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The Future of Game Design
IGN has the beginnings of an interesting series up entitled The Future of Game Design. The first part of this series covers game design elements that we've seen in the past that the author would like to see show up more often in future games. From the article: "We need better art direction in our games. Not just more polygons or slicker textures, but games with a better sense of visual style. Off the top of my head, one of the first games that really showed a distinct sense of art direction and style in this generation of games was Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. That game oozed with style, and even though it was simple and quick, it became one of my favorites because the main character, Sly, had real character." As we start to get into Uncanny Valley territory I hope more artists take the approach that Sly and WoW have.
Art direction is good and all, but is anybody writing games to convey *atmosphere* these days? Take the first two Thief and System Shock games. These games had atmosphere. You felt the panic and dread in SS2 as a former human rounded the corner, lead pipe in hand, swinging at you while moaning, "Kiiilllll mmmeee!" Your heart pounded as you crept up behind that guard and clocked him over the head, picking up his corpse just in time to duck into the shadows before his friend saw you.
These were games you could play at night, with the lights off, and actually scare the crap out of yourself. And it wasn't because of toonish graphics or special effects - it was because of atmosphere.
I can agree with the author on just about every criticism he makes, but some of the things he wishes were better are huge hurdles. For instance its trivial to say "We should have better AI in games!" but, in reality its damn hard to try to make AI better. Most current AI (the AI the author was talking about) is scripted and is therefore limited by the programmer's ability to think outside the box. Yeah, when you're in a game and the enemy does something weird we automatically think "Duh! Its obvious that this is stupid!" But when you're designing and writing the game, its not always obvious. The designer has to think ahead "Well, what would happen in this situation?" and then program that particular situation in.
Or take voice recognition AI. It would be great in KOTOR if I could simply tell a companion to go attack the guy on the left and then I attack the guy on the right. Again, this is not a trivial hack or by any means some hidden conspiracy to prevent ease of use. The AI would have to understand the idea of left, right, and attack along with actually understanding when I state into a microphone "Attack the guy on the left." Yeah, we could script this, but see previous problem.
I realize the author is critiquing games to make them better, which is good, but failing to understand how some problems are very difficult can sometimes aggravate more than motivate. Nothing aggravates me more than a fanboy who simply states "How hard could it be to do X?"
There were just as many bad games Back in the Day (tm) as there are now. You've simply forgotten about them. In 5-10 years, you'll forget about the bad games taking up shelf space today and only remember the stand-out titles, and make the same complaint.
This doesn't just apply to games, either. It applies to almost everything. The "Good Old Days" were not necessarily any better than today, but the effects of time have made you forget the bad and remember the good. That's why people want a return to the "values" from the 1950s, or complain that Hollywood is just churning out mindless blockbuster action flick after mindless blockbuster action flick, or complain that the airwaves are overrun by Britney Spears wannabes. Do you really think that there wasn't divorce, death, rape, abortion, violent crime, or any of the other ills of today's society back in the 50s? Do you really believe that back in the day Hollywood only released one or two films a year, or even went years without releasing antyhing because nothing was good enough? Do you really think that there were entire stretches of years where no artist released any music at all? Of course not. The collective consciousness has just swept all of the bad behavior, bad movies, bad music, etc under the rug and idolized what came before.
Tuck this thought away in the back of your mind, and drag it out in 10 years when you find yourself lamenting that the current crop of video games pale in comparison to the gameplay found in the "classic" Half-Life 2.