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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".
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
(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.