A Gamer's Manifesto 823
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."
The major difference between bonds and bond traders is that the bonds will eventually mature.
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.
All your base are belong to me (Score:3, Interesting)
I loved the "loading" part (Score:3, Interesting)
Bwahahaha... that guy gotta be kidding on that one
#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.
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?
On the high cost of development (Score:3, Interesting)
It's just impossible for a small company to create a small, nice, innovative game for a console. A new great idea along the lines of Tetris would never make it, no matter how addictive or playable the game was. All the new games are gigantic with minimized risks and huge budgets, and the price will be set accordingly. (The Sega Sports NHL/NBA/NFL 2K5 games being a notable exception to the rule.)
Game budgets have risen to the same ballpark as movie budgets, but, for console games, there is no alternative analoguous to independent films.
I have these new games that are pretty to look at and everything, but why do I miss a bunch of old, simple games from the C64 and Amiga days?
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
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't talk about loot glint. No really.
R.
What is in-order execution? (Score:2, Interesting)
From TFA...
"both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily."
That is more than a simplification. The in-order processing eliminates the transistors used for out-of-order execution, and puts the burden on the compiler writer to avoid dependencies/cache misses.
Some of the extra transistors are used instead on the other cores. Overall, this means way more processing power and should mean better AI... if the programmers can code good AI in the first place.
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.
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems pretty dumb to make such a visually stunnning game which a hearing impaired person can't finish.
On another note was there a script/bot problem here at
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.
Limitted/unlimitted play areas (Score:3, Interesting)
"I understand you can't have infinite space, guys surfing right off the mountain and taking a snowboard tour of Asia. But put a cliff there. Cliffs are solid. Empty air is not solid."
Tribes II had, as best I could tell, a totally unlimited play area. You could stray from the "battle zone" and litteraly just fly for ever. And the terrain it generated remained the same as you flew back, so it wasn't just recycling. I had got into a couple duels where me and the other guy fought until we could no longer see the battle area. Now that was a fight that sucked to win.
Kind Regards
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.
Re:On point 2: games are all the same (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The "arbitrary barriers" are what annoy me... (Score:1, Interesting)
A developer's perspective... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
First, many enemies DO adapt their strategy on the fly. Many enemies DO switch weapons when appropriate. Many enemies DO work in teams. The problem is, AI isn't about the NPCs, it's about the player, and for the most part AI advances would be in areas that the player doesn't notice. Getting snuck up on? Not fun. Fun is all about keeping the player informed about what's going on so that they can react and devise and enact their own plans. There are a number of ways that AIs need to be improved, but these aren't really among them.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
You've GOT to be kidding me. In-order instruction hurts the performance of the processors but allows them to be much simpler (and thus allows the Xbox360 to have 3 on a single core). AI is not hurt by this in the least. It's just ridiculous, and it's clear he's got absolutely no clue what he's talking about.
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
I worked on Thief, and let me tell you, we did basically this. And guess what? Didn't sell for crap. Action is fun and interesting. The game he's describing sounds like a bore.
And as far as why we don't come up with new genres, well, we do, only it only happens every few years. The whole stealth (Thief/Splinter Cell) genre started 6 or so years ago, and lately we've created the "open city game" (GTA). I honestly find that pretty amazing, particularly given how outrageously expensive games are to develop and how necessarily risk-averse that makes publishers.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Fine, then have a clue and don't fall for it. Killzone released a movie that was blindingly obviously not gameplay footage, and they never claimed it was, and yet at this very site there was huge debate as to whether it was real or not. Take marketing with a grain of salt, eh?
All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Actually, in MS's and Sony's infinite wisdom, they're going to be OPTIONAL hard drives. So we can't count on them. So we can't actually leverage them in our games. Sorry. Don't blame me.
Loading...
Fine, if you don't want loading, expect there to be cuts elsewhere in the game. That's not to say that loadtimes can't hurt the game significantly (including one game that I personally worked on), but we've only got X million dollars and Y years. If you think it's that important, fine, but then don't bitch about the limited scope of games.
YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again...
We do on the Xbox. And it's more like 6GB on the DVD, and that's if we want to deal with the layer switch and the impact on QA-ability of the title. But yeah, I agree a little more variety would be good.
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.
Re:He doesn't know what he's talking about (Score:0, Interesting)
As a consumer/gamer I don't give a shit how "hard" it is to implement, nor do I care if it is an "open" academic problem, and I don't care if the solution is a hand crafted set of decision trees or not. The term AI used by gamers is not true AI, and we don't care. What we care about is, when the bad guy is coming my way, and I put a b40 rocket within a foot of his head, he should do something, like hit the dirt, take cover, shoot out a light. Don't much care what, but just sitting there waiting for the next shot is stupid.
So, in the academic sense, the author may be a little off about AI. And, as one sees so often in real life, your academic interpretation of the authors need, is completely fucked up. What the author means is "I hate stupid bots that don't have the good sense to even duck", and you interpret it as "I must have code in the next game that can win Turing certification".
Please, stay in school, forever. The world does not need another pompus, asshat, compeng dork, who can somehow manage to read technical manuals for fun, yet could not interpret an end users requiremnets to save his own life.
Re:HALO (Score:1, Interesting)
And yes, I pointed out to the authors a while back when I read this article (it's about 2 weeks old), that Halo2 had pretty intelligent AI.
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?
Women in Games (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree, because my girlfriend (29) and daughter (4) love the outlandish clothes women wear in games.
Three games that we are playing right now are: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy: Chrystal Chronicles, and Xenosaga (ep 1.)
Pretty much all of these feature pretty outlandish clothing. We talk about it. We think it's cool.
I don't know about Ms. Floss, (pictured in the article,) but I suspect my girlfriend would think it was cool, and have no problem playing her. My daughter seems sort of blase, ("Do you like it?" "Yeah..,") but she's more focused on kicking robot ass in Xenosaga right now.
Our daughter regularly tells us, "I want to be Lulu," by which she means: "I want to dress like Lulu." She earnestly likes all these images. We let her cut and paster her old clothing, to make the outfits.
Nobody finds it particularly offensive that Lulu has big breasts.
So, I'm going to have to say: I think that one's right off the mark.
Maybe some women won't find the images appealing. Maybe a conservative christian women won't find it appealing. People who have strong ideas about what people should be, how they should dress- obviously, they're not going to like it.
But, there's a lot of women who like these kinds of things.
When I went to college, interest in anime was mostly a male thing. (Or, perhaps it was that I just went to a school that is mostly male. [hmc.edu]) But I've heard from the anime that in the younger croud, I'm guessing people aged 15-20 right now, that a lot of girls are into anime- that the ratio is even. I strongly suspect that almost all of those girls will feel comfortable with Ms. Floss.
Look at the movies that are coming out: Sin City, X-Men, - it's like we're going on a comic book fashion rampage. I don't think this is a bad thing.
It may offend more traditional sensibilities. Women from particular backgrounds may feel objectified. But: I think if we're talking about the growth of games, it makes sense to look at what this younger generation is doing and thinking.
I could help, but I doubt he'd take it. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are actually quite a few games out there which are not FPS, racing games, or sports titles. He'll just have to look in a different part of the software store to find them.
Most of my favorite games (which I've collectively spent far too much time on) fall under none of these genres, and satisfy most of his complaints. At the end of the article, I thought "well, if this guy wants something that will satisfy most of his demands, he should head down to the store and pick up a copy of MS Flight simulator. It's challenging. The primary focus of its development is realism as opposed to graphics. It has online multi-player (for free). They're really aren't any restrictions in the game's world that would limit the immersion factor (the game does cap off the maximum altitude you can reach, but 95% of the aircraft you fly wouldn't be able to reach it due to physics modeling, so it's more or less a non-issue). In some of the default airplanes the pilots are drawn as women who are hardly "scantily clad". Granted, the AI is a little clunky, but in its current form it's more there for ambiance then game play.
Though I doubt he'll do it. I mean, there are no monsters to kill, nothing to blow up, and even though he says he wants games to be difficult at the start, the learning curve for most FS is pretty high. I mean, he'd probably have to read the manual and go through a number of tutorials before he could complete a short, successful flight in a Cessna without crashing. Oh, and he'd have to use a computer instead of a consul.
Re:On point 2: games are all the same (Score:3, Interesting)
Fair play if you didn't know that then, but I thought everyone understood consoles were for "arcade" gamers, PCs were for "thinking" games.
Of course, I'm overgeneralising here, but the very platforms are designed with the different games in mind - the PC has always been geared for stateful, number-crunching simulation and "deep" games (witness the years and years it took for the PC to get decent sound and graphics capabilities compared to consoles). Consoles, on the other hand, have been designed from the get-go to have pretty graphics and pick-up-and-put-down gameplay (lack of storage capability, limited input capability of controllers vs. keyboard/mouse, etc).
That's not to say that you can't now get decent strategy games for the console and "arcade" games for the PC, but the general culture of the platform has solidified around those two positions, so decent games in the "other" genre tend to be the exception, rather than the norm.
"I will not buy a PC just so I can play a game."
I understand your frustration, but you obviously made the wrong choice and them's the breaks - for "deep" games the PC is the platform of choice, for "arcade" games choose a console, and no matter how inconvenient it might be, that's just the way it is. Perhaps a little more research might be in order before spending hundreds of dollars on technology next time?
"IMO, that's what "game machines" or "consoles" are intended for."
ObSlashdot Car Analogy:
You can drive places in a Formula 1 car or a 4x4 beach buggy, but don't expect the F1 car to be any good on the beach. And always check what you want to use the car for before parting with your hard-earned cash.
"But, no doubt, I appear to be mistaken - as such games were not aggressively marketed on my platform."
Well there you go - it was never historically a big "strategy" platform, and they never advertised it as a big "strategy" platform, so you can't really blame them for not producing many strategy games, can you? Not to sound sarcastic, but the problem is obviously an incorrect purchase, rather than anything inherently wrong with the product or marketing, right?
Apologies if you were just sounding off and I'm inadvertantly pissing on your bonfire, but it honestly sounded like you didn't understand why it had happened...
Brilliance (Score:2, Interesting)
Thank goodness someone else said it. I'm tired of getting shat on, dissed and dismissed for talking about this stuff for the past ten years - it is why I left the industry.
You can't change this from within the system, the vacant $uits have too much power and they simply don't care. You can't change it from outside the system, the system is too insular and amoral and is not responsive to common sense, or even examples of dissident innovative success like Katamari Damacy - and consumers,sadly don't drive markets, any more than voters drive candidates, they follow them - serve them quality, and they will cherish it, feed them crap, and they will worship it - and the other nine-tenths will simply turn off, tune out, and play solitaire instead.
The only way to change it is by treating the mainstream, commercial game industry as damage and routing around it, creating alternatives - not just alternative developers creating alternative games, but alternative distribution, alternative revenue models, alternative value systems.
90% of the potential market is waiting. Some of us are trying to do something about it. And it's nice to have some cover from folks who obviously Get It [tm]. The article was brilliant, and any developer who doesn't pay attention, who thinks they know better, deserves the STDs they'll get from the pimps who write their paychecks.Re:Multiplayer (Score:3, Interesting)
In some games there is. Take counterstrike for example. If you die, you lose any weapons you might have bought, which means you may be short of money. You don't want to go from being kitted out with armour, deagle, full kit of grenades and para to just deagle and grenades. Also you have to wait for the round to finish before you respawn.
CSS is the only game I play regularly online.
A game player's response to the developer (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Um... I did. Actually, I went in halves for a used PS2, *then* bought Katamari Damacy, making its effective cost to me $85.
Despite my doing what you said, there wasn't any other PS2 games I was interested in. B-but... I bought Katamari Damacy!
What is my point? My point is this: I like clever, original games, and will buy them, and in fact buy nothing except them. But there are millions of idiots who buy Ultra-Madden 200X. This means big companies, chasing profit and mindful of opportunity costs, go after that, to the deteriment of things like Katamari Damacy.
Thus, there is very, very little out there that interests me, other than that which is produced by Nintendo, who, for all their faults, still know how to make clever games most of the time. Meaning that I buy, primarily, Nintendo. Meaning a number of idiots on Slashdot would call me a fanboy. Argh.
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.
If the gut feeling is had by an analyst, then I agree. If it's by a developer, or a master designer, then I think you're smoking crack, sorry to say. They probably know their field a lot better than an analyst. Or a marketing department.
Ultimately, what the article says is "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." Meanwhile you object to that, saying, "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." The article said it with regret. You seem to think it's unavoidable, and thus people shouldn't complain. Me, I think I'll continue complaining.
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.
He already covered this: figure out ways to load data during down time. Metroid Prime loads the new room during the previous one, in a rather slick fashion, though I'm sure it means that levels must be designed with it in mind. Even so, most developers put nowhere near that much thought into the process. Yet, somehow, most of Nintendo's games have little or no load times. (I hate to bring up Nintendo again, but it's true.)
5. Stop the Short-Sighted Business Bullshit
Agree and disagree. I agree that frivolous or baseless patents are not good for the game industry. But if a company comes up with something truly revolutionary, I think that they should get to reap some reward from that.
Like, um, HAVING THE FEATURE IN THEIR GAME?! Sony patented a brain-centered input method not so long back that they admit doesn't even exist yet, and they don't even know how it would work! I don't see how anyone could possibly say that's good for anyone, including customers, except Sony.
If by reaping rewards, you mean exclusive access to that idea, then I have absolutely no sympathy. Building on each other's ideas is what moves the industry forward as a whole, not what holds it back. Nothing says you have to tell how you accomplished it -- if the idea is deserving of real protection, then it shouldn't be trivial for others to duplicate anyway.
BTW, what Slashdot readers tends to have a default antipathy for isn't patents, it's software patents. And ust because a bunch of Slashdot readers think something's wrong, it's not a secret indicator that that thing is right.
Enough responses, I told my doctor I'd try to lay off the extreme bitterness.
Some Good, Some Bad... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not really what we want; it's actually not always fun. What we actually want is AI that will a) surprise us, or b) do something that appears clever. In some of the better, faster-paced games, there a decent amount of intelligence on the part of the enemy -- (ever see how enemies in Half Life 2 will try multiple doors to get to you?) but we're so busy running and gunning, that we don't notice it.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before.
I'll be -1 Redudant and point out, say, many of Will Wright's offerings, (PA [penny-arcade.com] notwithstanding). Hell, they even bring up Katamari later on in the article. I was somewhat agog at the article's next complaints:
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine?
Games such as Thief and, to a lesser extent, Splinter Cell, fulfill the former; and the underrated (but difficult-to-play) Robinson's Requiem and (again, to a lesser extent) Notrium are among the latter.
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin... Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It's true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless.
Absolutely; I think companies will flock to that as the "next-big-thing" eventually. Here's my timetable for buzzwords:
2004 - Shadows and Lighting
2005 - Realistic Physics
2006 - Emergent Gameplay
2007 - Appeal to Women
10. And while we're at it... Let's rid games of all arbitrary barriers.
Again, I agree; and I wonder if, should we start building games differently, (e.g., if more elements are handled by simulated systems rather than scripted events), will we see more of this? I care less about this from the standpoint of immersion, and more from the standpoint of the ability to solve problems as I want to solve problems. This seems less a matter of horsepower and more a matter of game design. It's not slow CPUs preventing us from doing this. Is it?
________
Epidemic Groove [dejobaan.com] - A combination of real-time-strategy and action on a cellular level.
I've heard stories... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bring 'em on! By the time I can see HL2 on full detail at a steady 60 fps, I'll be more than able to run their good AI.
But, Halo 2, although it has intentionally stupid AI sometimes (do you really expect a Brute to be much for strategy?), it also has done some crazy things to me, and even crazier things to my friends who play on Legendary. True, Legendary is pretty cheap -- instant one-hit-kill headshots from Jackal snipers or three plasma shots from a fully automatic weapon to kill you -- but from what I'm told, the AI learns and strategizes.
I'm talking about, watch an Elite say something to another Elite, then they cut around in a pincer maneuver around the sides of the area, while a third Elite in a Ghost charges you from the front. Or, sneak up behind a jackal sniper placed obviously in your path and bash him to death, and have it work the first time you play through, but the second time, he hears you, spins around, and one-hit-kills you.
It could be a lot better, but to be honest, I like it right where it is. That way, I'm encouraged to do co-op mode, just because all of my CPU allies are fucking morons. And, for that matter, I bet that for all your chess/go/sudoku strategizing, those skills probably have to be completely re-learned for modern games.
Now, if only more games had co-op... What I really want is not MMO, but -- say -- Half-Life 2, in which Alyx is at least as much of a badass as Gordon, but in different areas -- maybe she's one of those black-ops ninjas? Or maybe she builds stuff, MechAssault style -- and where I can network two computers and play through the entire game with a girlfriend. We could even be split up for long periods of time. You could even still script our meetings -- maybe she has to catch up to me to give me the RPG so I can kill the strider, and until then, I have to survive in a courtyard with three of them and come up with inventive ways to keep Barny alive.
Or, while I'm brainstorming, maybe we do want some less linear games. Not GTA-style -- you still want somewhat of a linear plot -- but more like Jak II and III -- a massive, dynamically-loaded world, where you very rarely find the borders, and yet you still have some purely linear sequences and a lot of things you have to do. That would take some of the pain out of co-op -- maybe you have simpler goals, like "kill the final boss", and lots of tools to collect to do that, and you can have an 8-person game.
It could even work, if we could save multiplayer games.
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:2, Interesting)
They should - lots of people didn't buy GT4 because the AI in GT3 was so poor. (Not that it's -much- better in GT4, but at least they make the odd mistake under pressure now which means it's more of a race than a hot-lap contest.)