Slashdot Mirror
The Importance of New Ideas
Next Generation has up the first in a two-part article talking in-depth with members of the gaming industry about the importance of fresh ideas. Also discussed are the challenges of next-gen development costs and the impact of Hollywood/Intellectual Property on future titles. From the article: "Q: What role will original game concepts play in next generation development? A: (Todd Hollenshead) Technology is a gating factor to the experience of playing games. Whether it's visual quality or character interactions, you have to have the processing power to make more sophisticated and interesting entertainment. Certainly the next generation of consoles in the Xbox 360 and PS3 are far more powerful than their predecessors and that gives game developers broad options to do things we haven't been able to do before and provide experiences for players they haven't had before. For example, for our next generation Wolfenstein game, which uses the Xbox 360 as it's primary development platform, we are developing technology that will change the way people play First Person games by doing away with the whole concept of 'levels', which has been the primary progression mechanic every first person game has used."
Game Developers' willingness to suck at the teat of Hollywood for easy money, marketing and ideas will weigh the industry down until they can successfully wean themselves from it. Hollywood has already fully embraced mediocrity as a method of risk reduction. Who needs to take a chance with a novel script when we can remake King Kong, War of the Worlds, or make Rocky XX. Game Development NEEDS to take risks. Otherwise all the consoles will die on the vine.
B O R I N G
"For example, for our next generation Wolfenstein game, which uses the Xbox 360 as it's primary development platform, we are developing technology that will change the way people play First Person games by doing away with the whole concept of 'levels', which has been the primary progression mechanic every first person game has used."
Ok, who's underwhelmed by this revolutionary idea. Looks to me like they're just taking a page from the GTA series. In fact, it looks to me like they're just latching onto the latest fad of openended gaming.
So you want to get rid of levels. Well, we can make one big world, and only load the part immediately around you. When you get close to the edge, we load the next part in the background. To stop you from going where we don't want you to go, we can put giant walls/buildings to keep you in one area until you finish it. We can call these areas "levels".
No reason they couldn't do this on current hardware- just noone has chosen to. Not a big change.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I was planning on saying something interesting, but Im fresh out of new Ideas :p
Seriously though, to me, the elimination of levels isnt revolutionary. Getting rid of load times, changes of scenes, and getting rid of mission objectives. Thats all there is to levels. Several games get rid of a few of these three elements. All wolfenstein is planning to do is get rid of all three? It doesnt seem all that revolutionary to me.
Is there an IgNobel prize or anything like that for obviousness?
I'm pretty sure Valve did this with Half Life about 8 years ago... but that's just me.
I though the new consoles (I know the 360 was described as such in an Ars article) favored graphical power. That they really didn't offer any advances useable in more sophisticated AI or such? Bigger and better graphics are nice, don't get me wrong, but are we really going to actually see anything fresh and new until the hardware is capable of doing more than eye candy?
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
In summary:
"New ideas are awesome! Just check our next sequel for proof!"
I'm kind of disappointed that they choose the 360 as the primary development platform for the next Wolfenstein game. I really like the series, but I'll be kind of disappointed if the game gets to arcadified for the console audience. New ideas or not, I sure hope their ideas still cater to the pc gaming audience.
Hasn't that already been done with Metroid Prime? Not exactly a new idea.
FTA:
...I once asked Mr. Miyamoto about Nintendo's strategy when it comes to making games. I was surprised when he said that Nintendo only makes games to sell hardware units
I think this is a really good point. Nintendo's primary goal is to sell Nintendo consoles. They do this by not only having good games, but having a good console as well. They focus on what matters (selling consoles) and adjust everything else so they can acheive this goal.
Companies like ID are already innovating, but in a different way. ID is not a game company. They are a technology company. They make engines for games which they sell to make money. They make games to sell the engine, picking up quite a profit on the way mind you. A good example of this is Doom 3/Quake 4. They used Doom 3 as a technology demo, and Raven software and Activision liked it so much that they wanted to make a game using that engine.
Innovative things that I am exited about:
A Metaverse type of game, using Virtual reality.
This guy's vision of Virtual reality to come true. I think it would be fantastic.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - I am really looking foward to this game. It is exactly what I want: a RPFPS Game (Role Playing First Person Shooter Game). It has the kind of fully interactive gameworld that I want out of a metaverse (only smaller). AI that reacts depending on the situation (another innovative technology?). Really good physics (watch the demo movies). And the gameplay looks good; you interact with the world in pretty much the same way that you do in real life (with obvious limitations, of course).
I believe that the next innovation of games will be to make them as realistic as possible. We are already getting that now, with the game engines. Soon, I hope, we will change the way we interact with the games themselves (Virtual Reality). Hollywood (may) actually write good original stories (doubtful, I know), rather than re-hashing old ideas. We may get to decide how the story goes (like a choose-your-path book), and the game can go in different directions according to our choices.
As the technology gets better, hopefully the ideas will follow.
Sure, this will increase immersion at the cost of robbing the player of the sense of accomplishment and reward he/she feels at the completion of a level.
But there is something Hollenshead doesn't mention in the admittedly small space he is given to talk about the admittedly sensitive topic of forthcoming features in his company's future product.
Is it going to be one long linear roller-coaster ride to the end of the game, or is the Wolfenstein world going to feature multiple paths to victory, increase replay value, show signs of innovative thought, and possibly broaden this well-worn genre?
Return to Castle Wolfenstein was great, but Quake 3, Doom 3, Quake 4? Hollenshead may be right: he's going to change the way I play First Person games. At the current rate.. I'm not going to play them anymore.
So from now on every single player FPS game will have the following:
FEAR was short and the story not exactly original BUT it was beautifully executed. It simply incoorperated a lot of good design decission. The only baddie I found was that you still were alone and badly equipped. I would at least to have liked to see a couple of mission starts and ends with some real backup and not just story plot cannon-fodder. I could also have done with a better supply of ammo so I would not have to loot every damn corpse. Oh and the "hidden" health/slow-mo boosts were lame as well. Can you make it any more obvious I am playing a game then having power-ups lying around in sewers?
I find it amazing to see wolfenstein and the word innovation linked however. Sure they were the first but the last wolfenstein to me was an extreme case of mediocore FPS design. Oh well, the punters loved it so who am I to critize.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"SWIV" a vertical two-player shmup, was a single level continuously loaded from a floppy on a 7.14Mhz Amiga with 512MB of RAM.
"Jak and Daxter" by Naughty Dog did the whole single world thing on the PS2.
For example, for our next generation Wolfenstein game, which uses the Xbox 360 as it's primary development platform, we are developing technology that will change the way people play First Person games by doing away with the whole concept of 'levels', which has been the primary progression mechanic every first person game has used.
Sorry to quote this one more time, but WTF? Since when is getting rid of the concept of levels a new idea? I know someone said this already but did this guy not play Metroid Prime?
Unless he means giving people the abilty to freely roam an environment without limitations on where they can go based on items, this has been done already! With little or no load times on top of that. And, Retro Studios was able to do it a second time with MP2. They want to really innovate, let's see them do something with that is amazing gameplay wise. Let's see them hype up something other than load times, graphics or ragdoll physics like these companies do half the time. The Big N showed a demo to the press earlier this year of Metroid Prime 2 played with the Revolution controller. When it comes to an FPS, that is innovation and I can't wait to play Metroid Prime 3 becasue of it.
If it's got to be First Person, try Halo for lack of level loading. Even more ironic because it did this on the Xbox, the predecessor to the 360. And not because you have monsterous new hardware, but because you thought a little bit.
I'm a big believer in linear games. As the Max Payne developers said, "It's better to have one good plot than an infinite number of bad ones." And the interactiveness of it can be more than just "playing a movie". It's a different medium, after all -- unless it's Stuntman or something equally backwards, a shooter is a shooter. I have to like the Half-Life approach -- the plot is in the environment and the gameplay.
But anyway, I've just lost a lot of respect for id. I like that they release their source and provide Linux versions. I don't like that they are doing something Microsoft has done for a long time. "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" Every time I see a game make me wait, I'm annoyed, because I've seen it done right. Jak and Daxter, a launch title for the PS2, had no loading screens, so gameplay was never interrupted except to save.
Oh, and sequels can have good IP. Jak and Daxter have the only controls I've ever had work for me in a platform game -- GTA, the Matrix games, Street Fighter, all either too sluggish or too much based on button-mashing. It makes you wonder -- Quake had the control set used by every FPS today, and Jak had controls that were responsive but not combo-memorizing or button-mashing. And then they made Jak II -- everything Jak & Daxter had, but auto-saving in a separate thread -- you'd see an icon on the screen to show you it was saving, as you continued playing -- and guns, and carjacking, and skateboarding. Then Jak III -- all of the above, plus open desert with a dune buggy, flight, and open war.
I think Naughty Dog did a better job with that than Valve did with Half-Life 2. HL2 is a different game than HL1 -- new content, new weapons, etc. You can still crowbar headcrabs, but the crowbar is mostly obsoleted by the Gravity Gun, which makes me very sad -- I was a fan. And they made it slower. Jak II is everything you liked about Jak&Daxter, enough to still have a game, plus enough more content to make a new game. Jak III did it again.
Oh, and the graphics, while they aren't technically as detailed as Doom 3 or Quake 4 on Ultra, are artistically better and look better than anything id has done, and are at least as original as most of what Valve has done.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ahyes: the expert... what about the Revolution though? Funny if you talk about the change in next gen consoles, and then leaving out the -only- company that's really trying to come forth with new ideas/experiences to play games.
For example, for our next generation Wolfenstein game, which uses the Xbox 360 as it's primary development platform, we are developing technology that will change the way people play First Person games by doing away with the whole concept of 'levels', which has been the primary progression mechanic every first person game has used.
You're not unique,Mr. Hollenshead. In fact, the Unreal engine announced thise feature -ages- ago (streaming level content on the fly, thus creating endless levels without loading). Nice feature nonetheless.
They ask about "original concepts" and in response, they get a page and a half of marketing blurb for a "Wolfenstien Meets GTA" game?!
Geez. They're not even trying to be subtle about it anymore.