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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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Ah: jumping puzzles.
The most annoying part of FPS games, which require you to take a break from gleefully blowing the crap out of your enemies to make meticulously-timed jumps across platforms, like you've suddenly turned into Mario or something.
Personally, my biggest pet peeve is that the AI in strategy games hasn't advanced significantly in the past 10 or so years. More annoyingly, playing "harder" settings on these games doesn't change anything about the AI, it just lets the computer "cheat" to produce things quicker than you do.
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The simple fact is that gaming companies have dropped the "let's be innovative and unique" idea long long ago. What was the most innovative and unique game to come out last year? Katamari Damacy? Donkey Konga? And how many copies did these games sell? The bulk of the gaming world unfortunately resides in the teenager category. And what do these kids want? Well look at how they dress or what they're into. These kids want something that they think will make them look cool, IE: the most overhyped product to come out. Take GTA: San Andreas for instance, that game to me was a big fudge up compared to VC. First they promised us so many things, then didn't deliver. Some of the things they did give us were lacking some of the depth and options they said they'd give us. Very few game developers want to take a risk due to the high cost of development. And most studios won't let them even take that risk even if they have a cash cow. If the game does bad the company is basically done for given the fact it probaly cost them at least 5mill to develope it. So what do we REALLY need? Either lower development costs, or more expensive games. Why? Because the average gamers again doesn't care about what has great gameplay or something unique to it, they want what the game with the best graphics, the most hype, and the one they're friends are likely to get. Yeah I probably screwed that up somewhere.
I eagerly bought one of the first generation PS2s when they came out, in the hope that ps2 game developers would continue the playstation tradition of releasing good war strategy games. Games like Command and Concur, or Allied General, or maybe a decent civilization type strategy game. But no. So now the damned thing sits idle because I got sick of playing car crash and kill games (grand theft auto), FPS games (red faction et all), I never liked the final fantasy games, etc etc etc. I like pretty graphics. But this 37yo wants a game that takes more planning than pressing a button to take out the enemy or jump at the right time. I'm bored with these damn games and haven't bought a new one in over a year. That can't be good business. How 'bout some better games folks? --M
You walk into a room full of traps and puzzles to disarm them... you are well on your way to getting through the room.. when suddenly.. BAM! You have just stepped on a tile that locks the way out. What do you do now? Leave the way you came in... and PRESTO! all the traps are reset and everything is back to how it was before you entered earlier.... that always gives me a chuckle or two...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
"How in the name of Islamic Fonzie did we ever let games get away with "Loading..." screens? The Gamecube doesn't have those, not on the games made by Nintendo. Hell, the 8-bit NES didn't have load screens 20 years ago."
Bwahahaha... that guy gotta be kidding on that one
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
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
Almost every game does this. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King there's actually a "run out of a crumbling building" level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can't jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.
This one really hits home, because it's exactly the reason that I didn't buy Guild Wars. Yeah, it might be a really fun game otherwise, but it's like your character is on rails. Hey, there's a cliff. I think I'll run off the edge... hmmm, nope there's an invisible wall preventing me from moving. In a game that's supposedly a cross between FPS and MMORPG, this is just super lame.
For all of it's fault, at least in WoW I could explore terrain, climb mountains, and roam aimlessly if I wanted to.
He's only complaining about his gaming preferences. I don't think the FA applies in full to every game-player.
It's just impossible for a small company to create a small, nice, innovative game for a console. A new great idea along the lines of Tetris would never make it, no matter how addictive or playable the game was. All the new games are gigantic with minimized risks and huge budgets, and the price will be set accordingly. (The Sega Sports NHL/NBA/NFL 2K5 games being a notable exception to the rule.)
Game budgets have risen to the same ballpark as movie budgets, but, for console games, there is no alternative analoguous to independent films.
I have these new games that are pretty to look at and everything, but why do I miss a bunch of old, simple games from the C64 and Amiga days?
UT AI impressed me. The bots fire in the direction youre running, not where you are. And they actually hide and make mistakes like people do too. I wished the aimbots of counterstrike 1.5 had that kind of intelligence, rather than vibrating all around and having a really good aim
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
"Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?"
/. i have real life around me 24/7 and that's for free. if i invest precious time and money for playing a game, i certainly don't want more of the same.
this is obviously just another example of the ironic fact that most gamers would make very bad games if they were to design one.
it's simply amazing how many of them have no idea of what makes a good game.
they always cry for more, more AI, more realism, more micromanagement etc.
but all those things have nothing to do with a good game. they might make a good simulation, but games are supposed to be fun, a good simulation would be as frustrating as real life. excluding
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
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.
Game dev and music blog
> 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!
DECAF!
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
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.
That is incorrect mathematics.
.5. A quarter are over age 50. That is .25. The set of gamers that are over age 50 is a subset of the gamers that are over 18. The two events are not disjoint. In other words: .5 * .25 * 100% = 12.5% of gamers are over 50 years old.
Half of the gamers are over 18. That is
Which means 50% - 12.5% = 37.5% of gamers are between ages 18 and 50 by the statistic cited.
I am unsure of his truth, but he stated it quite clearly. That's basic probability and statistics I used there.
Besides, the point in the article was sound without the statistic: making game environments juvenalian gives no incentive to mature gamers to play it. Is it true? Possibly... who knows. I side with that point.
The Crimson Dragon
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
I take it that he didn't play Deus Ex (the original). I think it is the best game of all time. It is rumored that you could win the game without shooting a bullet.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
I have a friend, who in playing the UT2k4 campaign, was in a 1 on 1 deathmatch with a bot. He stayed one or two ahead of the bot the entire match, up until he was one kill away. The bot then owned his soul, up until the point where he was just one ahead of my friend.
:)
The bot then hid for the entire rest of the round, and waited for the time to expire.
It ran away from him, and waited out the clock, causing it to expire.
They also say that UT2k7, they're completly revamping the AI, to be much, much, much harder. That's perfectly okay with me, I could use a good challenge
However, I do play a lit of simulators. Mainly flight simulators, but also more "down to earth" simulators like Operation Flashpoint. These games need to have great AI, because they would be completely unplayable if not. They also usually have a physics model unparallelled in any other type of game. Take a look at IL2 Sturmovik for a good example.
Imagine that... There already exists games without artificial barriers, with great AI, with real physics, no indestructible doors and realistic movement.
I guess the problem is that as soon as you make such a game, it suddenly becomes a "simulator" and therefore not interesting anymore for most game-playing consumers. That's why unrealistic crap like Ace Combat sell way better than the realistic counterparts.
"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.
From TFA...
"both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily."
That is more than a simplification. The in-order processing eliminates the transistors used for out-of-order execution, and puts the burden on the compiler writer to avoid dependencies/cache misses.
Some of the extra transistors are used instead on the other cores. Overall, this means way more processing power and should mean better AI... if the programmers can code good AI in the first place.
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.
OK, I am not a gamer and I hadn't seen Clones until last week on TV, but I am interested in graphics and adventure/SF/fantasy/whatever-the-heck-Star-Wars-i s-supposed-to-be. I also channel-flipped into Clones about halfway through, where in a great piece of Lucas dialog, Padme orders Anakin to "follow my lead" and they go into the battle droid factory.
Something about that part of the movie seemed so cheesy for something as big-budget and hyped as Star Wars, and I couldn't put my finger on it. Padme and Anakin go down this long corridor when suddenly all of those buzzing winged monkey creatures come out of the walls, and then Anakin defends himself and Padme by hacking them up with his light saber. I guess Padme leads by crawling through a hatch to fall into the actual droid factory with Anakin following that lead into the same mess, where they have escaped the buzzing winged monkeys but Anakin not only light saber all of the droids but also dodge these stamping presses of the droid assembly line while Padme rides around in a foundry ladle.
If it weren't for all of us being fans of the Star Wars franchise, when you think of it, this kind of hero and damsel in peril cliche gets much, much better treatment by the Indiana Jones movies. But there was something I just didn't get about the Clones scene until I read the Gamer's Manifesto post. The hero triggered the alarm and had to fight off hundreds of BWMs (buzzing winged monkeys), for no good reason to the plot or the character or the story apart from when you walk down some long corridor with nothing in it, hundreds of BWMs will appear from seemingly nowhere -- it is just the formula. Also, after escaping the BWMs, you will have to fight droids and have to engage in what I guess is called a jumping puzzle -- avoiding the stamping presses, and I guess, also jumping across moving platforms now that I think about that scene in Clones.
Not only is single-handed combat against hundreds of BWMs followed by a jumping puzzle a gaming cliche, it has crossed over to become a movie cliche, and I guess it is just as lame in the movies as it is in games.
Gamer's Desiderata
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.
FTA:
"I understand you can't have infinite space, guys surfing right off the mountain and taking a snowboard tour of Asia. But put a cliff there. Cliffs are solid. Empty air is not solid."
Tribes II had, as best I could tell, a totally unlimited play area. You could stray from the "battle zone" and litteraly just fly for ever. And the terrain it generated remained the same as you flew back, so it wasn't just recycling. I had got into a couple duels where me and the other guy fought until we could no longer see the battle area. Now that was a fight that sucked to win.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.
Not only that but they ought to work toward creating a multiplayer experience that is more realistic. Just because some twelve year old kid is controling that enemy soldier doesn't make the game any more fun than if it were just a bot. Every time I have gotten into a multiplayer game hosted on the internet it turns out to work about like this: Every player runs blindly through the level like they are crazy and high on methamphetamines shooting everything they see. If it is a team game then the only change is to shoot everything they see but stop if they realize it is their own team's color. How many soldiers do you think charge through alleys shooting people and picking up ammo and flak jackets? Their have been a few but they usually get awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. For anyone that wants to go back home, that's a sure way to make the trip in a body bag. Multiplayer games should be designed so that wild hotdogging heroes buy the farm just like in real life.
If you're going to correct someone, at least be right. You interpreted the statement as "half of all gamers are over eighteen, and a quarter of those are over fifty." This is not what was said.
Let's break this down, in a very slightly simplified format:
* Half of gamers are over eighteen.
* A quarter of gamers are over fifty.
* All gamers over fifty are also over eighteen.
So, you take a representative hundred gamers. Fifty are under eighteen. Twenty-five are over fifty. How many does that leave between eighteen and fifty---that is, under fifty but over eighteen?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If you're seriously bored with the lack of AI and realism in current games, have I got the solution for you!
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it. Just sign up. You start by running around endlessly and having some guy yell at you for trival things. This goes on for weeks while you learn the rules of the game.
Then, the playing action begins. You get physically relocated to some hot-dry shithole on the other side of the world. Surrounded by thousands of the enemy. You can't tell them apart from ordinary people, but it doesn't matter because everyone hates you just for being there. The enemy has hundreds of years experience fighting new gamers like you. They know all the tricks. They communicate in a special language that you or anyone on your game team can't understand. But they know how you think from watching your television shows and movies. They have a secret religion that enables them to kill anyone without remorse and to accept their own and their fellow gamers deaths without hesitation.
Such incredible realism in this game. And your enemy's gaming stategy is based on the experience of a permanent hot war that has been going on there since you were born. They were gaining combat experience while you were watching cartoons. They've already made all the mistakes in this combat game and they won't make them again, but you will.
Just like an arcade game, when you're done playing, you get sent right back to begin again.
And just like every other video game, no matter how good you get, in the end, you always lose.
Sign up now!
(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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the women characters with attitude & huge bouncing breasts rather than play "cute" and "girly" games
I don't think that the author meant that "cute" games should be developed, but that the characters shouldn't be potential pr0n stars.
Why not have a sniper game where you can choose a woman character (with an A- or B-cup figure instead of DDD)? When you have a separate physics engine for a character's cleavage there's a bit of an issue.
No, really. I want to know which company patented the loading-screen game.
Last I heard, Namco owns loading screen games on the PSP. Not sure about in general though, but it's a good guess. Here's a quote from Game Developer magazine, interviewing EA's Dave McCarthy:
BS: Do you forsee anything like minigames during the loading screens?
DM: Minigames during loading screens is actually patented by Namco, so they're doing it!
I'm a professional game developer, and for the most part I think this guy's a moron. Here's why:
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?
First, many enemies DO adapt their strategy on the fly. Many enemies DO switch weapons when appropriate. Many enemies DO work in teams. The problem is, AI isn't about the NPCs, it's about the player, and for the most part AI advances would be in areas that the player doesn't notice. Getting snuck up on? Not fun. Fun is all about keeping the player informed about what's going on so that they can react and devise and enact their own plans. There are a number of ways that AIs need to be improved, but these aren't really among them.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
You've GOT to be kidding me. In-order instruction hurts the performance of the processors but allows them to be much simpler (and thus allows the Xbox360 to have 3 on a single core). AI is not hurt by this in the least. It's just ridiculous, and it's clear he's got absolutely no clue what he's talking about.
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
I worked on Thief, and let me tell you, we did basically this. And guess what? Didn't sell for crap. Action is fun and interesting. The game he's describing sounds like a bore.
And as far as why we don't come up with new genres, well, we do, only it only happens every few years. The whole stealth (Thief/Splinter Cell) genre started 6 or so years ago, and lately we've created the "open city game" (GTA). I honestly find that pretty amazing, particularly given how outrageously expensive games are to develop and how necessarily risk-averse that makes publishers.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Fine, then have a clue and don't fall for it. Killzone released a movie that was blindingly obviously not gameplay footage, and they never claimed it was, and yet at this very site there was huge debate as to whether it was real or not. Take marketing with a grain of salt, eh?
All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Actually, in MS's and Sony's infinite wisdom, they're going to be OPTIONAL hard drives. So we can't count on them. So we can't actually leverage them in our games. Sorry. Don't blame me.
Loading...
Fine, if you don't want loading, expect there to be cuts elsewhere in the game. That's not to say that loadtimes can't hurt the game significantly (including one game that I personally worked on), but we've only got X million dollars and Y years. If you think it's that important, fine, but then don't bitch about the limited scope of games.
YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again...
We do on the Xbox. And it's more like 6GB on the DVD, and that's if we want to deal with the layer switch and the impact on QA-ability of the title. But yeah, I agree a little more variety would be good.
I can't count the number of times I've caught a Harvester in C&C gazing longingly across a river at a tiny little patch of timberium that it can't possibly get to, or getting so drunk after filling itself that it decides to wander over to an enemy base get a really close look at an enemy turret.
:-) :-)
Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
Damn things need a babysitter.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Excellent comment, sir, although the game was called Commend and Concur. It was the corporate office brown-nosing game, sir, but I'm sure in your vast experience and knowledge you already knew that, sir.
It was a simulation of sitting in long bored-room [sic] meetings where you lose points for falling asleep, but gain points and status for being agreeable to the lecturer's ideas, hence the name of the game.
I rank this game as follows:
Addictiveness: 10 out of 10. At my current job I play this game for 8 hours a day in lieu of my real responsibilities, only breaking long enough to eat a 30 minute lunch. Every single day.
Interface: 10 out of 10. Commend and Concur forgoes the traditional controller setup and makes use of verbal commands and body language to play the game. Certain system functions, like pausing, must be executing with undocumented verbal commands such as "I need to use the bathroom", but you cannot pause indefinitely.
Immersion: 10 out of 10. Creepily realistic graphics - I couldn't tell the difference between this and real life.
A.I.: 2 out of 10. The other humans in the meeting room are often devoid of life and anything creative to say. Programmers, please remedy this in the sequel.
Playability: 10 out of 10. You can play this game without thinking-... wait! I am playing this game without thinking! In fact, I'm typing up this Slashdot comment while I'm playing this game.
Solomon Kevin Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
1x cdrom is around 150k/s while 1x dvd rom is something like 1350k/s. Therefore once the math is done, the dvd drive is about twice as fast as the cdrom drive at their respective theoretical max speeds, which are rarely reached.
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.
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
I largely agree with this one, though I also think there's room for pattern-based attacks. Doom III isn't a tense military sim with realistic opponents. It's a shoot-'em-up in 3D. The original author's missing the point here.
Where the enemy's supposed to have advanced AI, though, it needs to be better. Duh.
The End from Metal Gear Solid 3, perhaps?
To greatly oversimplify, in fact. There are plenty of approaches to AI that don't rely on scripted routines that are hit by in-order processing. And I don't believe that even the limited scripting-based AI that tends to get used these days is going to be in any way reduced from what we have now. "We won't be able to do more of the same, but faster," cries the author, in an article where he spends most of the rest of his time bitching about the fact that games are just... doing more of the same, but faster. Woo!
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...
Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.
Not so easy, is it?
There are games that break with existing genre convention - that do something new, and do it well. There have been every generation. And they've been limited in number every generation, because for each idea that works well there are a hundred total abortions.
I loathe the idea of innovation solely for the sake of innovation, and I always have done. I'd rather play a mediocre 2D platformer than a godawful pre-op transsexual simulator. It's great that despite the wailing and moaning of the people whose favourite game is bitching about the game industry innovative games still get made. And lo, some of them (like Katamari Damacy) are great. But the level of innovation involved will never make me excuse the shittiness of your game.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Don't be such a stupid bastard, then. You know what the games look like, don't expect them to suddenly become photorealistic. Apply some critical thinking here.
Yes, it's the fault of anyone who falls for it. But that doesn't mean you're subject to it if you don't fall for it - it's pretty much trivial to find screenshots online for any released game.
So would you care to explain why I should be lectured on what gamers want by someone who didn't start gaming until the PSX? That's the only conclusion I can draw from someone blaming Square for something that's been around since day one. Anyone else remember the 8-bit game boxes with the beautiful screenshots and the small print reading "Screenshots may be from a completely different version of the game - yours will be shitty two-colour graphics with hideous colour clash"?
4. Nipples?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
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.
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
;)
Sounds like the Sims.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Real Life, a huge MMRPG, got a great review from Gamespot! Life sounds like a cool MMRPG, we should check it out!!
The author wrote that there is something wrong with the way that heroines are designed. He said that he thought it made women feel objectified, and that this was turning them away from games.
I disagree, because my girlfriend (29) and daughter (4) love the outlandish clothes women wear in games.
Three games that we are playing right now are: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy: Chrystal Chronicles, and Xenosaga (ep 1.)
Pretty much all of these feature pretty outlandish clothing. We talk about it. We think it's cool.
I don't know about Ms. Floss, (pictured in the article,) but I suspect my girlfriend would think it was cool, and have no problem playing her. My daughter seems sort of blase, ("Do you like it?" "Yeah..,") but she's more focused on kicking robot ass in Xenosaga right now.
Our daughter regularly tells us, "I want to be Lulu," by which she means: "I want to dress like Lulu." She earnestly likes all these images. We let her cut and paster her old clothing, to make the outfits.
Nobody finds it particularly offensive that Lulu has big breasts.
So, I'm going to have to say: I think that one's right off the mark.
Maybe some women won't find the images appealing. Maybe a conservative christian women won't find it appealing. People who have strong ideas about what people should be, how they should dress- obviously, they're not going to like it.
But, there's a lot of women who like these kinds of things.
When I went to college, interest in anime was mostly a male thing. (Or, perhaps it was that I just went to a school that is mostly male.) But I've heard from the anime that in the younger croud, I'm guessing people aged 15-20 right now, that a lot of girls are into anime- that the ratio is even. I strongly suspect that almost all of those girls will feel comfortable with Ms. Floss.
Look at the movies that are coming out: Sin City, X-Men, - it's like we're going on a comic book fashion rampage. I don't think this is a bad thing.
It may offend more traditional sensibilities. Women from particular backgrounds may feel objectified. But: I think if we're talking about the growth of games, it makes sense to look at what this younger generation is doing and thinking.
The kid who wrote this (and I say kid, because typically adults are able to write criticism without using frantic, profanity filled pleas) really ought to spend a few minutes and think about the horrible hypocrisy he's showing. It seems apparent to me that the guy makes his games purchasing decisions based on what the cover the glossy fan boy gamer magazines and websites is showing.
There are actually quite a few games out there which are not FPS, racing games, or sports titles. He'll just have to look in a different part of the software store to find them.
Most of my favorite games (which I've collectively spent far too much time on) fall under none of these genres, and satisfy most of his complaints. At the end of the article, I thought "well, if this guy wants something that will satisfy most of his demands, he should head down to the store and pick up a copy of MS Flight simulator. It's challenging. The primary focus of its development is realism as opposed to graphics. It has online multi-player (for free). They're really aren't any restrictions in the game's world that would limit the immersion factor (the game does cap off the maximum altitude you can reach, but 95% of the aircraft you fly wouldn't be able to reach it due to physics modeling, so it's more or less a non-issue). In some of the default airplanes the pilots are drawn as women who are hardly "scantily clad". Granted, the AI is a little clunky, but in its current form it's more there for ambiance then game play.
Though I doubt he'll do it. I mean, there are no monsters to kill, nothing to blow up, and even though he says he wants games to be difficult at the start, the learning curve for most FS is pretty high. I mean, he'd probably have to read the manual and go through a number of tutorials before he could complete a short, successful flight in a Cessna without crashing. Oh, and he'd have to use a computer instead of a consul.
The Internet is generally stupid
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it
I really liked the art deco style of Grim Fandango, but it was not the last great RPG. That title belongs to Planescape: Torment (1999). It has storytelling like nothing else before or since. What a shame it never sold well...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
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
Thank goodness someone else said it. I'm tired of getting shat on, dissed and dismissed for talking about this stuff for the past ten years - it is why I left the industry.
You can't change this from within the system, the vacant $uits have too much power and they simply don't care. You can't change it from outside the system, the system is too insular and amoral and is not responsive to common sense, or even examples of dissident innovative success like Katamari Damacy - and consumers,sadly don't drive markets, any more than voters drive candidates, they follow them - serve them quality, and they will cherish it, feed them crap, and they will worship it - and the other nine-tenths will simply turn off, tune out, and play solitaire instead.
The only way to change it is by treating the mainstream, commercial game industry as damage and routing around it, creating alternatives - not just alternative developers creating alternative games, but alternative distribution, alternative revenue models, alternative value systems.
90% of the potential market is waiting. Some of us are trying to do something about it. And it's nice to have some cover from folks who obviously Get It [tm]. The article was brilliant, and any developer who doesn't pay attention, who thinks they know better, deserves the STDs they'll get from the pimps who write their paychecks.Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Thought is free. - Shakespeare [The Tempest]
Your post is very good...
However, there are a few things you should consider about raytracing.. While it is easy to do in parallel, it is also very limiting from a hardware standpoint. The problem is that those pesky rays can go anywhere once they hit a surface, including directions that you didn't intend for them to go in.
This means that more data has to be loaded in the scene (because the rays can even go back behind you or off perpendicular to the scene). There's also the problem of what the data storage is going to look like. IE, in order for this to be expressed in a way that is going to be extremely efficient to a GPU, you're going to have to come up with a common data format that works for all applications that intend on doing raytracing via a hardware solution.
Finally there's the problem that raytracing is O(resolution). That is to say that 800x600 is exactly twice as bad as 640x480. 1600x1200 is 4x worse than 800x600, and any sort of antialiasing on top of that is pure pain.
As for your other (implicit) question, "Why don't interesting games use interesting game engines?"
Because they cost an arm and a leg. Last time I checked, a license for the upcoming Unreal Engine 3 cost between 700K and 1 million dollars. Quake 3 was 1 million, without support. HL2 is in the same ballpark.
Considering that the "interesting" games often have a budget of less than a million bucks total, it's pretty easy to see why it's hard for the little shops that come out with good games to buy the big engines.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
True, but its sort of a cop-out. Galactic Civilizations manages a MUCH better AI than CivIII by the conceptually simple, programatically difficult solution of multi-threading the AI code, which means that when you take five minutes and hit end the AI already knows what he's going to do on his turn. In Civ, the AI only starts thinking when the end button is pressed, and because its a real-time application and the user won't tolerate a 5 minute thinking period between turns, so instead it tries to cram all the calculations in to 5-15 seconds, which means you really have to skimp on your algorithms (like, for example, cruddy pathfinding so you can't efficiently use rail networks despite the fact that that should be a 100% solvable problem).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
It occurs to me that, successful human armies don't let their soldiers wait until actual combat and rely on them to figure out what to do in any given circumstance. Instead, they attempt to enumerate the sorts of situations their soldiers are likely to find themselves in and attempt to train those soldiers to handle each of them. Emphasis is placed on recognizing the sort of situation they're in and reacting as they were taught in training. That sounds perfectly amenable to the sort of "rigged demo" approach commonly used in games.
I would sign up, but I heard there's no respawn points. I mean, fuck that - what if I get lag?
~Will
sig?
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.
Um... I did. Actually, I went in halves for a used PS2, *then* bought Katamari Damacy, making its effective cost to me $85.
Despite my doing what you said, there wasn't any other PS2 games I was interested in. B-but... I bought Katamari Damacy!
What is my point? My point is this: I like clever, original games, and will buy them, and in fact buy nothing except them. But there are millions of idiots who buy Ultra-Madden 200X. This means big companies, chasing profit and mindful of opportunity costs, go after that, to the deteriment of things like Katamari Damacy.
Thus, there is very, very little out there that interests me, other than that which is produced by Nintendo, who, for all their faults, still know how to make clever games most of the time. Meaning that I buy, primarily, Nintendo. Meaning a number of idiots on Slashdot would call me a fanboy. Argh.
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.
If the gut feeling is had by an analyst, then I agree. If it's by a developer, or a master designer, then I think you're smoking crack, sorry to say. They probably know their field a lot better than an analyst. Or a marketing department.
Ultimately, what the article says is "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." Meanwhile you object to that, saying, "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." The article said it with regret. You seem to think it's unavoidable, and thus people shouldn't complain. Me, I think I'll continue complaining.
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.
He already covered this: figure out ways to load data during down time. Metroid Prime loads the new room during the previous one, in a rather slick fashion, though I'm sure it means that levels must be designed with it in mind. Even so, most developers put nowhere near that much thought into the process. Yet, somehow, most of Nintendo's games have little or no load times. (I hate to bring up Nintendo again, but it's true.)
5. Stop the Short-Sighted Business Bullshit
Agree and disagree. I agree that frivolous or baseless patents are not good for the game industry. But if a company comes up with something truly revolutionary, I think that they should get to reap some reward from that.
Like, um, HAVING THE FEATURE IN THEIR GAME?! Sony patented a brain-centered input method not so long back that they admit doesn't even exist yet, and they don't even know how it would work! I don't see how anyone could possibly say that's good for anyone, including customers, except Sony.
If by reaping rewards, you mean exclusive access to that idea, then I have absolutely no sympathy. Building on each other's ideas is what moves the industry forward as a whole, not what holds it back. Nothing says you have to tell how you accomplished it -- if the idea is deserving of real protection, then it shouldn't be trivial for others to duplicate anyway.
BTW, what Slashdot readers tends to have a default antipathy for isn't patents, it's software patents. And ust because a bunch of Slashdot readers think something's wrong, it's not a secret indicator that that thing is right.
Enough responses, I told my doctor I'd try to lay off the extreme bitterness.
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
...Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water...
This is not really what we want; it's actually not always fun. What we actually want is AI that will a) surprise us, or b) do something that appears clever. In some of the better, faster-paced games, there a decent amount of intelligence on the part of the enemy -- (ever see how enemies in Half Life 2 will try multiple doors to get to you?) but we're so busy running and gunning, that we don't notice it.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before.
I'll be -1 Redudant and point out, say, many of Will Wright's offerings, (PA notwithstanding). Hell, they even bring up Katamari later on in the article. I was somewhat agog at the article's next complaints:
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine?
Games such as Thief and, to a lesser extent, Splinter Cell, fulfill the former; and the underrated (but difficult-to-play) Robinson's Requiem and (again, to a lesser extent) Notrium are among the latter.
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin... Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It's true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless.
Absolutely; I think companies will flock to that as the "next-big-thing" eventually. Here's my timetable for buzzwords:
2004 - Shadows and Lighting
2005 - Realistic Physics
2006 - Emergent Gameplay
2007 - Appeal to Women
10. And while we're at it... Let's rid games of all arbitrary barriers.
Again, I agree; and I wonder if, should we start building games differently, (e.g., if more elements are handled by simulated systems rather than scripted events), will we see more of this? I care less about this from the standpoint of immersion, and more from the standpoint of the ability to solve problems as I want to solve problems. This seems less a matter of horsepower and more a matter of game design. It's not slow CPUs preventing us from doing this. Is it?
________
Epidemic Groove - A combination of real-time-strategy and action on a cellular level.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
First of all, nobody hyped the Halo 2 AI much. All the hype was for the Half-Life 2 AI, which got completely killed. I mean, they couldn't even stick to scripted tricks that they know how to do. No, they had to cut a boss and completely script certain scenarios, and the only excuse I've ever heard is that we don't have enough CPU.
Bring 'em on! By the time I can see HL2 on full detail at a steady 60 fps, I'll be more than able to run their good AI.
But, Halo 2, although it has intentionally stupid AI sometimes (do you really expect a Brute to be much for strategy?), it also has done some crazy things to me, and even crazier things to my friends who play on Legendary. True, Legendary is pretty cheap -- instant one-hit-kill headshots from Jackal snipers or three plasma shots from a fully automatic weapon to kill you -- but from what I'm told, the AI learns and strategizes.
I'm talking about, watch an Elite say something to another Elite, then they cut around in a pincer maneuver around the sides of the area, while a third Elite in a Ghost charges you from the front. Or, sneak up behind a jackal sniper placed obviously in your path and bash him to death, and have it work the first time you play through, but the second time, he hears you, spins around, and one-hit-kills you.
It could be a lot better, but to be honest, I like it right where it is. That way, I'm encouraged to do co-op mode, just because all of my CPU allies are fucking morons. And, for that matter, I bet that for all your chess/go/sudoku strategizing, those skills probably have to be completely re-learned for modern games.
Now, if only more games had co-op... What I really want is not MMO, but -- say -- Half-Life 2, in which Alyx is at least as much of a badass as Gordon, but in different areas -- maybe she's one of those black-ops ninjas? Or maybe she builds stuff, MechAssault style -- and where I can network two computers and play through the entire game with a girlfriend. We could even be split up for long periods of time. You could even still script our meetings -- maybe she has to catch up to me to give me the RPG so I can kill the strider, and until then, I have to survive in a courtyard with three of them and come up with inventive ways to keep Barny alive.
Or, while I'm brainstorming, maybe we do want some less linear games. Not GTA-style -- you still want somewhat of a linear plot -- but more like Jak II and III -- a massive, dynamically-loaded world, where you very rarely find the borders, and yet you still have some purely linear sequences and a lot of things you have to do. That would take some of the pain out of co-op -- maybe you have simpler goals, like "kill the final boss", and lots of tools to collect to do that, and you can have an 8-person game.
It could even work, if we could save multiplayer games.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I mean, if a cockroach, who has no more than six brain cells, can figure out how to hide if you're chasing it, then it should be no problem for a programmer to figure out how to make an NPC do it.
You're right! All we have to do is shrink all the NPCs down to a few centimeters and let them hide in the wall cracks! Problem solved!
The 'smartest guys in the room' cannot make an AI as smart as a roach - which has many more than six brain cells. See the recent competition to design a bot that can cross a small stretch of desert in CA.
Sooooooo true, and well thought out. I think the next generation game systems will do nothing but try to convince us that they are great and beautiful (I call this the Paris Hilton Effect: no substance, full of crap) and give us a big fat dent in our kids wallets. There's no way I'm shelling out money on one of these things.