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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."
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!
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
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.
evil adrian
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 andy.
IN THE YEEEEEAR 2000!!!!!!!!
In the year 2000 robots will do 80% of our housework. But we will do 90% of theirs.
Is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Nothing else comes close.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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 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.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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!
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...
why run from Vincenzo?
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.
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".
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
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.
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.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
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.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
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.