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A Gamer's Manifesto
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."
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We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. 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?
While I generally agree with the author's complain, I can recommend him a game with quite decent enemy AI: Operation Flashpoint. However, this is also a good example why too good enemy AI can be bad for gameplay. In Flashpoint, you can really be killed by Russian sniper or sneaking soldier just behind your back - but it's as exciting as getting blue screen of death when playing. You just die - and that's it. Personally, I found it surprisingly boring and quite happily returned to totally unrealistic, AI-foolish "Max Payne 2".
I read this a few days ago, but I gotta agree with a lot of what this guy is saying. Some of his points can be debated, like save spots, but most of them are just dead on, like bad AI.
I was thinking previously that in the next gen sony and MS were just going to make more of the same games, and that hopefully Nintendo would give us a real revolution in which there are new gaming experiences. However, after reading this I remember there IS still room for shittons of innovation in the current gaming paradigm of a screen, speakers and a gamepad. Nintendo is sort of taking an easy way out by innovating in other areas than these fundamental, obvious and real problems. If the other guys who are making plain old video games with the same old interface can address many of these issues you can be ready for some games that will sell by the millions.
Maybe this is how there will be a PC gaming comes back. If the next gen consoles dont' fix these things, perhaps some newer PC games will buck the trend and we'll have us a revival.
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seriously. One of the best games I have ever played is Lumines, and it was the cheapest game for my PSP.
...
... I know I am bloody registered!
Anyway, the article is so right in every point, and it just shows my double why I don't play much games anymore, and why I haven't bought a PC in more than 5 years
FSPYQIS
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Jumping puzzles in Metroid Prime work very well, thank you very much.
I didn't play Half Life completely (I didn't like it), but, as far as I got, jump puzzles weren't a problem either. That said, why can't I see the feet of characters in FPSs?
Metroid Prime should hardly be called a FPS. It's first person, and you shoot, but it's more a FPS / Platformer hybird. You don't really aim so much as you lock on, and dodge / fight like a platformer. It's unique in the field.
If you didn't even finish Half Life, you're concerned about your feet in games (Halo 2), and these are the only two examples you give, I'm guessing you don't play too many FPS games. The end of Half Life had some really horrid jumping puzzles, for example.
The problem has lessened since older games though, Alice was the last really jump-happy game that instantly comes to my mind. Doom 3 had some tricky jumps / platform fighting, but not a heck of a lot. If done right, jumping can add to the complexity of an environment and give the game depth. If done wrong, you are indeed jumping from floating / moving platform A to floating / moving platform B, C, D, and E for no good reason.
In my experience the girls I know actually prefer playing Dead Or Alive 3 as the women characters with attitude & huge bouncing breasts rather than play "cute" and "girly" games - they get some kind of escapism out of it, just like us men do when we fire up Rainbow Six...
Maybe it goes back to what you grew up with, but the videogame "Type" that I always loved the most was "Adventure Games". I was a major Sierra and Lucasarts junkie as a kid ... I lived for each release of Kings Quest, Monkey Island, Quest for Glory, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, etc ... then then doom came out (yes I know wold3d was first, but doom was the *BIG* hit) and Adventure games stopped getting made, and videogames got dumbed down forever. Instead of intellecutal challenge and witty writing, we got button mashig, searching for ammo, and looking for what switch opened that door. Grim Fandango (1998) was the last *GREAT* Adventure game. To put it in the words of a friend of mine, "I actually feel a sense of loss that the game is over, like someone has died and won't be a part of my life anymore." Has anybody ever felt that way about a FPS?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Wherever did he get this idea? It is completely unrelated. "Unpredictability" only harms in-order processing at the scale of single assembly instructions (nanoseconds). A good bot should hardly do something unpredictable more often than once every other second.
And for that matter, more advanced AI algorithms, such as ANN or SVMs, are usually massively parallelizable and very easy to predict. The Cell would be ideal for such applications.
I was going to write a long point-by-point discussion (and partial refutation) of the points listed in this article thing. It would of course take forever, no one would read it, and the problems would still be there at the end of it.
:(
Most of the things in the article (having shorter load times, better AI, no invisible borders, etc) are things decent game developers strive to do on every title. However, many of these problems are hardware-bound (you can only stream data from dvd so quickly regardless of how you optimize your code), knowledge-bound (AI isn't exactly a solved problem is it!), or practicality-bound (yeah, "come up with a new genre" is easy to say, you do it, find funding, get it published, etc.)
Another few quick points -
"bullshit" about graphics is indeed bullshit, but it *sells games* and people put up with it for some reason. Trade description laws might well apply, if they do, use 'em!
Save points are a fairly nice way of saving progress in a completely linear world, like for instance Halo. Less so in free-roamers like Resident Evil, but thats just my opinion. I can see why developers use them, and I've worked on games which have them in, and its better than the alternative. They're not there to save space!
Sports game commentary will suck for quite some time, game DVDs aren't 9Gb (usually, anyway), and commentary is difficulty not because of how much speech you record...
"Superimposing shit" on the screen is going to happen until you can come up with a way of conveying all information without text (or sound, because deaf people play games too y'know). Even cunningly hiding it like in The Movies isn't getting rid of it.
And do you have some kind of magical map that shows you floor layouts of places you've never been before? No? Didn't think so. How do you find your way around? Exactly.
Hmm. This turned into a huge post.
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> it's evident that he doesn't know what he's
> talking about.
Something is a challenge for the developers, therefore he doesn't know what he's talking about? He didn't say "adding good AI is easy, get on it"; he said that good AI was a seriously lacking element in modern games. And he's correct.
I think he's pretty much right on on every point, and the fact that developers would have a lot of work cut out for them has nothing to do with whether he "knows what he's talking about".
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Its so true.
If you want a game that's truly a challenge, it will have to be against human opponents.
Things like Counter-Strike (without cheats), fighting games (Tekken, DoA, etc), or occasionally strategy games (C&C, Empire Earth, Civ).
Everything else is too easy. The only difference between easy and hard on some games is the amount of enemies. Granted, yes, that does make it harder, it doesn't make it any more exciting. There's only so much enemy-slaying you can do before it loses its excitement.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Actual programming likely has very little to do with making a good AI. If you want to outdo Sid Meier, you need to be able to describe, in very generic terms, how to play Civ III well. The game is outstandingly complex, with all of the different civ interactions going on at once. I seriously doubt that most people could succeed with this task.
Basically, I think the rule is: a gamer should NOT be aware of the cruel hand of God fucking with him.
If you ever say, "Damn you, (programmer)!" then there is something wrong. (well, unless Will Wright is peeing on you, but that's another story) There should never be moments so arbitrary or evil that you're snapped out of the game universe to curse the designer. A door which you JUST walked through should not suddenly be locked, for no reason at all, just to prevent you from going back to that save point you passed two rooms before. (I'm looking at you, Metroid Prime 2 - and your older brother DIDN'T DO THIS!)
Or if you're near the endgame... You've got all the keys and magic spells... And all you have to do is march into the Temple and kill the evil wizard... this is NOT the time to make you go on a scavenger hunt all over the fucking map for a ludicrously high number of pieces of an arbitrary key which has no purpose except to draw out the last act! *cough*WindWaker*cough*
(if I pick on Nintendo, it's because if any game design company should know better, it's them)
It's really simple. Just ask yourself - if this were a MOVIE, would I believe in this event? (Paul Anderson and Uwe Boll movies excepted) Would I believe that the characters need to spend three months item-gathering? Would I believe it's necessary for the heroes to take a break from the plot to crossbreed giant chickens? Could I conceive of a world in which a character is unable to climb over a ten-inch high barrier?
If the answer is "no" then there is no excuse for having it in the game.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
2 comments on this:
Don't buy a console for anything other than mindless FPS, side scrolling Mario gams, and racing games.
Stop the developers from lowering the standards of gameplay to suit consoles. Thief: Deadly Shadows was a middling-quality game utterly ruined by the limits imposed so the publishers could sell it to xbox owners. They had to dumb the game down, and sever the levels into small pieces to suit the xbox. This ruined the immersive environment totally.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
"Hey man, want to play DK Jungle Beat? You use the bongos!"
"No thank you sir, it's simply a 20 year old Mario designs married to an overpriced, single use gimmick controller."
"Hey man, want to play DDR? You totally have to use your legs to play!"
"No thank you sir, I grew tired of that sort of thing with the NES's power pad."
There are times when the use of the word "innovative" is incorrect. Katamari Damacy is not one of those times. There is more to the innovation in the game than just rolling a ball. The easy-to-grasp concept and controls, the cute/bizarre art and music design, the level and size scaling, the original IP. Combine that with ball rolling and you still get innovation. Katamari deserves all the credit and good word-of-mouth it received, which is more than you can say for just about every mainstream game out there.
Oh wait, they completely ripped off "The Little Prince" with those small planets in the game menus! INNOVATION IS DEAD.
And this is years after analysts told developers that women would happily play games if they didn't feel so objectified by them, and several decades past the point where they should have even needed to be told that There is hope however. Like all industry, it is inevitable that females will eventually forge their place in the world of game design. The female designers will burst on the scene soon enough, heaving their giant bosoms of talent and creativity and brandishing their black thongs of diversity.
/really/ cared about making THEIR games, they would use today's tech to do it. I don't care less if you hate UT2k4, it's been modded into everything from a racing sim to a GOLF GAME. It's been modded into a top down shooter, a 2D shooter, and even a platformer game! There are countless engines like this, and plenty of open source solutions too.
They feel objectified by them? Seriously, that's what you get for taking the word of analysts. In the real world, a good deal of actual girl gamers aren't bothered by such things just as men aren't bothered by the hulking warriors and shirtless fighters. The demographic he's pointing to is the casual, non-gamer... and let's face it, they don't know what they want. Odds are, they don't want anything... they're not gamers. People need to realize there's a crowd that just won't be sold to, regardless.
As for female developers / designers, more power to them! In fact, what the heck is taking so long? I'm sick of seeing complaints from females and males on behalf of females about the gaming industry. You don't like it? GET IN IT AND 'FIX' IT! In truth, the girl gamers I know just don't care enough to try and change anything. We'll make our games, you make yours... everyone is happy.
The arguement I usually hear back is that nobody will fund the idea. I know good and well that it's hard to break into the gaming industry, but if the female population
It all reminds me of a post on Newgrounds a good while ago. Some anon woman basically flamed Newgrounds for not posting anything she liked, speaking on behalf of all girls that the site was bias. The result, after a good deal of laughter, was 1) A lot of offended site regulars who were women, and 2) a general agreement that Newgrounds is a COMMUNITY site and it is what you make it. If you want that kind of content, make that kind of content! Nobody is going to do it for you.
Uplink a fantastic small game by introversion and ported to the mac by ambriosia (whom I adore) - yes, it's not a PRETTY graphics based game, and it can be a bit cheesy at times, but VERY immersive, and puts you in a fundamentally different role than a shot-em-up or make-my-army-win kind of game. Darwinia isn't half bad either.
It's a good thing the gaming industry doesn't listen to players, because we'd all quit playing within a week.
This guy does have some good points, especially re: obnoxious savepoints, misleading advertising and jumping puzzles, but many times he's asking for things that would destroy the fun of games.
For example, having instant-save anywhere sounds fun until you have it, at which point you realize there's no challenge to a game. You can just play like an idiot and rewind whenever you make a mistake. At that point you could throw your console controller into a paintmixer and it would eventually "win". Fun = gone.
And the parents point about "good" AI is excellent also. we enjoy beating up lots of stupid guys in a game because it puts us in the driver's seat, controlling the game flow. If this guy wants good AI's with a selection of weapons, he should fire up some bots in Quake or UT and get his fill of immaculately aimed rail guns up his ass every 5 seconds. Wheee!!!
That said, a few elements of good Ai *used sparingly and appropriately* will do wonders to enhance immersion.
Back to the main point, people don't often realize that the things they are aggravated about during gameplay are the same elements that make them enjoy the game when it's done.
(I've developed several titles, including the top selling PC game a few years ago. And no, not the Sims.)
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
Actually, this is the point of the cell processor. The cell is meant to allow lots of pipelined tasks to happen with little additional overhead. This means that the difference between a "simple" AI and a complex "AI" (in terms of performance) is little different. And the cell is actually seperate from the RSX, which is the graphics chip from NVIDIA.
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...
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. No, pirating a copy doesn't count. Want games of alternative genres? They're out there. They're just not advertised and they're not always available at your local Best Buy. They will often be at your smaller game store, or available online. So get off your lazy ass and go vote with your dollars.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
We wouldn't have to, except that by the logic in argument 2 this seems to be the #1 thing that people care about. You vote with your dollars. Your mouth is saying "graphics don't matter" but your wallet says "grapihcs are all that I care about. Shit in the box as long as the graphics are top notch." Doom 3, Unreal 3, Half-life 2... All top sellers because of their stellar unrelated gameplay?
4. Nipples?
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. I mean, when's the last time you bought a Japanese dating simulation? (NSFW)
6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Agree.
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. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
8. I understand that John Madden was raised by wild boars...
This hooks in with #7. Bottom line, consider the requirements of this. It's a simple M*N cost to have more sounds. (M events by N events per sound, assuming a flat distribution of sounds). Of course, one could argue (successfully) that an increase in all sounds isn't necessary, and just in the sounds that come up again and again. Of course, you could also forsake the Madden franchise in favor of a lesser known football series. (This would also have the side benefit of ceasing to support the EA cartel.)
9. Immersion and the invisible hand of God
Agree. This is generally just laziness (or a very tight schedule).
10. And while we're at it...
I sort of agree here, but I see the other side of the coin as well. I mean, if I let you get to areas that aren't important for gameplay, then I need to populate them with content. You also might become lost and frustrated, which is something I don't want to happen either.
11. And while we're still at it...
I agree, with the caveat that this is a genre-specific complaint. For example, I don't mind health bars imposed in an RTS, because I realize it's just a game that I'm playing. On the other hand, having numerous hea
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
UT2K3 drove me nuts. The enemy bots didn't seem any better than the original UT (which is fine, they where excellent there), but your bots where dumb as bricks. In UT, I'd leave my whole compliment of bots to defend and be pretty sure I could at least get back in time to keep the flag from being taken. In 2k3, they're a bunch of babies or something, requiring constant attention, and can't make it to the bathroom without getting blown to hell, let alone to a flag...
Sorry, just venting. I loved the game until the later levels. I know the AI's great, but the balance on the bots could've been better. The AI was more than good enough to support it.
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It's fair to say that the Cell design isn't optimised for AI. Although with all that compute power there should be more time to do AI than there is on current consoles.
Blaming in-order processing misses the point though.
Flight simulator would be a good illustration of your point. While I'm sure it's great for aviation freaks it's just cumbersome and tedious for the average player such as myself.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then. I make games for a living. Actually, gamers want AI that isn't too smart. They want to dominate and destroy the game. If they are playing against the machine, they want to be the baddest godamned thing in the universe. Now granted, this doesn't excuse AI that interferes with the gameplay, running into walls and each other and forgetting you are there if you hide in a shadow for 10 seconds. It also doesn't particularly apply to strategy games, where the strategy is the basis of the gameplay. The bottom line is, when another human repeatedly kicks your ass, it's a challenge. When the machine does, it's simply frustrating. But otherwise, a great article.
The problem is that many game universes are too self similar for people to visually find their way around. Yes, that's how we do it in real life, we don't have a map but we use visual clues to figure out where we are and navigate. However even in fairly bland areas/buildings in the real world, there is plenty of variance to cue in on. People put posters on the walls, surfaces take damage at different rates, the light is different in different parts of the building, etc. There also are a whole bunch of people walking around that you can go and ask, and they'll help tell you where to go, not just deliver a scripted response.
Many games lack that. Now it's not the designer's fault entirely, there are real limits to the amount of textures you can load in a card at the same time, but it's still a problem. You find yourself lost without a map because everything looks the same, and there's no one to ask for directions.
Everquest is an excellent example of this. I was always getting lost in zones because you'd have this wide open space, nothing descript anywhere and your "find direction" ability worked for shit. Even if I go in to the middle of the desert out here, I still am not nearly that lost, the landscape has variances, there are major landmarks (like mountains) that I can cue off of, and the sun is always there to help you know which way is which (unconsciously usually).
So if you develop a world that is very rich in detail, where everything truly looks different, then on you can argue people don't need a map. However if you find people who haven't played your game getting lost all the time, sorry, your world doesn't cut it, a map is a good idea.
There's also the fact of how much you take in at once in a game. You are limited to a 90 degree FOV and looking around isn't natural. Moving the point of view is associated with moving your character, and is generally a conscious action. It's not like eye movements and even head movements, which we tend to do all the time automatically. Thus there's less information for a person to cue in on to figure out where they are.
Generally I think maps are a very good idea in games. Being lost isn't fun, and a map just makes sure that never happens.
Which part is hateful bile, and who is it hateful to? The enemy or our soldiers? Sarcasdic yeah, but pretty much accurate.
The part about them always winning maybe? This is mostly true, they do usually win. The reason is because for them to win we just have to leave, for us to win we have to establish a functional democracy and then leave. That's not usually actually feasible. Usually we either get sick of it and leave, or stay forever. I wouldn't call either of those winning. The last time we succeeded in putting a country to together that we could actually safely leave was in WWII.
Yeah, he's pretty sarcasdic there, but also pretty much dead on.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice