The Future of PC Gaming

Warrior-GS writes "GameSpy has two new articles up talking about the Future of PC Gaming. The first talks about the The Future of PC Game Engines, talking to Tim Sweeney, Chris Taylor, Stuart Moulder and others about everything from physics to lighting to AI. The second is an interview with Peter Molyneux about his areas of expertise and what lies ahead. The series will continue next month with a look at the Future of User Created Games and an interview with Warren Spector on PC Gaming's future."

Comments

Warren Spector

[Illuminati Member]

Warren Spector is a true game innovator.
Look at thief, system shock, ultima underworld, deus ex. I'm always for the lookout of his latest games.
Thief 2 was especially heinous. I used to play that game for hours. My first wife eventually gave me the "you love that game or me" speech, and I ended up choosing the game. That divorce led me down the road to many other ones. Its sad really. But damn was that game fun!

Re:Warren Spector

[CaffeineAddict2001]

When she told you "you love that game or me" you should have hit her over the head with a blackjack and dragged her out to the curb.

Re:Warren Spector

[unicron]

That's too funny.

Pro-Microsoft Comment: -1, troll
Pro-Spousal Abuse Comment: 4, funny.

Re:Warren Spector

[unicron]

Stick around for the 10 o'clock show, it's friggin awesome. They do this magic routine where they turn software pirating into a grass roots political movement. If you thought David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear was the shit, you haven't seen a damned thing yet.

And for comedy, they can't be beat. I'm fully aware now that the anti-dmca/palladium rants on this board will someday be used in court the HELP the cases of pro-dmca lawyers.

Re:Warren Spector

[CaffeineAddict2001]

Maybe next time I will leave a disclaimer about how I in no way condone spousal abuse in any way.

After all, we can't have people just telling jokes all willy nilly, somebody might find them funny and beat their wife!

Re:Warren Spector

[haa...jesus christ]

ouch, you sub 50,000 users are so bitter. ;)

Games of the past

[Evil Adrian]

Does anyone else miss 2D scrollers like Super Mario 3 or overhead adventure games like Gauntlet? I have grown so weary of 3D shooters, I wish somebody could offer a decent 2D game that engaged my brain.

Re:Games of the past

[katarac]

Get yourself a Gameboy Advanced. The Castlevania games, the Mario games, the zelda games, and the upcoming Metroid: Fusion! This is truely one of the best systems on the market right now, portable or not.

Re:Games of the past

[Junks Jerzey]

Does anyone else miss 2D scrollers like Super Mario 3

Not really. Yes, at one time those games were great. Even when Sonic the Hedgehog came out in 1991--an awesome game--the genre was already getting stale and moldy. Then the thousand such games released in the next five years completely put the 2D scroller to bed.

There's nothing wrong with 2D scrolling games, except that everyone was just following the path chosen by Miyamoto. If you're tired of the current crop of PC games because they're derivative, the last thing you want to do is wistfully remember the most derivative game era of all time.

Re:Games of the past

[Rew190]

Try out Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project.

And no, you're definitely not the only one who misses side scrollers. I'm waiting for a good Xevious (sp?) game.

Re:Games of the past

[Ian Wolf]

Not At All :)

Then again, I kind of miss Karateka, but Stick Fighter fixed that.

Re:Games of the past

[Pxtl]

I agree - in retrospect, the genre was never really explored. If you look very, very hard you can find a handful of real gems in 2d, but most were just Mario clones (good god, how many games involved jumping on the baddies?).

For the last word in Mario - look up Jump'n'bump. Cute little bunnies stomp each other's heads and explode into bloodnguts.

For 2d games - Liero (worms 1 on 1) and its clones - the original is still the best. NiL is its abandoned (and unfaithful) Linux online version. I hope someone will pick this back up.

Abuse (and the open-source version, FrAbs) is the best thing out there for online 2d action - imagine a hyperfast Quake as a side-scroller. There is deathmatch, and FrAbs promises CTF soon.

Metal Warriors - The rarest, most awesome title for the SNES - 1-on-1 deathmatch splitscreen sidescroller with really, really innovative robots.

For the PC - Z - An RTS with a fresh approach to the genre - its paced more like an arcade game then an RTS. Scorched Earth - come on, this was just cool.

There were a lot of really good platformers and side-scroll games right up until Super Mario came out. New innovations didn't arrive until the genre was dying, and then it was too late - 3d took its place.

Re:Games of the past

[Pxtl]

I have actually been really really freaking disappointed with the lineup for my gameboy advanced. There's really very little besides Pokemon clones and sidescrollers. I was hoping people would take better advantage of what is really a handheld LAN (finally you can conceal the screen from other players) to make some innovations. I want Spy VS Spy, and Metal Marines, and Metal Warriors, and Z, and StarCraft, and old flight sims and suchlike. The only games that even hold my interest on the GBA are the racing games and the FPS games. Even the puzzle games are kinda weak compared to some of the PC titles I've tried.

Re:Games of the past

[Pxtl]

Well, 3d shooters, aside from interface (why does every game use 1-10) actually have some real variety. The problem is in the leaders - Q3, UT, HL, Shogo, Doom, ROTT, Wolf3d - those are all one genre, just some have more multiplayer mods and some have an SP campaign.

If you look a little further you will find some variation. BattleZone (FPS/RTS hybrid), Tribes 2 (Team FPS with some RTS elements), Aliens VS. Predator (really impressive), the new OMF (waiting on the edge of my seat for that) and various other games that are breaking away from the FPS stereotypes.

The main element they have in common is control - move with left hand, aim with mouse. And really, there's more variety then those sidescrollers had.

Re:Games of the past

[infiniti99]

Definitely..

Over the last 6 months or so, my friends and I have been randomly revisiting old games. We just bought a bunch of used NES and SNES games at a nearby store. We even were able to beat Ghosts 'n Goblins, a game I had not played for 16 years (and was impossible back then).

Other games we have been playing lately, instead of modern games:

Kid Icarus
Contra 3
Street Fighter 2010 (sleeper NES game from capcom, it is NOT a fighting game)
Ninja Gaiden
Castlevania 1 & 3
Crystalis (best NES game, IMO)
Megaman 1-6
The Gaurdian Legend
Ultima: Quest of the Avatar (this one goes nearly forever)
Super Mario all-stars
Bionic Commando

There are a lot of good old games, you just have to know what to look for. In my case, I had played all of these games in the past, so I remembered what was good. And contrary to what others may say about old games, I found these totally enjoyable in the present.

For modern 2D, I recommend Marvel vs Capcom 2, an amazingly well-done 2D fighting game by capcom, such that it is still popular even after being around for nearly 3 years (and still has a tournament scene).

Re:Games of the past

[pclminion]

Does anyone else miss 2D scrollers like Super Mario 3 or overhead adventure games like Gauntlet?

Not as much as I miss the great 1D games such as "Linear Boy" and "Lack of Dimension."

Re:Games of the past

[Sylver Dragon]

Prince of Persia, now there was a cool game. I loved the sword fights in it. Not only did you have to worry about attacking, but parrying as well. And, it didn't degenerate into a button mashing fest, or jumping around maddly swinging(*cough* Jedi Knight 2 *cough*). Actually, from what I remember, trying to win by button mashing tended to get you killed. You actually had to think your way through the fight.
I do have to give credit where its due. The 3D version of Prince of Persia that came out some time ago did a great job of capturing the feel of the old game, though I was still killed far too many times because of the camera angle.
Speaking of camera angle, am I the only one who finds this to be the biggest problem with 3D games? You effectivly have 2 choices: first person, which lacks good periphieral vision; or 3rd person, which gives pretty good periphieral vision, but then makes lining up a jump a real pain, also, if the controls are based on the camera they will often change on you while you are in mid-air, really screwing the jump.
Also for what its worth, someone above mentioned Thief, I really like the idea, but all of the Zombie levels and the semi-steampunk atmosphere really detracted from that game. Though I would love to see that engine applied to a Ninja-esque game (and for god's sake, put in a story co-op mode, real ninja worked in groups). I would love to play as a ninja that actually concentrates on stealth. (I tried tenchu, nice idea, really bad controls, stupid enemies, and really bad controls. Did I mention that the controls sucked?)
Oh well, guess I'm just ranting about not being able to find a game I like recently. I'll stop.

Re:Games of the past

[Triv]

two words for ya: guardian legend. Half overhead adventure game, half top scrolling fighter-type. Without a doubt, my all-time favorite NES game. Give it a whirl. :)

Triv

Re:Games of the past

[WNight]

In many ways, yes, 3d is easier to code. In a 2d game you've limited it, to the point of needing to throw out your old artwork, to a single viewpoint. In a 3d game it costs a bit more to make models instead of 2d spites, but it means you've got a ton of flexibility.

In a casual game of Everquest you might very well find that the isometric view is nicer. But nothing beats 1st person for immersion. Imagine wandering through a beatifully rendered forest, watching beams of light play through a light mist as the trees sway gently in the wind. You'll *never* get that in 2d games, Myst had awesome art but you couldn't look at any arbitrary thing. Once you've made your 3d world you can put a camera anywhere.

Scenery is also easier in 3d, at least from a designer's point of view. Once you do a set of textures, and detail textures, for a tree for instance, and modelled a single one, you can permute it in a variety of ways and all of a sudden you've got a forest of unique trees. Not a seperate model file for each, or a collection of views from every angle, but one master and a few numbers describing the differences. Gamers don't need to see the exact same tree often enough to recognize it, or to have a bloated game from having twenty different models/spite collections for every simple thing.

And then when you want, you project grid/hex lines on the ground, lock the camera at an overhead position, and you've got your 2d game.

The reason 3d looks bad now is that models are fairly low polygon count. The models in Final Fantasy (the movie) were over half a million faces each, with a HUGE skin file. Models in Quake are 500-1000 faces with a small JPG for a skin. Maps are similarly low-detail. When the computational barriers are broken we'll see some tremendous looking games. Hopefully at some point it'll become ubiquitous enough that games will stop trying to sell the effects and concentrate on the gameplay again. (Hollywood is stuck in the same rut.)

Re:Games of the past

[Cruciform]

That sounds just like my girlfriend's son. I can't get him to play a game without cheating, except for racing games.
At least now he's unable to because I won't let him near a cheat site for any of the newer titles. He asks if he can play games with the adults sometimes, but I've had to point out to him that he'd have no fun because he'd get his ass handed to him (and I don't need to hear him whine about it). Not because anyone would pick on him, but because he hasn't actually developed any gaming skills.

I don't mind if he'd use the FAQs or strategy guides out there, but right now it's all about cheat codes. Ah well, I think it's slowly sinking in.

Mmmmm...new game engine

[fobbman]

What are the game producers going to do when they finally get to the point where the games look like real life, but still have the entertainment value of the movie "Glitter" or "It's Pat"?

An exquisitely rendered turd is still a turd.

The future conan?

[CaffeineAddict2001]

The future andy.

IN THE YEEEEEAR 2000!!!!!!!!

In the year 2000 robots will do 80% of our housework. But we will do 90% of theirs.

Lighting and shadows

[phorm]

For those who haven't heard of it, I recently picked up an older game called "Nocturne." The gameplay was clunky, and the storyline at times annoying, but the lighting effects were quite awesome for its time. In fact, in comparison to some games I've played today, the lighting is quite superior.

From what I've read up on the game, all scenes are rendered from complete darkness. This means that only the point and spot light sources exist (no ambient). Shadows in the game are incredible. If an object passes in front of a light, the shadow blocks it.
While some newer games have good shadow effects, having a realistic shadow that follows the characters movement (in the game, your character has a trenchcoat which swishes around, making the shadow move too) is extremely cool in comparison to the often used "dark blob" shadow effects in many games. I'm hoping Doom 3 uses these "dark and sinister" effects too. It would be extremely cool to be able to site who is coming around the corner by their shadow cast on the wall or ground.

In short, polygons and texture rendering play a great part in detail, but realistic light and shadow rendering make scenes much more lifelike.

Best 2D side scroller ever.

[unicron]

Is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Nothing else comes close.

not going away

[ramzak2k]

i was surprised that none of the gaming gurus had anything negative to say about PC losing out as the gaming platform like this earlier slashdot article .

PCs have so far been one step ahead of consoles in terms of hardware/processing power, hope those innovations (like AI, ability to use more polygons etc) hit the PCs before consoles.

Polys are overrated

[YAN3D]

A video card's ability to crunch polygons is not as important as it used to be. What is important is what you can do with those polygons. Polygons are just a medium to deliver your textures, lighting effects and shaders. Particle effects are also a staple in modern video games.These are the things that will be improved in future game engines. Imagine a game engine with full global illumination (not faked)

If you remember, virtua fighter had more polygons per charachter than virtua fighter 2. Virtua fighter 2 looked so much better because it acually had textures instead of just flat shaded polygons.

Given the trend.

[Kenja]

Given the current trend of releasing a game engine without much of a gain included (Morowind, Neverwinter Nites, Dungeon Siege), with the expectation that people paying for the product will finish it. I predict the in the future you'll just get a copy of GCC and some artwork when you purchase a game. The game developers will cover their asses by sticking a "some assembly (ASM) required" sticker on the box.

One problem about self-improving game AI

[sielwolf]

One big problem is that we want opponents to learn "online" but how many of us are willing to deal with the long learning curves of a lot of AI? Most people want to 1. sit down at a game 2. be challenged 3. maybe see the opponent due something new.

But to do something new would probably require a lot of trial and failure... and a lot of moments where users will think "damn, this thing has gotten stupider!"

So then you can enforce a baseline behavior... which is more static, more predictable and basically where AI is now (lots of scripting, etc).

I guess the best solution would be for developers to come up with a dozen or so strategies and a system for switching/blending between them. Heck, maybe even have the developers run improvements and then upload them to all the users.

Of course "meat" opponents online do that already: they're called gaming forums. The ability of a person to come up with a great strategy and then propogate it to everyone else online may be the most difficult thing to implement in any game AI.

Advanced graphics != good graphics

[weird mehgny]

It has become common belief that the better tech, the better graphics. It's simply not true. There's much more than a technological aspect of graphics in games, there's also something called aesthetics.

SNES era games come to mind. Games like Zelda 3 and Super Metroid had wonderful graphics - they are in low resolution and in few colors when compared to today's games, but the design work is excellent.

I have no doubts that DOOM 3, for example, will have a great combination of technology and design. My point is just that graphics aren't bad just because they're old!

waiting for that killer app

[DenOfEarth]

The great things is, that there are those people out there that understand that some people play games for the same reasons some people play soccer; the gameplay is basically the same, but every encounter is different, and even greater (for me ;) are those people that understand that some of us will want to play a game for the same reason that we want to read a book or watch a movie (Halo, anyone).

So, considering this, those guys who are building better and better engines are actually going to be helping out both of the above types of game developer, and surely more as well.

I am waiting for the day in the not-so-distant future, where someone releases a game with a story and characters compelling enough (decent engine too) that it causes the larger audience of people to realize that games aren't just for kids. The next thing after that is Sex in games. Wait, that's here already, but wait until it gets even more real.

MK!!!

[kingkade]

Dont't forget the unbelievable funny Monkey Island 1 & 2 which were greatly written and sometimes ridiculously hard (how it the @#$@! was I to know you're suppose to use an actual *monkey* as a monkey wrench to shut off that valve by the waterfall to get at the secret passage behind it! arrgghh!).

I remember good old Mario 1 with the negative world and Mario 2 with all those cool boss enemies! Mario 3 was probably the most popular game ever on NES...

This may soud fruity but, you know a game is good when it leaves you with some cool memories of how cool and fun it was even if its through rose-tinted VR goggles...

Doom/Quake bad examples of retail products

[AHumbleOpinion]

The Doom and Quake series of games are not good examples of retail products. Selling boxes at retail is only part, it may even be the smaller part, of the income. Licensing the engines found in these games is the other part of the income. These games are partly "advertisements" for the engine. That is how they can get away with such high system requirements. The requirements won't seem so steep by the time the products based on a licensed Doom III engine appear.

Re:What I'd like to see...

[Ian Wolf]

The Holodeck would be the death of civilization as we know it.

Seriously can you imagine an even greater scourge? Who the hell would leave? Sure, I'd like to think that my first foray would be to play baseball with 17 hall of famers, to drive through the streets of Monte Carlo for McLaren, or even storm a 747 widebody with an MP5 and a couple of flashbangs, but we all know that the first thing booted up on 90% of all holodecks would be "A Night with Jenna Jameson".

Good ol' Days Syndrome

[Torgo's Pizza]

I'm already seeing a bunch of messages talking about the games they used to play in the past and how great they were. There seems to be an equal amount of posts complaining about what their vision of the future should be.

Funny thing is that I've seen these same articles and the same reactions for over twenty years know. Ever since Bill Kunkel et al started the first video game magazine, there always has been articles with a prognostication about the future of gaming and how crappy the games of today are.

It seems that the future articles state that: the games will be bigger, faster, have more features and be more realistic and interactive. The complaints seem to be the games of today lack innovation, have no plot or substance and have poor quality. The best articles have a up-and-coming game designer revealing the latest and greatest and a wily veteran designer with a "return to the basics" mantra.

Do yourself a favor. Next time you see an article with the "Future of Gaming!" title, just read the above paragraph which will sum it all up neatly for you and you've saved ten minutes of your life that you can now apply to playing Vice City.

Games or Pornography?

[cerebralsugar]

This reminds me of an odd college lecture...

I had a PC achitecture class at my college. When we got to the history of video adapters, our professor explained in graphic detail how each successive graphics adapter (mono to cga to ega to vga) was pushed along by the need for more detail in pornography!

He pointed out how EGA looked lousy, and 256 color VGA was bad for round things with light, such as women's stomach's or breasts. He was pretty into this explanation. He wasn't kidding! This class had about an equal number of men and women.

I would have thought desktop publishing or gaming or something like that would have pushed graphics adapters along. So, maybe based on my professors great theory, maybe its not the gamers that are pushing on realtime rendered 3d graphics, but maybe the porn-mongers. And all this time I thought it was quake upping the odds!

Of course, if you listen to liebermen games such as GTA3 are supposedly pornography.... Maybe I highly realistic, pornographic 3D will be the killer app to get a GPU into every home. ;)

Re:Games or Pornography?

[Mac Degger]

Duh! What do you think made the printing press so widespread...the bible? No, pornographic prints. That also what pushed pricture tech. And photography. Why do you think video recorders did so well? Porn! More to the point, porn at home instead of seedy bookstores/cinema's. And what financed those huge pipes for the internet? Sure, Darpa started it, but the pron biz made it economical. Porn has pushed all forms of communications technology. It's just that society is too prude to admit it most of the time.

BTW, this is a serious post, it's not meant to be funny.

The Future of Tech Journalism!!!

[Elwood P Dowd]

This article is about the future of tech journalism. Notice the byline at the end? "This article is the editorial opnion of gamespy network. Sponsored by the Intel Pentium 4"

Obviously, it was a well written and insightful article. And it was about all the reasons that new games will need bigger and faster processors. And Intel paid Gamespy to write it. Interesting, not wrong.

Why do all games revolve around A physics engine?

[hellfire]

All the "future of gaming" articles I'm constantly seeing are about improving the physics models in games and creating more realistic graphics and actions?

Civilization 3 is an extremely popular game with no physics or highly advanced graphics engine, just some nice animated units that entertain you while your conquering Egyptians.

Heroes of Might and Magic is also a very popular game that also does not require physics, and barely has any animation.

Diablo 2 is unimaginably popular and their physics consists model consists of pushing you in the opposite direction when you get "knocked back" and all the characters/monsters die in roughly the same way with similar animations.

I'm not sure about Warcraft 3 but I can't imagine it requires a sophisticated engine that makes the goblins blow up in just the right way.

This is self-serving tripe about first person shooters. There are dozens of genres out there that don't require physics engines to make their games the absolute best. Hell I just want a game that doesn't crash or contain so many damn gameplay bugs; can we have an article about the future of better QA processes please?

Dedicated AI

[limekiller4]

On page three of the GameSpy article, they get into AI a bit. I wonder if we're ever going to have AI cards like we do now with nics and graphics cards.

Why not? Why not have a whole processor dedicated specifically to the type of algorithmic applications that AI requires?

Re:Dedicated AI

[smallstepforman]

With dedicated video cards and dedicated sound cards, it looks as if we already have a dedicated AI card - its called the motherboard. Asus and Abit make excellent AI cards :-)

The best games the last few years

[Multiple Sanchez]

Are the most immersive. Think Zelda 64. Think GTA3. These are games with a lot of action and a lot of attention to detail. The designers made it entirely entertaining to do nothing more than explore the landscape all day long. The attention to every detail is there in some of our other favorites, too... Space Quest I-III spring to mind, not to mention the Z-word, Zork. Even the abstract, near-wordless Out of This World -- a game I'd happily spend hours arguing is the most entertaining game of the last twenty years -- had this quality, full of the little details in the periphery that made playing the game such a successful escapist fantasy.

Game engines are great and all. . .

[mntgomery]

but good games require more innovation than anything. EverQuest has a pretty crappy game engine, for instance, but the innovative gameplay has captured poor souls for years.

Granted, a good game engine goes further than just putting pixels on the screen, but the future of gaming doesn't rest in the ability of programmers to design wonderful new game engines. It lies in the creativity of the designers to take gaming in directions its never gone before.

FreeDOS

[CableModemSniper]

FreeDOS. Seriously. It even has experimental FAT32 support. And its free. And the latest one is CD bootable. Pop the cd in, load Ultima V to your FAT32 HD (unless you're using NTFS) and play. I believe you can even customize the boot cd and make an Ultima V "live cd". Saving might be a problem there tho...

FreeDOS.

Re:Warren Spector's actual credits

[AlexxKay]

Warren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.

That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. He had no involvement with Thief 2 at all. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.

Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. Warren is indeed a true game innovator. But singling him out in this way is both misleading, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.

Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.

{This is an edited version of a post I've made before -- and doubtless will again.)