KotoR is mentioned in combination with Jades Empire. In terms of Serria adventures they have Gabriel Knight. About the Sims, keep in mind that the article is about storytelling, not story. In terms of storytelling The Sims is quite interesting, since it doesn't have a predefined story, but instead the storys emerge from its gamemechanics, like in few other games. Sure, you never get more deep of the story then random soup opera stuff, but its still a huge leap in terms of storytelling.
It actually made me ignore all that effort. Spreading a story by placing a ton of post-its all over the levels that connect in no way whatsoever to the actually gameplay is probally the worst way to tell a story. Scanning logs and reading email is very fine to add detail to the story, but as the only element to tell the story I found it absolutly aweful. Having enemies that always respawn in the same spots was another thing that ruined any immersion into that little bit of story that there was.
As with all lists, there is always some stuff that is missing, while I am very happy that Dreamfall made it in there I missed. First "The Last Express", which I think was the first (almost) realtime-adventure/game out there. Secondly the classic "Another World", which had an amazing story told with almost no word of dialog: "Good moring professor. I have seen you have driven here in your Ferrari", thats all the dialog you ever get in the whole game. It also was the game that broke virtually every rule of the genre.
Speaking about Jade Empire, I don't really feel that Jade Empire perfected the good/evil stuff, in fact not even close, since it felt far to forced and out of character most of the time. Instead of real dialog choices, you where basically left with something very obvious evil, something very obvious good and some thing neutral, it felt very artificial and unrealistic.
Re:Does 480p have anything to do with widescreen?
on
Wii Confirmed at 480p
·
· Score: 1
The only thing that is really a negative in my mind about the Wii is whether or not games will be square, or rectangular.
The Wii has an option in its system setting to switch between 4:3 and 16:9 display modes, so its likly that all or most games support the 16:9 format, at least the native Wii ones, old Gamecube titles and VirtualConsole are of course a different matter.
Re:what things should be done...
on
Game Breakers
·
· Score: 1
As a guy building an FPS game, I'm curious as to what sorts of things should/shouldn't be done in an FPS.. any thoughts on that?
The thing that annoys me by far the most with virtually every FPS is the total lack of body simulation. In FPS you are for most part a pair of flying arms that control like a cylinder on ice, not exactly the thing I expect when I want to control a human. So give the player a body, use the arms when climbing a ladder and don't climb 'free-hand' like in HL2, let that body have hit-zones and let the weapon have some as well. As others have said, don't drive the realism to far, but drive it to the point where it feels real. This also means that you shouldn't have a 1000:1 kill count for enemy vs player. Have fewer enemies, but more intelligent ones or better armored ones or whatever, have team members that are actually usefull and have interesting situations because they emerge from good AI, not because of too much scripting. Have a realistic environment, meaning birds, civilians and stuff, not just you and the enemy.
To make a long talk short, look at Operation Flashpoint, that game just moved way beyond normal FPS cliches and still stands out today for exactly that reason. DeusEx, Call of Chuthulu and Riddick are a definitve must-have-a-look as well. Instead of writing yet another FPS, try to write a good game, the most important part is to not restrict yourself by genre. And a last whish: give me a game that offers as much freedom as XCom:UFO does, but from a first person view and in realtime.
Re:Not even capable of what the original XBOX can
on
Wii Confirmed at 480p
·
· Score: 1
According to the Wii FAQ from IGN the Wii can technically do 720p and 1080i. Its only that due to the lack of CPU/GPU power using that resoluton wouldn't make much sense for real games.
Those are all retro-games, they are kind of an exception. The number of originally created 2D games on the other side is very very low, however not only on Sony consoles, but on all of them.
What would you have said when Nintendo did a improved N64 instead of the Gamecube? When they simply added a new motion controller and left the rest mostly as is? I mean N64 could do pretty graphics as well, for its time. Today however the N64 is horribly outdated and no high-end motion controller would make we want to play that thing when I can play Shadow of the Colossus or Katamary on a PS2.
The Wii graphics don't look that bad currently, since most people are still left with Gamecube, XBox1 and PS2, so Wii is a small improvment, but will people really be happy in a year or two when PS3 and XBox360 are utilized to their full potential? I kind of doubt it.
I think this will be their fatal flaw for next gen console rave
I very much doubt it. HD-TV adoption is still very low and will stay there for quite a while. If HD-TV would ever become a must-have in the lifetime of the Wii Nintendo could just release a improved and fully compatible Wii (just like GBAsp or DSlite) with an faster GPU that could do HD-TV and have solved the problem easily.
While I doubt that HD-TV is an issue, I however think the lack of plain CPU and GPU power will become a problem very quickly. One doesn't need HD-TV to tell that the Wii graphics look outdated already today and that situation won't improve when developers figure out to better utilizize the multi-core processors of PS3 and XBox360. And it doesn't stop with just graphic. Physic, AI and a bunch of other very gameplay relevant things can benefit a lot from CPU/GPU power, so while the other console will explore new areas of game design, the Wii will be limited to just its controller, which might work for some games, but I really doubt that the new controller will make up the lack of computing power. Katamari or SotC couldn't have worked on Playstation1 and this generation will surly see some 'next-gen' games sooner or later as well.
I am sure some will scream "censorship!", which is of course silly, and only the government can censor.
In a strict sense that is of course right. However what Walmart and other big retailers do results in practically the same situation. Publishers try very hard to avoid AO raitings, because an AO game simply couldn't be sold since the large retailers won't stock it. Its of course still the publishers that decides what should go in or out of a game, but ultimatly they get it dictated by Walmart and friends. The choice between 'publishing what you want and going bankrupt' and 'publishing what Walmart says and getting stuff sold' isn't exactly a free choice.
Its of course everybodys decisions what he wants to stocks and what not, if large retailers however get so large that they are close to monopoly they get far more influence then they should have.
Cutscenes are for most part already realtime generated, they still take up some space, but much less then 1080p HD-TV. Filling 25GB with realtime generated cutscenes will take quite a while and probally not happen in any game ever, it simply is to expensive to produce.
and CD quality audio with procedural techniques.
You can fit like 70 hours of speech on a single DVD, most games hardly reach 10 hours of speech, so even with a DVD you should have plenty of space for your audio needs. Music itself can be quite easily generated procedurally and if there are some spare CPU cycles left, we might see that again as well.
If you look at the games from the last 10 years you will also notice something: games no longer get any larger in terms of the gameworld, they only get more detailed and that detail can for most part be generated procedurally and those parts that can't should be small enough to fit on a DVD.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, the reason is that in the future games will use more and more proceduraly generated data, so that instead of a few megabytes for a huge textures you simply use a few hundred bytes for parameter to generate that same data. Beside saving space this also has the huge advantage that it leads to better graphics, instead of textures getting all blury when watched up close, a procedural approach could generate finer and finer detail the closer you get.
An example would of such a game would be RoboBlitz and I wouldn't be suprised if we will see more and more of games using similar techniques in the comming month and years.
Everybody knows that the Zelda game was designed as a Gamecube game, hence no upgrade in graphics.
Thing is, Zelda is also one of the best looking Wii games around, the other games don't exactly look beyond Gamecube power either. He is not claiming that there isn't an upgrade, but simply that it is a rather small one.
You can of course do some 3D motion if you only have relative data, but sooner or later (most likly in a matter of minutes) it will declaibrate and the console won't have any idea where the heck your controller truely is. It might be possible to recalibrate it with the optical sensor, but that assumes that the sensor gives depth information, quite possible, but given all the talk about the Wiimote basically gets out of control when you get closer to the TV I am not so sure and that of course also assumes that you point the Wiimote at the TV, which you might not do in a lot of situations.
Looking at the current games shows that none of them tries to do a real 1:1 mapping, which, if nothing else, it at least a strong indication that it might be very problematic or simply impossible. Announcements of software like this also suggest that 1:1 mapping won't play much of a role on the Wii.
I am not sure if 1:1 mapping will be completly impossible or can be approximated reasonablly well, but the Wii definitvly isn't build to do it out of the box.
Reading this little review of the Wii and its games shows that the Wiimote isn't without fault either, especially when it comes to games that only got adopted to the Wii and not written from scratch and yes, that includes Zelda.
It however doesn't stop with this, its not just a problem with badly adopted games (very bad sign for multi-platform titles and thus third party support), but there is also another "problem" with the Wiimote that seems to have been largly unnoticed. Unlike early rumors have indicated the Wiimote isn't a true 3D device that can detect its position in space, instead it can only detect relative motion and tilt, just like the PS3 controller, the only different is that the Wiimote has a lightgun-like sensor that allows aiming at the TV/sensorbar. This pretty much destroys a lot of game ideas, like for example everyones favorite, the realistic sword fighting. Sure, there can still be sword games, but it won't be a 1:1 mapping from Wiimote to sword. Red Steel for example is even after the cleanup limited to basically 8 predefined sword moves.
That of course doesn't mean that the Wii will be a bad console, but after all the hype some people should better adjust their expectations to reality or they will have to deal with a huge disapointment.
I browsed through his side, but one thing that puzzles me is: Where is the story in his interactive storytelling? His system works by a bunch of behaviour variables that via some fuzzy logic result in some character behaviour, so far ok, most RPGs or games like The Sims do stuff like that, maybe his system is more complex, more finetuned, whatever. However where is the story in all this? A bunch of characters doing random things doesn't result in an interesting story, it results in a bunch of characters doing random things. This might be fine if you use them in an RPG to simply make a city believable, i.e. use them more or less as 'background noise', but if those are the only things that is happening in the gameworld I fail to see how to get a story from that.
So far I havn't seen anything in his interactive storytelling that would reassemble a AI game master or something similar that manages the overall happenings of the world and thus ensures that the happenings as a whole connect to a larger story, instead of just meaningless random stuff.
How would that be different from The Sims? From the screenshots it looks like each actor has a ton of varibles that might get influenced when different actors interact and then cause them to do things. This sounds pretty much exactly like The Sims. Maybe it allows different kinds of scenarios or such, not just the puppet house that the Sims provide, but I don't see a fundamentel difference that would turn his stuff magically into 'storytelling' while not The Sims. Sounds kind of like a Sims Construction Kit, but I fail to see how the actors and storys will get any more interesting then in any other sandbox games.
Speaking of Facade, while interesting, its pretty much normal interactive fiction, type in a few words and get a reaction when you hit the right verb. All the reactions are completly pre-scripted and the freedom you have in Facade is still pretty much non-existant, except the normal branching points that you get in most other games as well. The interesting thing in Facade is that the gameworld doesn't wait for the player to interact like in a normal point&click adventure, instead it always progresses, but thats not really something new in terms of storytelling, its more an issue of presentation, The Last Express, Half Life 2 or Fahrenheit do pretty much the same thing.
Adventures: - The Last Express (to see an adventure that plays in realtime instead of waiting for the player to act) - Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (dito, but implemented in a different way) - Façade (dito, also shows that storys don't need monsters and crazy to be interesting) - The Longest Journey
Strategy: - XCom:UFO (best thing that ever happened in the genre, great demonstration on how to combine different modes of gameplay into a single game) - Syndicate (to see that RTS can be much more then endless series of Dune2 clones) - Total Annihilation (probally dito, even so I havn't played it myself)
First person Shooters: - Operation Flashpoint (to see that interactive worlds can be much more interesting then prescripted events and that genre rules are ment to be broken) - Riddick (to see that you character doesn't have to feel and move like a sliding cylinder)
2D Platformer: - Another World (to see a game that breaks pretty much all rules of the genre, beside one of the most athmospheric games ever created) - Yoshis Island (to see that breaking trends, i.e. 3D sprites, can be a good thing) - Super Mario Bros 3 (to see that awesome game design can work even with 8bit)
Simulations: - EF2000 - Falcon 4.0 - Mechwarrior 3 (even non-real vehicles can be simulated in a realistic fashion)
Racing Games: - Super Mario Kart[SNES] (the game that pretty much invented the genre as we know it today) - Grand Prix Legends
Roleplaying Games: - DeusEx - Paper Mario
Space: - Wing Commander 3 & 4 (to see one of the best uses of real actors in a game) - Tie Fighter - Elite (to see that whole galaxys don't need more then a few kilobyte of storage space when done right)
What are the implications for PC-based Linux as a gaming platform?
It would change nothing for Linux gaming, at least not in a positive sense, since the problem with Linux gaming are the pledora of incompatibilties that a developer runs into. On the Wii that won't be a problem, one platform, everything fixed. On the PC you will have the same problems as ever, a bazillion distributions, a bazzilion different graphics card each with its own more or less broken drivers and other stuff like that. Wii won't fix any of those problems.
If anything it might actually kill of Linux on PC completly, since if there is a piece of hardware that allows you to publish easily and cheaply to a large market, why waste time with a tiny tiny tiny gaming Linux-PC crowd?
The Wii is reported to operate on top of a proprietary form of the Linux kernel,
Who is reporting that? Its the first time I hear that and the linked webpages don't really give any more detail, the Iwata interview simply states that the Wii will have upgradable firmware, nothing Linux related.
And you won't have competing products, either; if a designer puts in a Pepsi machine in the game as product placement, then you sure as heck aren't going to see a Coca Cola machine stuck right next to it.
That is true today because games are shipped on DVD and have static content, but the next generation of consoles will all be online capable, thus things might change quite a bit. Advertising would no longer be limited to a few sponsors, but the advertising space would become something dynamic where everybody could add there advertisment on each start of the game, the new ads could be downloaded and placed directly into the game.
Am I the only one who's never been bothered by the uncanny valley effect? Having grown up on video games I can't say I've ever experianced this supposedly common phenomenon, or had any friends say "gee, that's creepy". Actually, I always sort of assumed only older folk felt it.:-)
I would say that so far there simply havn't been all that many games that suffered from it. The effect isn't something that just magically pops up due to advances in graphics, I would say it has far more to do with an imbalance in the presentation, i.e. when you have an almost photorealistic graphic, you'd better also have almost realistic animation, else the result will look like a walking zombie, not like a pretty girl. If the graphics on the other side are far from photorealistic, a bunch of glitches in the animation won't be that much of an issue.
Another thing that plays a heavy role is fine tuing of the animations, raw motion caputuring data gives horrible results (Polar Express), since it simply only captures a subset of the total motion and thus leads to noticable errors. Classic keyframe animation by a good animator however can easily fix these problems, since an animator knows what to look for and how to fix it (Golum), just applying the raw data to the model doesn't do that.
Speaking in terms of gaming, one demo that demonstrated the Uncanny Valley rather well was Heavy Rain, in some moments it just looked horrible, however in others it also looked great. Its the lack of fine-tuning (was all motion captured) that was lacking here and some bugs in the rendering (inner of the mouth to bright) that causes the throuble. Another example is the latest FIFA game, the characters look rather awefull, the polycount is high, but finetuning is again largly lacking, no suprise by how many players they have to model, so the result looks far more creepy than it should. A last generation example would be Riddick, the shading on the human skin was just all wrong and so was the hair, which lead to unpleasent results. The Tiger Woods shown on the PS3 press conference was another example of being deep down in uncanny valley.
We will for sure see some more uncanny valley on PS3 and XBox360, but luckily it is something that can be avoided with some extra effort.
The reason that sequels sell is simple, people already know them, so its easy to market them. Saying to the customer "more of the same" gives him a idea of what the sequel will offer. With a new game on the other side the marketing department has to start from zero, explain the world, the gameplay, the genre and what not to the consumer, a heck a lot more work then just saying "more of the same". This can also be seen by non-sequels, for examples Assassin's Creed, while its an original game, every interview basically starts with "From the creators of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time...", which is really not so different from saying "more of the same", they simply build up on the fame of the past, with true sequels that is of course even easier.
In the end I don't think that consumers want sequels, it simply happens that marketing makes it easier to buy sequels then original games. There are of course a few exceptions, when the story isn't done and there is still something to be told or when the original game simply was to short to take advantange of the full potential of the game mechanics or when the technology has advanced so much that a reinterpretation of the original game is worth the try (PrinceOfPersia, Mario, etc.). For most part I would however say that non-sequels are prefered, however what I want and what I buy don't have to be the same things in the end, thanks to marketing and a bunch of other influences.
Of course, people who are seriously interested in gaming already know to get a capable graphics card. So the problem is much smaller than he claims. Mark Rein is an idiot.
The problem is that you are not born as a gamer and if you try to enter PC gaming these days you have a very hard time with casual non-gamer hardware, especially when the hardware doesn't even allow you to upgrade (lack of AGP port, laptop, etc.). So I think the problem is very real, however I also think that Mark Rein is fundamentally wrong on the cause. The problem is not Intel, the problem is that he and other game developers fail to develop games that run all the hardware out there. If a lot of people using on-board graphic chips then it is his job to make the games scalable. Sure you won't get the pretty graphics from a gamer graphics card on an on-board chip, but there is no reason why you couldn't scale the graphics down. Most games these days have pretty much the same underlying logic then a lot of years ago, scale down the polycount, don't require hardware shader and most games would be able to run on lower-end hardware. This of course requires additional development work, but compared to the total cost of developing a next gen game, the cost of doing a scaled-down version of the same game should be pretty low.
Slashdot Mirror
KotoR is mentioned in combination with Jades Empire. In terms of Serria adventures they have Gabriel Knight. About the Sims, keep in mind that the article is about storytelling, not story. In terms of storytelling The Sims is quite interesting, since it doesn't have a predefined story, but instead the storys emerge from its gamemechanics, like in few other games. Sure, you never get more deep of the story then random soup opera stuff, but its still a huge leap in terms of storytelling.
It actually made me ignore all that effort. Spreading a story by placing a ton of post-its all over the levels that connect in no way whatsoever to the actually gameplay is probally the worst way to tell a story. Scanning logs and reading email is very fine to add detail to the story, but as the only element to tell the story I found it absolutly aweful. Having enemies that always respawn in the same spots was another thing that ruined any immersion into that little bit of story that there was.
As with all lists, there is always some stuff that is missing, while I am very happy that Dreamfall made it in there I missed. First "The Last Express", which I think was the first (almost) realtime-adventure/game out there. Secondly the classic "Another World", which had an amazing story told with almost no word of dialog: "Good moring professor. I have seen you have driven here in your Ferrari", thats all the dialog you ever get in the whole game. It also was the game that broke virtually every rule of the genre.
Speaking about Jade Empire, I don't really feel that Jade Empire perfected the good/evil stuff, in fact not even close, since it felt far to forced and out of character most of the time. Instead of real dialog choices, you where basically left with something very obvious evil, something very obvious good and some thing neutral, it felt very artificial and unrealistic.
The Wii has an option in its system setting to switch between 4:3 and 16:9 display modes, so its likly that all or most games support the 16:9 format, at least the native Wii ones, old Gamecube titles and VirtualConsole are of course a different matter.
The thing that annoys me by far the most with virtually every FPS is the total lack of body simulation. In FPS you are for most part a pair of flying arms that control like a cylinder on ice, not exactly the thing I expect when I want to control a human. So give the player a body, use the arms when climbing a ladder and don't climb 'free-hand' like in HL2, let that body have hit-zones and let the weapon have some as well. As others have said, don't drive the realism to far, but drive it to the point where it feels real. This also means that you shouldn't have a 1000:1 kill count for enemy vs player. Have fewer enemies, but more intelligent ones or better armored ones or whatever, have team members that are actually usefull and have interesting situations because they emerge from good AI, not because of too much scripting. Have a realistic environment, meaning birds, civilians and stuff, not just you and the enemy.
To make a long talk short, look at Operation Flashpoint, that game just moved way beyond normal FPS cliches and still stands out today for exactly that reason. DeusEx, Call of Chuthulu and Riddick are a definitve must-have-a-look as well. Instead of writing yet another FPS, try to write a good game, the most important part is to not restrict yourself by genre. And a last whish: give me a game that offers as much freedom as XCom:UFO does, but from a first person view and in realtime.
According to the Wii FAQ from IGN the Wii can technically do 720p and 1080i. Its only that due to the lack of CPU/GPU power using that resoluton wouldn't make much sense for real games.
Those are all retro-games, they are kind of an exception. The number of originally created 2D games on the other side is very very low, however not only on Sony consoles, but on all of them.
What would you have said when Nintendo did a improved N64 instead of the Gamecube? When they simply added a new motion controller and left the rest mostly as is? I mean N64 could do pretty graphics as well, for its time. Today however the N64 is horribly outdated and no high-end motion controller would make we want to play that thing when I can play Shadow of the Colossus or Katamary on a PS2.
The Wii graphics don't look that bad currently, since most people are still left with Gamecube, XBox1 and PS2, so Wii is a small improvment, but will people really be happy in a year or two when PS3 and XBox360 are utilized to their full potential? I kind of doubt it.
I very much doubt it. HD-TV adoption is still very low and will stay there for quite a while. If HD-TV would ever become a must-have in the lifetime of the Wii Nintendo could just release a improved and fully compatible Wii (just like GBAsp or DSlite) with an faster GPU that could do HD-TV and have solved the problem easily.
While I doubt that HD-TV is an issue, I however think the lack of plain CPU and GPU power will become a problem very quickly. One doesn't need HD-TV to tell that the Wii graphics look outdated already today and that situation won't improve when developers figure out to better utilizize the multi-core processors of PS3 and XBox360. And it doesn't stop with just graphic. Physic, AI and a bunch of other very gameplay relevant things can benefit a lot from CPU/GPU power, so while the other console will explore new areas of game design, the Wii will be limited to just its controller, which might work for some games, but I really doubt that the new controller will make up the lack of computing power. Katamari or SotC couldn't have worked on Playstation1 and this generation will surly see some 'next-gen' games sooner or later as well.
Conker got a remake on XBox, and since Rare belongs to Microsoft now don't except him to set a foot on Nintendo territory anytime soon again.
In a strict sense that is of course right. However what Walmart and other big retailers do results in practically the same situation. Publishers try very hard to avoid AO raitings, because an AO game simply couldn't be sold since the large retailers won't stock it. Its of course still the publishers that decides what should go in or out of a game, but ultimatly they get it dictated by Walmart and friends. The choice between 'publishing what you want and going bankrupt' and 'publishing what Walmart says and getting stuff sold' isn't exactly a free choice.
Its of course everybodys decisions what he wants to stocks and what not, if large retailers however get so large that they are close to monopoly they get far more influence then they should have.
Cutscenes are for most part already realtime generated, they still take up some space, but much less then 1080p HD-TV. Filling 25GB with realtime generated cutscenes will take quite a while and probally not happen in any game ever, it simply is to expensive to produce.
You can fit like 70 hours of speech on a single DVD, most games hardly reach 10 hours of speech, so even with a DVD you should have plenty of space for your audio needs. Music itself can be quite easily generated procedurally and if there are some spare CPU cycles left, we might see that again as well.
If you look at the games from the last 10 years you will also notice something: games no longer get any larger in terms of the gameworld, they only get more detailed and that detail can for most part be generated procedurally and those parts that can't should be small enough to fit on a DVD.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, the reason is that in the future games will use more and more proceduraly generated data, so that instead of a few megabytes for a huge textures you simply use a few hundred bytes for parameter to generate that same data. Beside saving space this also has the huge advantage that it leads to better graphics, instead of textures getting all blury when watched up close, a procedural approach could generate finer and finer detail the closer you get.
An example would of such a game would be RoboBlitz and I wouldn't be suprised if we will see more and more of games using similar techniques in the comming month and years.
Thing is, Zelda is also one of the best looking Wii games around, the other games don't exactly look beyond Gamecube power either. He is not claiming that there isn't an upgrade, but simply that it is a rather small one.
You can of course do some 3D motion if you only have relative data, but sooner or later (most likly in a matter of minutes) it will declaibrate and the console won't have any idea where the heck your controller truely is. It might be possible to recalibrate it with the optical sensor, but that assumes that the sensor gives depth information, quite possible, but given all the talk about the Wiimote basically gets out of control when you get closer to the TV I am not so sure and that of course also assumes that you point the Wiimote at the TV, which you might not do in a lot of situations.
Looking at the current games shows that none of them tries to do a real 1:1 mapping, which, if nothing else, it at least a strong indication that it might be very problematic or simply impossible. Announcements of software like this also suggest that 1:1 mapping won't play much of a role on the Wii.
I am not sure if 1:1 mapping will be completly impossible or can be approximated reasonablly well, but the Wii definitvly isn't build to do it out of the box.
Reading this little review of the Wii and its games shows that the Wiimote isn't without fault either, especially when it comes to games that only got adopted to the Wii and not written from scratch and yes, that includes Zelda.
It however doesn't stop with this, its not just a problem with badly adopted games (very bad sign for multi-platform titles and thus third party support), but there is also another "problem" with the Wiimote that seems to have been largly unnoticed. Unlike early rumors have indicated the Wiimote isn't a true 3D device that can detect its position in space, instead it can only detect relative motion and tilt, just like the PS3 controller, the only different is that the Wiimote has a lightgun-like sensor that allows aiming at the TV/sensorbar. This pretty much destroys a lot of game ideas, like for example everyones favorite, the realistic sword fighting. Sure, there can still be sword games, but it won't be a 1:1 mapping from Wiimote to sword. Red Steel for example is even after the cleanup limited to basically 8 predefined sword moves.
That of course doesn't mean that the Wii will be a bad console, but after all the hype some people should better adjust their expectations to reality or they will have to deal with a huge disapointment.
So far I havn't seen anything in his interactive storytelling that would reassemble a AI game master or something similar that manages the overall happenings of the world and thus ensures that the happenings as a whole connect to a larger story, instead of just meaningless random stuff.
How would that be different from The Sims? From the screenshots it looks like each actor has a ton of varibles that might get influenced when different actors interact and then cause them to do things. This sounds pretty much exactly like The Sims. Maybe it allows different kinds of scenarios or such, not just the puppet house that the Sims provide, but I don't see a fundamentel difference that would turn his stuff magically into 'storytelling' while not The Sims. Sounds kind of like a Sims Construction Kit, but I fail to see how the actors and storys will get any more interesting then in any other sandbox games.
Speaking of Facade, while interesting, its pretty much normal interactive fiction, type in a few words and get a reaction when you hit the right verb. All the reactions are completly pre-scripted and the freedom you have in Facade is still pretty much non-existant, except the normal branching points that you get in most other games as well. The interesting thing in Facade is that the gameworld doesn't wait for the player to interact like in a normal point&click adventure, instead it always progresses, but thats not really something new in terms of storytelling, its more an issue of presentation, The Last Express, Half Life 2 or Fahrenheit do pretty much the same thing.
Some additions:
Adventures:
- The Last Express (to see an adventure that plays in realtime instead of waiting for the player to act)
- Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (dito, but implemented in a different way)
- Façade (dito, also shows that storys don't need monsters and crazy to be interesting)
- The Longest Journey
Strategy:
- XCom:UFO (best thing that ever happened in the genre, great demonstration on how to combine different modes of gameplay into a single game)
- Syndicate (to see that RTS can be much more then endless series of Dune2 clones)
- Total Annihilation (probally dito, even so I havn't played it myself)
First person Shooters:
- Operation Flashpoint (to see that interactive worlds can be much more interesting then prescripted events and that genre rules are ment to be broken)
- Riddick (to see that you character doesn't have to feel and move like a sliding cylinder)
2D Platformer:
- Another World (to see a game that breaks pretty much all rules of the genre, beside one of the most athmospheric games ever created)
- Yoshis Island (to see that breaking trends, i.e. 3D sprites, can be a good thing)
- Super Mario Bros 3 (to see that awesome game design can work even with 8bit)
Simulations:
- EF2000
- Falcon 4.0
- Mechwarrior 3 (even non-real vehicles can be simulated in a realistic fashion)
Racing Games:
- Super Mario Kart[SNES] (the game that pretty much invented the genre as we know it today)
- Grand Prix Legends
Roleplaying Games:
- DeusEx
- Paper Mario
Space:
- Wing Commander 3 & 4 (to see one of the best uses of real actors in a game)
- Tie Fighter
- Elite (to see that whole galaxys don't need more then a few kilobyte of storage space when done right)
It would change nothing for Linux gaming, at least not in a positive sense, since the problem with Linux gaming are the pledora of incompatibilties that a developer runs into. On the Wii that won't be a problem, one platform, everything fixed. On the PC you will have the same problems as ever, a bazillion distributions, a bazzilion different graphics card each with its own more or less broken drivers and other stuff like that. Wii won't fix any of those problems.
If anything it might actually kill of Linux on PC completly, since if there is a piece of hardware that allows you to publish easily and cheaply to a large market, why waste time with a tiny tiny tiny gaming Linux-PC crowd?
Who is reporting that? Its the first time I hear that and the linked webpages don't really give any more detail, the Iwata interview simply states that the Wii will have upgradable firmware, nothing Linux related.
That is true today because games are shipped on DVD and have static content, but the next generation of consoles will all be online capable, thus things might change quite a bit. Advertising would no longer be limited to a few sponsors, but the advertising space would become something dynamic where everybody could add there advertisment on each start of the game, the new ads could be downloaded and placed directly into the game.
I would say that so far there simply havn't been all that many games that suffered from it. The effect isn't something that just magically pops up due to advances in graphics, I would say it has far more to do with an imbalance in the presentation, i.e. when you have an almost photorealistic graphic, you'd better also have almost realistic animation, else the result will look like a walking zombie, not like a pretty girl. If the graphics on the other side are far from photorealistic, a bunch of glitches in the animation won't be that much of an issue.
Another thing that plays a heavy role is fine tuing of the animations, raw motion caputuring data gives horrible results (Polar Express), since it simply only captures a subset of the total motion and thus leads to noticable errors. Classic keyframe animation by a good animator however can easily fix these problems, since an animator knows what to look for and how to fix it (Golum), just applying the raw data to the model doesn't do that.
Speaking in terms of gaming, one demo that demonstrated the Uncanny Valley rather well was Heavy Rain, in some moments it just looked horrible, however in others it also looked great. Its the lack of fine-tuning (was all motion captured) that was lacking here and some bugs in the rendering (inner of the mouth to bright) that causes the throuble. Another example is the latest FIFA game, the characters look rather awefull, the polycount is high, but finetuning is again largly lacking, no suprise by how many players they have to model, so the result looks far more creepy than it should. A last generation example would be Riddick, the shading on the human skin was just all wrong and so was the hair, which lead to unpleasent results. The Tiger Woods shown on the PS3 press conference was another example of being deep down in uncanny valley.
We will for sure see some more uncanny valley on PS3 and XBox360, but luckily it is something that can be avoided with some extra effort.
The reason that sequels sell is simple, people already know them, so its easy to market them. Saying to the customer "more of the same" gives him a idea of what the sequel will offer. With a new game on the other side the marketing department has to start from zero, explain the world, the gameplay, the genre and what not to the consumer, a heck a lot more work then just saying "more of the same". This can also be seen by non-sequels, for examples Assassin's Creed, while its an original game, every interview basically starts with "From the creators of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time...", which is really not so different from saying "more of the same", they simply build up on the fame of the past, with true sequels that is of course even easier.
In the end I don't think that consumers want sequels, it simply happens that marketing makes it easier to buy sequels then original games. There are of course a few exceptions, when the story isn't done and there is still something to be told or when the original game simply was to short to take advantange of the full potential of the game mechanics or when the technology has advanced so much that a reinterpretation of the original game is worth the try (PrinceOfPersia, Mario, etc.). For most part I would however say that non-sequels are prefered, however what I want and what I buy don't have to be the same things in the end, thanks to marketing and a bunch of other influences.
The problem is that you are not born as a gamer and if you try to enter PC gaming these days you have a very hard time with casual non-gamer hardware, especially when the hardware doesn't even allow you to upgrade (lack of AGP port, laptop, etc.). So I think the problem is very real, however I also think that Mark Rein is fundamentally wrong on the cause. The problem is not Intel, the problem is that he and other game developers fail to develop games that run all the hardware out there. If a lot of people using on-board graphic chips then it is his job to make the games scalable. Sure you won't get the pretty graphics from a gamer graphics card on an on-board chip, but there is no reason why you couldn't scale the graphics down. Most games these days have pretty much the same underlying logic then a lot of years ago, scale down the polycount, don't require hardware shader and most games would be able to run on lower-end hardware. This of course requires additional development work, but compared to the total cost of developing a next gen game, the cost of doing a scaled-down version of the same game should be pretty low.