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First Pictures of Quake IV
Snaller writes "Yahoos GameDomain are looking ahead to 2005, and have the first pictures of Quake IV. For all those who have missed the Stroggs since Quake 2 - fear not, they are baaack! Quake IV will be made by Raven software using the Doom 3 engine."
...but let's face it, this is Quake - the gameplay will still be stuck in 1996.
Unreal has grown up and matured. The FPS market is oversaturated with as it is, and there are a lot of good games. I know Quake has tons of name recognition, but is there really much room for a game that hasn't changed much of anything since its first incarnation 8 years ago?
This is a direct result of the sheer amount of cash required to make a game. As "processing power has increased to insane levels", so has graphic detail, and graphic detail is VERY expensive/time consuming. Modern game production teams are nearly always comprised mostly of artists. The kind of people who could write up a game even like quake3 on their own in their basements with little/no capital are extremely rare if they even exist at all. Game development is vastly different on the ps2 than it was on the intellivision.
So the corporations with the kind of cash hanging around that it now takes to make a game are faced with an option. They can make a few tweaks to an existing model, pay off some reviewers and sell a couple million copies, or create a game vastly different from anything that came before it and run a rather good risk of losing quite a lot of money.
Eventually the market will turn, people won't buy UT 2023, Quake XVII, and Super Mario 4096, and these companies will look at games like Katamari Damacy and Gish that will be taking over the market, and there will be a switch.
But my guess is that this won't happen for quite a long time. People like bland familiarity. Over 60 billion served.
One thing that really bugged me about Doom III was that everything appears to be wrapped in plastic. Be it metal, skin, paper or stone, everything was shiny. When I look at the Quake IV shots I see the same thing. I don't see this in games like Farcry, Painkiller, or UT 2004 (Or the next-gen UT engine demos) so I'm assuming that it's just got something to do with Doom III's lighting engine.
Does this bug anyone else.
I actually found the vehicle scenes in HL2 to be the most fun.
I haven't played other FPS games lately, so maybe someone else has it right. We used to play Quake 2 and 3 on the lan where I used to work on Friday afternoons and the thing that bugged me wasn't the graphics but the stupidity of the play.
The only way to survive was to put your character into constant run mode and constantly be jumping so as to make you a harder to hit target. This made everyone look like overcharged jackrabbits bouncing around unendingly.
A little more realistic gameplay would be accomplished by adding something like FATIGUE to the game. The more you run, the more tired you get. You need to slow down occasionally to catch your breath, etc. Also, the more tired you get, the worse your aim should get (slightly). This would IMHO increase the playability of these games quite a bit, as you could then act in a sane manner with your character instead of bouncing around at full speed until the fraglimit is hit taking you to the next level.
Id certainly seems to think so. But if you check out other recent releases, such as Far Cry or Half Life 2, you'll see that other palettes are not only possible, but absolutely delightful. Personally, I'm yawning in anticipation for yet another Quake.
One of my pet fantasies as graphics get more realistic is to get into young kids' games. You know, things like "tag", "hide and seek" - the things I really did. Disgusting idea really, worse than battery-powered kid's vehicles. Even worse, I'll bet such a game would sell. I think I'd cry all the way to the bank. I'm happy I don't have time to even try such a thing.
Something like, I dunno, Capture the Flag? And Splinter Cell multiplayer is basically hide and seek where everyone's both hiding and seeking at the same time. I can't think of a direct analog of tag offhand, but I'm sure it's out there.
Thing about kids games is that they're often pretty much archetypes of games...games boiled down to the purest form it can be in and still be a game. These tend to translate pretty well to any medium. Frankly if you could find a popular kid's game that hasn't been translated to FPS form yet, you could probably design a killer mod...
hot foreign sheep.
It's called the uncanny valley, and you can read more about it here
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
Fatigue is only the beginning. How about creating a physical model in which I'm really able to run around and do what I want?
Why is it I can sit in most FPS games and fire my big ass gun at a wall until the cows come home but never blow a hole through it? (...unlesss it's one the game designers specifically put there for that purpose)
I'd like to see a FPS in which *all* walls act like walls, *all* doors act like doors, and if it's visible on screen, it's an object I can act upon. I don't just want to see bullet holes mapped onto the texture of something I shoot, I want to be able to blow a freaking hole through a wall, tie a rope to something in the room, and climb down (or jump to my death if I'm done playing). I can't stand it when there's some door I can't get through until I get the red key or some crap like that. I've got enough explosives to bring down a skyscraper and I can't even dent this door? Riiiight... It's just BS to keep you following the script.
I think the whole FPS genre could get a lot more people back into it if the environment were a more realistic physical model. That's why the whole thing jumped when it went from 2D to 3D, there was additional freedom to move about and do things the game designers never necessarily intended you to do.
I imagine games will eventually get to this point, where walls, doors, floors, tables, ceilings, windows, and, well, everything has qualities that make up how strong they are, how much they weigh, how far I can throw them, how much weight they can support, how big a blast it takes to destroy them, etc. Just overall a more realistic phyiscal model instead of "wow! what awesome lighting effects!"
But for now, I think a lot of people are sick of following the game script. I know I am.
I definitely agree. Seems like every time I see a little kid walking around these days they're quite overweight, which I suspect is because of the phenomenon that you're describing. Not that I don't think TV and video games have a place for kids, since they develop other sorts of skills (How many of us know the alphabet from watching sesame street? And video games develop things like hand-eye coordination and problem-solving skills.), but parents have to draw the line somewhere.
And childhood games also teach kids what bastards people can be, which I think is a valuable lesson that needs learned early on.
hot foreign sheep.