use a good challenge
Parent
Re:Unreal AI is *dang* good (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, just venting. I loved the game until the later levels. I know the AI's great, but the balance on the bots could've been better. The AI was more than good enough to support it.
Parent
Better AI: do you really want it? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I generally agree with the author's complain, I can recommend him a game with quite decent enemy AI: Operation Flashpoint [bistudio.com]. However, this is also a good example why too good enemy AI can be bad for gameplay. In Flashpoint, you can really be killed by Russian sniper or sneaking soldier just behind your back - but it's as exciting as getting blue screen of death when playing. You just die - and that's it. Personally, I found it surprisingly boring and quite happily returned to totally unrealistic, AI-foolish "Max Payne 2".
Re:Better AI: do you really want it? (Score:5, Informative)
OF is a great game, but as you say, gets boring real quick.
Parent
100% Ack (Score:5, Interesting)
this is obviously just another example of the ironic fact that most gamers would make very bad games if they were to design one.
it's simply amazing how many of them have no idea of what makes a good game.
they always cry for more, more AI, more realism, more micromanagement etc.
but all those things have nothing to do with a good game. they might make a good simulation, but games are supposed to be fun, a good simulation would be as frustrating as real life. excluding
Parent
Re:100% Ack (Score:4, Funny)
You don't think real life makes a good video game? I have to disagree. I mean, I thought "Overweight Pimply-Faced Virgin Living in his Mom's Basement" was a blast. The graphics are wicked- you can see every little button on the remote as you're watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" reruns. And the AI is really tough- no matter how you try to get away from them, those junior high school kids track you down and beat you up and steal all your comic books.
Parent
Re:100% Ack (Score:4, Insightful)
Flight simulator would be a good illustration of your point. While I'm sure it's great for aviation freaks it's just cumbersome and tedious for the average player such as myself.
Parent
Re:Better AI: do you really want it? (Score:4, Insightful)
While I know there are people who would truly enjoy the intellectual challenge of out-smarting a really great AI, I suspect those people are few and far between. They would be greatly outnumbered by those who found such contests stressful and very UNfun.
I point at Metal Gear Solid. Remember how frustrating the Psycho Mantis battle was, until the trick to the fight was revealed? There you go. There's what computer AI could be, if the gloves came off. AI isn't really about making the computer smart enough to beat the player - it's making the computer dumb enough that the player can win.
Parent
Gamers never know what's good for them (Score:4, Insightful)
This guy does have some good points, especially re: obnoxious savepoints, misleading advertising and jumping puzzles, but many times he's asking for things that would destroy the fun of games.
For example, having instant-save anywhere sounds fun until you have it, at which point you realize there's no challenge to a game. You can just play like an idiot and rewind whenever you make a mistake. At that point you could throw your console controller into a paintmixer and it would eventually "win". Fun = gone.
And the parents point about "good" AI is excellent also. we enjoy beating up lots of stupid guys in a game because it puts us in the driver's seat, controlling the game flow. If this guy wants good AI's with a selection of weapons, he should fire up some bots in Quake or UT and get his fill of immaculately aimed rail guns up his ass every 5 seconds. Wheee!!!
That said, a few elements of good Ai *used sparingly and appropriately* will do wonders to enhance immersion.
Back to the main point, people don't often realize that the things they are aggravated about during gameplay are the same elements that make them enjoy the game when it's done.
Parent
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point was that a challenging game would have an inherent challenge. A game is not challenging merely because you have to replay 10 minutes of stuff you've already seen to get to the part causing you trouble
Parent
Re:Better AI: do you really want it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, many game designers don't understand what AI in games is all about. It's not about making enemy units smarter so they can kill you faster, since that, as you noted, makes the game boring. The main purpose of AI in games should be to improve immersion and suspension of reality, so you can enjoy the game more.
For example, in many games enemy units are triggered once you are within a certain distance from them. They will start shooting at you, but once you step outside this invisible circle, they simply turn around as if nothing happened. In this case, improved AI shouldn't be the ability to shoot more accurately, but rather to be able to detect motion at further distances, and react realistically.
Parent
Totally (Score:4, Insightful)
I was thinking previously that in the next gen sony and MS were just going to make more of the same games, and that hopefully Nintendo would give us a real revolution in which there are new gaming experiences. However, after reading this I remember there IS still room for shittons of innovation in the current gaming paradigm of a screen, speakers and a gamepad. Nintendo is sort of taking an easy way out by innovating in other areas than these fundamental, obvious and real problems. If the other guys who are making plain old video games with the same old interface can address many of these issues you can be ready for some games that will sell by the millions.
Maybe this is how there will be a PC gaming comes back. If the next gen consoles dont' fix these things, perhaps some newer PC games will buck the trend and we'll have us a revival.
best games are often the cheapest (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, the article is so right in every point, and it just shows my double why I don't play much games anymore, and why I haven't bought a PC in more than 5 years
FSPYQIS
Re:best games are often the cheapest (Score:5, Insightful)
The game keeps you coming back for --more--, time and time again.
Parent
This guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it goes back to what you grew up with, but the videogame "Type" that I always loved the most was "Adventure Games". I was a major Sierra and Lucasarts junkie as a kid ... I lived for each release of Kings Quest, Monkey Island, Quest for Glory, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, etc ... then then doom came out (yes I know wold3d was first, but doom was the *BIG* hit) and Adventure games stopped getting made, and videogames got dumbed down forever. Instead of intellecutal challenge and witty writing, we got button mashig, searching for ammo, and looking for what switch opened that door. Grim Fandango (1998) was the last *GREAT* Adventure game. To put it in the words of a friend of mine, "I actually feel a sense of loss that the game is over, like someone has died and won't be a part of my life anymore." Has anybody ever felt that way about a FPS?
Re:This guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Allow me to add one more:
NO MORE DAMN 5-CD INSTALLS!
We've had DVD-ROM drives for YEARS, and most people have burners now. PUT THE DAMN GAME ON A DVD AND QUIT WASTING OUR TIME!
It's much easier to install (and store) a single DVD than the massive CD case that comes with the game (or an armload of flimsy paper sleeves (ala WoW)).
N.
Parent
Re:This guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
#9: Immersion and the invisible hand of God (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost every game does this. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King there's actually a "run out of a crumbling building" level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can't jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.
This one really hits home, because it's exactly the reason that I didn't buy Guild Wars [guildwars.com]. Yeah, it might be a really fun game otherwise, but it's like your character is on rails. Hey, there's a cliff. I think I'll run off the edge... hmmm, nope there's an invisible wall preventing me from moving. In a game that's supposedly a cross between FPS and MMORPG, this is just super lame.
For all of it's fault, at least in WoW I could explore terrain, climb mountains, and roam aimlessly if I wanted to.
The article sounded reasonable until: (Score:5, Insightful)
Wherever did he get this idea? It is completely unrelated. "Unpredictability" only harms in-order processing at the scale of single assembly instructions (nanoseconds). A good bot should hardly do something unpredictable more often than once every other second.
And for that matter, more advanced AI algorithms, such as ANN or SVMs, are usually massively parallelizable and very easy to predict. The Cell would be ideal for such applications.
IAAGD (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the things in the article (having shorter load times, better AI, no invisible borders, etc) are things decent game developers strive to do on every title. However, many of these problems are hardware-bound (you can only stream data from dvd so quickly regardless of how you optimize your code), knowledge-bound (AI isn't exactly a solved problem is it!), or practicality-bound (yeah, "come up with a new genre" is easy to say, you do it, find funding, get it published, etc.)
Another few quick points -
"bullshit" about graphics is indeed bullshit, but it *sells games* and people put up with it for some reason. Trade description laws might well apply, if they do, use 'em!
Save points are a fairly nice way of saving progress in a completely linear world, like for instance Halo. Less so in free-roamers like Resident Evil, but thats just my opinion. I can see why developers use them, and I've worked on games which have them in, and its better than the alternative. They're not there to save space!
Sports game commentary will suck for quite some time, game DVDs aren't 9Gb (usually, anyway), and commentary is difficulty not because of how much speech you record...
"Superimposing shit" on the screen is going to happen until you can come up with a way of conveying all information without text (or sound, because deaf people play games too y'know). Even cunningly hiding it like in The Movies isn't getting rid of it.
And do you have some kind of magical map that shows you floor layouts of places you've never been before? No? Didn't think so. How do you find your way around? Exactly.
Hmm. This turned into a huge post.
Re:IAAGD (Score:4, Insightful)
And do you have some kind of magical map that shows you floor layouts of places you've never been before? No? Didn't think so. How do you find your way around? Exactly.
Yes. It's usually on the wall of the lobby.
Parent
True (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want a game that's truly a challenge, it will have to be against human opponents.
Things like Counter-Strike (without cheats), fighting games (Tekken, DoA, etc), or occasionally strategy games (C&C, Empire Earth, Civ).
Everything else is too easy. The only difference between easy and hard on some games is the amount of enemies. Granted, yes, that does make it harder, it doesn't make it any more exciting. There's only so much enemy-slaying you can do before it loses its excitement.
Re:True (Score:5, Interesting)
I only have a few hours a week to play games, and those come at odd an unpredictable times; thus it is a royal pain to log onto a server of join a clan, etc.
Hell, I play games because I want to gedt the hell away FROM having to interact with other people!
Give me the following:
1- GREAT AI
2-unpredictible replay
3- DVD install
4- supreme realism (e.g if you get shot with a 9mm round your subsequent performance WILL be seriously impared, DOH)
5"good enough" graphics - nice but will not make up for bad design as afar as the immersive experince goes.
Do the above and I'll gladly pay $100 or so several times a year for a good PC game. I'm 44, I've been playing games since Spacewar in 1976 and rebuilt my whole PC to play Wolf 3d when it came out; cost is not an issue, quality is.
No slam on teens and 20 somethings, was there and still think that the average gamer is above average intelligence, but my demographic is a little different.
Parent
The "arbitrary barriers" are what annoy me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, I think the rule is: a gamer should NOT be aware of the cruel hand of God fucking with him.
If you ever say, "Damn you, (programmer)!" then there is something wrong. (well, unless Will Wright is peeing on you [penny-arcade.com], but that's another story) There should never be moments so arbitrary or evil that you're snapped out of the game universe to curse the designer. A door which you JUST walked through should not suddenly be locked, for no reason at all, just to prevent you from going back to that save point you passed two rooms before. (I'm looking at you, Metroid Prime 2 - and your older brother DIDN'T DO THIS!)
Or if you're near the endgame... You've got all the keys and magic spells... And all you have to do is march into the Temple and kill the evil wizard... this is NOT the time to make you go on a scavenger hunt all over the fucking map for a ludicrously high number of pieces of an arbitrary key which has no purpose except to draw out the last act! *cough*WindWaker*cough*
(if I pick on Nintendo, it's because if any game design company should know better, it's them)
It's really simple. Just ask yourself - if this were a MOVIE, would I believe in this event? (Paul Anderson and Uwe Boll movies excepted) Would I believe that the characters need to spend three months item-gathering? Would I believe it's necessary for the heroes to take a break from the plot to crossbreed giant chickens? Could I conceive of a world in which a character is unable to climb over a ten-inch high barrier?
If the answer is "no" then there is no excuse for having it in the game.
A game developer's response... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
Actually, this is the point of the cell processor. The cell is meant to allow lots of pipelined tasks to happen with little additional overhead. This means that the difference between a "simple" AI and a complex "AI" (in terms of performance) is little different. And the cell is actually seperate from the RSX, which is the graphics chip from NVIDIA.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
The fallacy of this statement is laughable. Games don't simply exist. The reason that a particlar game genre is produced again and again is become you asshats keep buying them. Again and again and again. Want more games like Katamari Damacy? Then buy the game. No, pirating a copy doesn't count. Want games of alternative genres? They're out there. They're just not advertised and they're not always available at your local Best Buy. They will often be at your smaller game store, or available online. So get off your lazy ass and go vote with your dollars.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
We wouldn't have to, except that by the logic in argument 2 this seems to be the #1 thing that people care about. You vote with your dollars. Your mouth is saying "graphics don't matter" but your wallet says "grapihcs are all that I care about. Shit in the box as long as the graphics are top notch." Doom 3, Unreal 3, Half-life 2... All top sellers because of their stellar unrelated gameplay?
4. Nipples?
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
A game these day costs in the tens of millions of dollars to release. A company is simply not going to risk that kind of green (and possibly the fate of the company) on an analyst's hunch. There has to be something more than a gut feeling to release that kind of game. I mean, when's the last time you bought a Japanese dating simulation? (NSFW) [jlist.com]
6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Agree.
7. Loading...
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
8. I understand that John Madden was raised by wild boars...
This hooks in with #7. Bottom line, consider the requirements of this. It's a simple M*N cost to have more sounds. (M events by N events per sound, assuming a flat distribution of sounds). Of course, one could argue (successfully) that an increase in all sounds isn't necessary, and just in the sounds that come up again and again. Of course, you could also forsake the Madden franchise in favor of a lesser known football series. (This would also have the side benefit of ceasing to support the EA cartel.)
9. Immersion and the invisible hand of God
Agree. This is generally just laziness (or a very tight schedule).
10. And while we're at it...
I sort of agree here, but I see the other side of the coin as well. I mean, if I let you get to areas that aren't important for gameplay, then I need to populate them with content. You also might become lost and frustrated, which is something I don't want to happen either.
11. And while we're still at it...
I agree, with the caveat that this is a genre-specific complaint. For example, I don't mind health bars imposed in an RTS, because I realize it's just a game that I'm playing. On the other hand, having numerous hea
Re:A game developer's response... (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
It's not merely that people are buying the same-old-stuff, but also that it costs so freakin' much to make an "A"-list title these days... if you are fronting the millions of dollars it takes to produce a title, I guarantee that you want assurance you'll see a return on your investment. As with Hollywood, most publishers (large and small) would rather take the shitty-but-safe route of Yet Another Pile Of Adam Sandler Horseshit than risk their money on an indie. It would be nice if the industry was about making "art", but to exercise one of the best movie quotes ever: "It ain't about art! It's about percentage!"
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
Um, "dating simulation"?
Clearly, I've been married and out of the "dating" scene waaaaaay too long if that's what constitutes dating these days... :-)
On the other hand, the exclusive deals that EA has inked with football is utterly deplorable and should be called what it is: a monopoly tactic
If I were an EA investor, I might call it a savvy business deal; certainly, the NFL has the right to license their property as they see fit. But as a former EA employee who has sworn to never purchase or play another EA game as long as I live -- and also an avid fan of videogame-football (Sega 2k5 was awesome) -- I have to say that I hope Mr. Probst & Co roast in hell for this deal. (That said, hopefully Midway's upcoming non-NFL-related football game will live up to the hype...)
So for example, you might have a game with 10 2-hour long episodes, each of which sells for $10-20. Wouldn't this really be preferable if they were released every 3 months or so?
Absolutely! Personally, most games are too freakin' long for me to finish these days anyway... I have other stuff going on in my life. I'd much rather have 10 hours of *solid* gameplay,(with a nice beginning, middle, and end) than 40 hours that have been padded out with Yet Another Level Of Shooting Grunts And Dodging Critters... I'm too old (and slow) for all the reflexes to hold my interest for that long! Give me a *story*, dammit... at least of comic-book quality. (And no, "Demons have invaded the earth and you must kill them" is not a story. It's an excuse.) Can't some enterprising company hire someone like, say, Brian Azzarello / Warren Ellis / Alan Moore to put a storyline worth a damn into a game?
I'll take this one step further and argue that jumping puzzles aren't fun *anywhere*.
Amen! It's time for "jumping puzzles" to join crates as "sign the game designer ran out of ideas or time and is just trying to pad out his level requirements..."
Parent
Re:A game developer's response... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, this is the point of the cell processor. The cell is meant to allow lots of pipelined tasks to happen with little additional overhead.
Yeah, that's what game developers said about the PS2's "emotion engine" and pretty much every console CPU since the Z80. The PS2 was supposed to enable AI that could beat a Russian grand master at chess, instead we got another generation of guards who forget they're looking for Solid Snake as soon as he leaves the room. The raw number-crunching power may be there, but I suspect it'll be used to calculate the effects of the sun's gravity on bouncing breasts in "DOA: Extreme Jell-O Wrestling" long before making enemies smart enough to cover each other's advances and shoot from behind a rock...
Parent
A partial rebuttal (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
I largely agree with this one, though I also think there's room for pattern-based attacks. Doom III isn't a tense military sim with realistic opponents. It's a shoot-'em-up in 3D. The original author's missing the point here.
Where the enemy's supposed to have advanced AI, though, it needs to be better. Duh.
The End from Metal Gear Solid 3, perhaps?
To greatly oversimplify, in fact. There are plenty of approaches to AI that don't rely on scripted routines that are hit by in-order processing. And I don't believe that even the limited scripting-based AI that tends to get used these days is going to be in any way reduced from what we have now. "We won't be able to do more of the same, but faster," cries the author, in an article where he spends most of the rest of his time bitching about the fact that games are just... doing more of the same, but faster. Woo!
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.
Not so easy, is it?
There are games that break with existing genre convention - that do something new, and do it well. There have been every generation. And they've been limited in number every generation, because for each idea that works well there are a hundred total abortions.
I loathe the idea of innovation solely for the sake of innovation, and I always have done. I'd rather play a mediocre 2D platformer than a godawful pre-op transsexual simulator. It's great that despite the wailing and moaning of the people whose favourite game is bitching about the game industry innovative games still get made. And lo, some of them (like Katamari Damacy) are great. But the level of innovation involved will never make me excuse the shittiness of your game.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Don't be such a stupid bastard, then. You know what the games look like, don't expect them to suddenly become photorealistic. Apply some critical thinking here.
Yes, it's the fault of anyone who falls for it. But that doesn't mean you're subject to it if you don't fall for it - it's pretty much trivial to find screenshots online for any released game.
So would you care to explain why I should be lectured on what gamers want by someone who didn't start gaming until the PSX? That's the only conclusion I can draw from someone blaming Square for something that's been around since day one. Anyone else remember the 8-bit game boxes with the beautiful screenshots and the small print reading "Screenshots may be from a completely different version of the game - yours will be shitty two-colour graphics with hideous colour clash"?
4. Nipples?
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:From TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
They feel objectified by them? Seriously, that's what you get for taking the word of analysts. In the real world, a good deal of actual girl gamers aren't bothered by such things just as men aren't bothered by the hulking warriors and shirtless fighters. The demographic he's pointing to is the casual, non-gamer... and let's face it, they don't know what they want. Odds are, they don't want anything... they're not gamers. People need to realize there's a crowd that just won't be sold to, regardless.
As for female developers / designers, more power to them! In fact, what the heck is taking so long? I'm sick of seeing complaints from females and males on behalf of females about the gaming industry. You don't like it? GET IN IT AND 'FIX' IT! In truth, the girl gamers I know just don't care enough to try and change anything. We'll make our games, you make yours... everyone is happy.
The arguement I usually hear back is that nobody will fund the idea. I know good and well that it's hard to break into the gaming industry, but if the female population
It all reminds me of a post on Newgrounds a good while ago. Some anon woman basically flamed Newgrounds for not posting anything she liked, speaking on behalf of all girls that the site was bias. The result, after a good deal of laughter, was 1) A lot of offended site regulars who were women, and 2) a general agreement that Newgrounds is a COMMUNITY site and it is what you make it. If you want that kind of content, make that kind of content! Nobody is going to do it for you.
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Re:I loved the "loading" part (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you know you can't have mini-games during a loading screen because of patent law?
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Re:No, really. (Score:5, Informative)
Last I heard, Namco owns loading screen games on the PSP. Not sure about in general though, but it's a good guess. Here's a quote from Game Developer magazine, interviewing EA's Dave McCarthy:
BS: Do you forsee anything like minigames during the loading screens?
DM: Minigames during loading screens is actually patented by Namco, so they're doing it!
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Re:He doesn't know what he's talking about (Score:5, Insightful)
> talking about.
Something is a challenge for the developers, therefore he doesn't know what he's talking about? He didn't say "adding good AI is easy, get on it"; he said that good AI was a seriously lacking element in modern games. And he's correct.
I think he's pretty much right on on every point, and the fact that developers would have a lot of work cut out for them has nothing to do with whether he "knows what he's talking about".
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Re:CIVILIZATION (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:On point 2: games are all the same (Score:5, Funny)
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Except for Harvesters... (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
Damn things need a babysitter.
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Commend and Concur? (Score:4, Funny)
It was a simulation of sitting in long bored-room [sic] meetings where you lose points for falling asleep, but gain points and status for being agreeable to the lecturer's ideas, hence the name of the game.
I rank this game as follows:
Addictiveness: 10 out of 10. At my current job I play this game for 8 hours a day in lieu of my real responsibilities, only breaking long enough to eat a 30 minute lunch. Every single day.
Interface: 10 out of 10. Commend and Concur forgoes the traditional controller setup and makes use of verbal commands and body language to play the game. Certain system functions, like pausing, must be executing with undocumented verbal commands such as "I need to use the bathroom", but you cannot pause indefinitely.
Immersion: 10 out of 10. Creepily realistic graphics - I couldn't tell the difference between this and real life.
A.I.: 2 out of 10. The other humans in the meeting room are often devoid of life and anything creative to say. Programmers, please remedy this in the sequel.
Playability: 10 out of 10. You can play this game without thinking-... wait! I am playing this game without thinking! In fact, I'm typing up this Slashdot comment while I'm playing this game.
Solomon Kevin Chang
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Re:On point 2: games are all the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't buy a console for anything other than mindless FPS, side scrolling Mario gams, and racing games.
Stop the developers from lowering the standards of gameplay to suit consoles. Thief: Deadly Shadows was a middling-quality game utterly ruined by the limits imposed so the publishers could sell it to xbox owners. They had to dumb the game down, and sever the levels into small pieces to suit the xbox. This ruined the immersive environment totally.
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Re:On point 2: games are all the same (Score:4, Interesting)
The reson for your complaints? That would be because all the strategic, intellectual, clever, thoughtful games for the PS2 are... on PC.
Seriously, dude - you buy a console, aimed squarely at fast-paced arcadey twitch-gaming (the occasional good strategy/RPG notwithstanding), then slate it because it doesn't do well what it patently isn't designed for?
Like I said, there's a market segment catering to the very areas you identify - it's called PC gaming. You even list your "ideal" games in the post - C&C, Allied General, Civilisation - see any connection? They're PC games.
Buying a PS2 for lobotomised knock-off PC strategy titles is like buying a hammer to install screws. You might be able to do it, but it's patently obviously The Wrong Choice.
The console marheteers know their audience - you've just bought the wrong product, is all.
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Re:Some good points, some not-so-good (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hey man, want to play DK Jungle Beat? You use the bongos!"
"No thank you sir, it's simply a 20 year old Mario designs married to an overpriced, single use gimmick controller."
"Hey man, want to play DDR? You totally have to use your legs to play!"
"No thank you sir, I grew tired of that sort of thing with the NES's power pad."
There are times when the use of the word "innovative" is incorrect. Katamari Damacy is not one of those times. There is more to the innovation in the game than just rolling a ball. The easy-to-grasp concept and controls, the cute/bizarre art and music design, the level and size scaling, the original IP. Combine that with ball rolling and you still get innovation. Katamari deserves all the credit and good word-of-mouth it received, which is more than you can say for just about every mainstream game out there.
Oh wait, they completely ripped off "The Little Prince" with those small planets in the game menus! INNOVATION IS DEAD.
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