"Titles such as Black, TOCA Race Driver 3 and FIFA Street 2 should ensure the Xbox and PlayStation 2 remain comfortable under consumers' TV sets for the rest of the year."
And here I thought that PS2 gamers would be playing Kingdom Hearts II and Final Fantasy XII...
Halo 2 is one of the best selling console games ever, and MS would be insane not to have Halo 3 in development for the Xbox 360. That said, the big question is which team is handling it? After Halo 2, Bungie said that Halo 3 would not be their next title. Gates then came out and said something about Halo 3 releasing with the PS3 (in a more recent interview with him he said he'd made a mistake with that). As a result of that combined with the recent release of the 360, everyone has assumed that Bungie must be working on Halo 3 after all despite the fact that nothing has actually been announced.
Personally, I'm a long-standing Bungie fan, since I got Operation Desert Storm for my old Mac LC575. For me, Halo 2 was a gigantic disappointment. It is certainly a good game, but it feels almost soulless, lacking in those special, hard to describe qualities that had set their games apart previously. When you look at the dev team that worked on it, the reason is pretty clear: the original team is now far outnumbered by newer talent.
I would not be surprised at all if Bungie dropped an 'unexpected' bombshell at E3, announcing and demoing a new game that isn't Halo 3, but something completely new. Perhaps an entirely new genre? I'd love to see a talented group like them tackle an RPG, for example. There is absolutely no reason why a separate Microsoft studio couldn't be working on Halo 3 and having some of the Bungie team give them the nod every now and then. It's not unheard of in the game development world after all. For example, Bioware handed off Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights to Obsidian so they could concentrate on developing new IP. There's no reason why Bungie couldn't still be involved in a creative capacity as well.
Allowing Bungie to work on something new while continuing to develop Halo as a brand would make sense in terms of long-term marketing too. MS at the moment have only got a few franchises that they can build on - Perfect Dark, Project Gotham, and Halo are about the shape of it. Bungie have proven that they have the ability to create franchises. If they produce something completely new, then there is a strong chance that it will end up becoming another large franchise for MS. The X360 should have at least another 3-4 years in its lifespan, and having an extra big franchise that they can push down the line when interest begins to wane would be good business sense for Microsoft.
Personally, I'd be far more interested in seeing something original from Bungie. What did that "Pheonix" project they were throwing around a few years back turn out to be, anyway?
Not a very well researched list
on
What is Next-Gen?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
While it's true that most of the supposed 'innovative' gameplay entries listed are the games which are often credited with these innovations, most of them aren't the true innovators. Others did it first, and they've simply given it a bit of spit and polish, and been able to exploit newer technologies.
It's already been pointed out that Halo was hardly the first playable FPS on a console - while not quite as polished in control (mainly due to the controller design, IMO) as Halo, Perfect Dark and Goldeneye both did it earlier. If anything, Halo could be seen as polishing refining the ground that Goldeneye really innovated in.
Half Life was not the first FPS to integrate a decent story with the gameplay. Marathon did that nearly five years earlier, and System Shock beat them as well. Depending on whether you class it as a FPS, you could even argue that Pathways into Darkness did it even earlier.
Resident Evil didn't really tread any new ground that hadn't been gone over in Alone in the Dark (which was a better game, in my opinion).
Did Mario 64 really innovate that much? It's certainly a hallmark title with fantastic gameplay, but the point of this article was supposed to be *innovative* gameplay, not highly-polished gameplay that other games had done beforehand. Hell, Doom listed as being innovative because it was a FPS? What happened to Wolfenstein 3D? Doom is a great game, but again, it refines on the innovation provided by earlier games.
This is not to say that refining existing game ideas into new games is a bad thing or anything - far from it, it's how games have always developed. If you're going to start listing off the games that were truly innovative and created a lasting impression on whole generations of games to come, then you should be listing the ones that did it first, not the first ones to gain mainstream approval for it.
In terms of next-gen gameplay innovations, the truth of the matter is that games have always employed an evolutionary model. They started very simple, and as time went on some new ideas (mutations) came in, making new varieties of game. Some types of games died out, and others thrived. Complexity increased and increased. In games, as in genetics, as the complexity increases, the amount of impact that a single mutation (idea) can have on the overall product is reduced. What I'm attempting to say is that back at the dawn of gaming, new ideas could be pretty simple (for example, adding a high scores table) but a single, simple idea could make a huge impact on the game. A lot of us gamers have been gaming for a long time now, and we've watched the complexity increase. There's a sizeable number of people who decry the current state of games and the supposed lack of innovation, but I can't help wondering whether it's just that simple innovations aren't going to be as obvious any more. We point to the big changes that went on ten years ago (or more) and note all the huge innovations, and are expecting that the same huge jumps should still be happening at the same rate now. It's just not going to happen any more, unless the actual hardware undergoes a paradigm shift. What we're going to see, I think, is more combining and refining of existing ideas. There will still be great games, and there will still be awful games. There is no single special quality or qualities that somehow makes a game 'next-gen'.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that the games which will later be accepted as being 'next gen' will be whatever makes the publishers the most money.
Slashdot Mirror
"Titles such as Black, TOCA Race Driver 3 and FIFA Street 2 should ensure the Xbox and PlayStation 2 remain comfortable under consumers' TV sets for the rest of the year."
And here I thought that PS2 gamers would be playing Kingdom Hearts II and Final Fantasy XII...
... but will it actually be developed by Bungie?
Halo 2 is one of the best selling console games ever, and MS would be insane not to have Halo 3 in development for the Xbox 360. That said, the big question is which team is handling it? After Halo 2, Bungie said that Halo 3 would not be their next title. Gates then came out and said something about Halo 3 releasing with the PS3 (in a more recent interview with him he said he'd made a mistake with that). As a result of that combined with the recent release of the 360, everyone has assumed that Bungie must be working on Halo 3 after all despite the fact that nothing has actually been announced.
Personally, I'm a long-standing Bungie fan, since I got Operation Desert Storm for my old Mac LC575. For me, Halo 2 was a gigantic disappointment. It is certainly a good game, but it feels almost soulless, lacking in those special, hard to describe qualities that had set their games apart previously. When you look at the dev team that worked on it, the reason is pretty clear: the original team is now far outnumbered by newer talent.
I would not be surprised at all if Bungie dropped an 'unexpected' bombshell at E3, announcing and demoing a new game that isn't Halo 3, but something completely new. Perhaps an entirely new genre? I'd love to see a talented group like them tackle an RPG, for example. There is absolutely no reason why a separate Microsoft studio couldn't be working on Halo 3 and having some of the Bungie team give them the nod every now and then. It's not unheard of in the game development world after all. For example, Bioware handed off Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights to Obsidian so they could concentrate on developing new IP. There's no reason why Bungie couldn't still be involved in a creative capacity as well.
Allowing Bungie to work on something new while continuing to develop Halo as a brand would make sense in terms of long-term marketing too. MS at the moment have only got a few franchises that they can build on - Perfect Dark, Project Gotham, and Halo are about the shape of it. Bungie have proven that they have the ability to create franchises. If they produce something completely new, then there is a strong chance that it will end up becoming another large franchise for MS. The X360 should have at least another 3-4 years in its lifespan, and having an extra big franchise that they can push down the line when interest begins to wane would be good business sense for Microsoft.
Personally, I'd be far more interested in seeing something original from Bungie. What did that "Pheonix" project they were throwing around a few years back turn out to be, anyway?
While it's true that most of the supposed 'innovative' gameplay entries listed are the games which are often credited with these innovations, most of them aren't the true innovators. Others did it first, and they've simply given it a bit of spit and polish, and been able to exploit newer technologies.
It's already been pointed out that Halo was hardly the first playable FPS on a console - while not quite as polished in control (mainly due to the controller design, IMO) as Halo, Perfect Dark and Goldeneye both did it earlier. If anything, Halo could be seen as polishing refining the ground that Goldeneye really innovated in.
Half Life was not the first FPS to integrate a decent story with the gameplay. Marathon did that nearly five years earlier, and System Shock beat them as well. Depending on whether you class it as a FPS, you could even argue that Pathways into Darkness did it even earlier.
Resident Evil didn't really tread any new ground that hadn't been gone over in Alone in the Dark (which was a better game, in my opinion).
Did Mario 64 really innovate that much? It's certainly a hallmark title with fantastic gameplay, but the point of this article was supposed to be *innovative* gameplay, not highly-polished gameplay that other games had done beforehand. Hell, Doom listed as being innovative because it was a FPS? What happened to Wolfenstein 3D? Doom is a great game, but again, it refines on the innovation provided by earlier games.
This is not to say that refining existing game ideas into new games is a bad thing or anything - far from it, it's how games have always developed. If you're going to start listing off the games that were truly innovative and created a lasting impression on whole generations of games to come, then you should be listing the ones that did it first, not the first ones to gain mainstream approval for it.
In terms of next-gen gameplay innovations, the truth of the matter is that games have always employed an evolutionary model. They started very simple, and as time went on some new ideas (mutations) came in, making new varieties of game. Some types of games died out, and others thrived. Complexity increased and increased. In games, as in genetics, as the complexity increases, the amount of impact that a single mutation (idea) can have on the overall product is reduced. What I'm attempting to say is that back at the dawn of gaming, new ideas could be pretty simple (for example, adding a high scores table) but a single, simple idea could make a huge impact on the game. A lot of us gamers have been gaming for a long time now, and we've watched the complexity increase. There's a sizeable number of people who decry the current state of games and the supposed lack of innovation, but I can't help wondering whether it's just that simple innovations aren't going to be as obvious any more. We point to the big changes that went on ten years ago (or more) and note all the huge innovations, and are expecting that the same huge jumps should still be happening at the same rate now. It's just not going to happen any more, unless the actual hardware undergoes a paradigm shift. What we're going to see, I think, is more combining and refining of existing ideas. There will still be great games, and there will still be awful games. There is no single special quality or qualities that somehow makes a game 'next-gen'.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that the games which will later be accepted as being 'next gen' will be whatever makes the publishers the most money.