What gamers want from 7th gen consoles

20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles

Clicky <-- wants to be touched... :eek:

Who ever done that review makes some really good points

I don't agree with everything, but definitely most of it is excellent. A good read!

Best. Ever.

ROFL, thats a hell of a good review!!!! Send it to the creators!

Excellent writeup there. Accurate and to the point!

Quote:
In FPS games built entirely on the anticipation of using gigantic, phallic-symbol weapons, why not start me out with a damned machine gun and 200 rounds of ammo and go up from there?
OMFG YESSSSS!!~!!!

A very good article that raises a lot of points. I agree with it totally, and I its one of those things game developers should be FORCED to read and adhere to.

That was awesome. So many good points and funny as.

The stuff he is saying is so true... Consoles are made for gaming and only gaming... stuff this extra crap...

Consoles are good for gaming, but when it comes to XBMC .. that's everything you want in a console. :D

The guy seems a little too angry for his own good. There are also good reasons why some of the things he's complaining about exist.

"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 and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources? " - Sounds pretty fkn boring to me.

Ruin...that game would be similar in gameplay to the sims, and while a lot of people find it boring, a lot dont. That said I think he was just using that as an example about depth of gameplay through detail.

What's that? A game that's already out (2 of em that is) that doesn't have bazooka bosoms and offers a different type of gameplay? :O

But seriously though, he seems to have it in for the developers even though they're mostly gamers themselves who have to make complicated design decisions. If you add huge open ended gameplay, you may have to lose the ability to hand craft a good storyline and/or have quadruple your workload and you might just not have the budget or the time to do that. He also pointed out himself that making games is a business which can certainly lead to more conservative types of games but it's not necessarily the developer's fault. They have to make a living and if you want to make a very innovative game, the whole company and the publisher has to be willing to take the chance of the game ending up being a flop and them losing lots of money and time. It's obvious developers don't like this situation to anyone who's read the reports from the last GDC and some very smart people still don't know what the best solution is.

AI that actually outsmarts you? How much programming would it take to make truly smart AI and so what other feature would the game have to miss to be on budget, and then how much would it really add to the game? And how much would you really notice it? A programmer might have spent a month trying to get an enemy to realise you're using the same weapon and move to a better location or something, but if they're gonna die by my hands in a few seconds anyway I might notice once or twice during the entire game. It still looks like it must be hard to make friendly AI not get in your way during a game let alone have the awesome thinking skills of a real person. MP is a cheaper and BETTER solution than that.

And what's wrong with games advertising themselves with art or cutscene stuff as long as they don't misrepresent as actual in-game stuff and frankly the examples he showed are obviously not in-game. It's like having posters n stuff for movies and performances.

What about not enough gore in computer games? Wtf? How much would making the gore especially gorey actually add to the game? I don't play first person shooters to see lots of guts, but maybe I'm just not masochistic enough. Sure, maybe some horror games might benefit with a little more gore or something but that's not exactly a huge amount of the market now is it.

Oh noes, games that are so sexy and have such detailed and immersive environments that they have LOADING... screens! Shock horror! Frankly this is a reality for any game that actually wants to use pretty recent hardware and not look like it's last generation. It's not like the game designers sit around and think "Hey, you know what would be uber fun! Let's have loading screens!". There are tricks to get around these things such as streaming levels etc but that also puts pressure on other parts of the hardware and isn't exactly infallible. Seriously, if you hate loading screens so much, play pac man or go get a coffee or something in the mean-time.

Game design is full of compromises (any design for that matter), if you make one thing happen (like having infinite ammo or getting the most powerful weapon in the game from the start) it'll effect many other aspects of the game. It depends on what bits actually form a coherent end-product that is most similar to the vision of the game to begin with (or a vision that's changed during the process).

Finally, as long as the level looks good and is fun who cares that it may have some crates?

(PS: Some people like jump puzzles)

On a similar topic here's a great post by someone on Beyond3d.com talking about misrepresentations of games, specifically at this year's E3:

Quote from "MrWibble:
It seems to me that the main problem here is that people can't comprehend the difference between a tech-demo, concept art, and reality.

Tech-demos exist to show the power of the hardware. They concentrate as much as possible of the available computational effort at a single effect to provide a targetted demonstration of what a machine is capable of. Clearly you can't then assume that the same level of quality will exist when that effect is used on 100 characters at the same time within a complex enviroment and a game running AI and Physics... If the machine had enough power to do all that at the same time then it would use that to make the tech-demo look *even better*.

Tech demos also exist because it's a lot easier to write an example of a single effect on a bit of prototype hardware, than it is to write a whole representative game-segment... especially when you only have a small team of engineers, limited art resources, and almost no time at all.

So anyone looking at the PS2 tech-demos (which to the best of my knowledge were all running on actual hardware, even if some of them were just streaming pre-transformed data at a GS) and expecting to see the same quality in every aspect of every game made since, is going to be disappointed. From an average-joe with no technical knowledge and only a tenuous grasp on logic I guess that's understandable, if a little naive. For people who hang around a technically oriented board like this, you should know better. Shame on you.

The PS2 tech-demos were on actual hardware, therefore they are quite emphatically not BS. They also probably were *all* supassed in terms of utilisation of the PS2 hardware at some point in the PS2's lifespan, it's just that the power was spread across an entire game and not focussed on a single face or character.

To go from "here's a tech-demo of a face", through "faces in games don't look like that", to "Sony are full of s**t" requires a level of ignorance and denial that makes me despair.

Concept-art meanwhile exists to give an *impression* of what something is supposed to look like when it's finished. It exists because if you showed stuff how it looks for 90% of the development, especially before hardware is finished, it'd look rubbish - and imagination doesn't cut much ice in marketing. Concept art gives you something to aim for in development, and something to show externally to demonstrate what you think a product will look like.

The reality is that if the hardware was complete enough to run games like KZ2, and those games were advanced enough in development to be demoed in realtime like that, then the console would be releasing a lot more promptly than "next spring". Either that or everything is going to get another 6-months to a year of polishing and thus is not representative of the final product - which means they'd probably want to tart it up even more to give a more accurate view on what it will look like.

The fact it, any concept-art is just a guess at what will be acheivable. That doesn't make Sony, or anyone else who produces such (which is, to be fair, pretty much every company in the industry) "liars".

What's important is how such demos and concepts are presented and what is said about them. It strikes me that most of the "BS" that is said comes not from Sony, but from the press that prints unfounded stories and rumour, or misquotes from a badly translated interview, or "exclusive source" that turns out to be some idiot in the QA dept. who met a journo down the pub and fancied a free pint.

There are several "facts" being presented both here, and even in some supposedly professional publications which I know, from personal experience, to be total fabrications with no basis in reality. Yet no doubt 5 years down the line we'll be here debating the "lies" Sony told about PS3 and why it never met them, even though these were constructed by 3rd parties and never actually stated by Sony themselves.

It doesn't help when concept-art is released and websites or magazines publish it with "screen-shot" in big letters, though even the most idiotic of editor ought to know that the PSP or PS2 doesn't run in high-def/print resolutions with full AA...

Some unscrupulous (or plain stupid) marketing departments might try to pass rendered concept stuff off as screen-shots. But on the whole I expect they just release some media packs with a bunch of art in, and editors just kind of make stuff up as they go along, because quite frankly an amazing screen-shot sells just as many copies of a magazine or gets just as many hits on their site as it will sell games...

It was pretty clear to me from watching the conference that the demos which were real-time were stated as such, and the handling of controllers and so-forth was made obvious so as to prove the point. Everything else was clearly running off video and probably pre-rendered (as opposed to recorded). It was said that these were visions of what the game companies thought they could produce on the platform. There are probably a variety of different ways in which companies approached that.

Some are no-doubt rendered entirely in art-packages, using features which may or may not be possible to emulate in hardware at decent speed. Some are probably prototypes running on PC, perhaps in real-time, perhaps at a slower frame-rate and frame-grabbed. Perhaps a few are running on prototype hardware already but not fast enough or reliably enough to show live. All just represent the aspirations of development teams who have been given specifications of a bit of hardware and asked what they could do with it. And they were presented just so.

If KZ2 had been realtime, you can expect that they would have shouted about it. Instead it was a segment of video in a sequence to show what some popular games might look like in their next-gen incarnations. Does this mean we'll never anything that good on hardware? No. It simply means that at this stage they haven't yet acheived it, but are working towards it.

It was clear to me from the specifications listed and the tech-demos running on (presumably unfinished) hardware, that Sony are well on the road to delivering a very powerful console. Some of of the numbers are no-doubt creatively arrived at, but no more so than for their competitors.

Mostly what they've done so far is to make public their *intentions*. Sometimes they might suggest something which is beyond what they will finally deliver. I don't think that the inability to accurately predict the future consitutes lying, I think it's just an unfortunate tendancy to want to disclose intended features before they're quite ready, which sometimes isn't going to pan out how they expect. To be fair I think Sony are probably *less* guilty of this than some other people I could mention.

They set lofty goals, they try very very hard to mee them, and they generally only go public when they're pretty sure what they're going to be able to actually build. On both PS2 and PSP they actually upped the spec before release.

Any you can't criticise a company for hype either. It was a PR conference to promote a new product they have coming out, which faces stiff competition from an already announced competitor. Of course they're going to hype it up a bit. If you don't understand the concepts of marketing then you really aren't going to survive in the modern world... also, I have this bridge for sale that might interest you...

In short, if you think concept art directly translates to final product, you might be a little naive. But if you think a tech-demo running on actual hardware in some way constitutes a lie... then you're an idiot.

That's a great read. However I think since the advent of crates in games, I have been seeing more in real life 8|

yeh, i work in a microbiological and chemistry lab, and theres heaps of useless crates lying aorund

Do you ever feel the urge to smash them for ammo though? :p

Hehe I do, whenever I see wooden crates I seriously get the urge to whip out a crowbar :)

The crates I usually see are made of treated pine, not 2mm thick balsa wood!

Quote:
Patents. Did you know there's a patent held by some microscopic software company on spherical camera controls in realtime 3D, and they're starting to level lawsuits against EVERYONE? Did you ever wonder what happened to force feedback, controllers that push your hands around so you can feel the action in the game as well as see it (we're talking real force feedback, not controllers that vibrate like pagers)? Somebody has a patent, that's what. Did you know you can't have mini-games during a loading screen because of patent law?

And folks, thats only the tip of the iceberg for patent-related stupidity.

Damn good post/link Aravi.

alot of what he/she says makes massive sense.

I totally understand his gripe about NFL 2005. Im so sick of hearing the same old witty comments. In fact they are so ingrained into my mind that i usually finish the line before the PS2 does.

Dont get me wrong, John Madden is still a god. (kind of like John Safran)
But come on at least offer say 30+ different one liners. Its totally possible now, let alone with the next gen consoles on the way.

He makes heaps of awesome points. Ruin, what he's saying about different game concepts is 100% true. I remember playing heaps of old sim games like transport tycoon, alter ego, life in the fast lane and heaps of others. Pizza tycoon, theme park world (there was a newer version too i think), theme hospital, just to name a few. You don't really see many games like those coming out anymore because the whole production process is becoming bigger, shinier and more expensive so companies don't wanna take chances on anything. I think theres a new sim game coming out soon that was @ E3 called spores or something? SimLife but bigger and better or something like that. Sounds cool. Anyway I haven't really made much of a coherent point here, but I just think that theres more the gaming world can offer than the same-old FPS games over and over with shinier graphics.

I didn't say he wasn't right about that. I agree with him, just as many major people in the industry too and that's the thing, it's not necessarily the developer's fault. Basically he's whining about it as if some magical person in the sky is going to read it and go 'He's right! Let's fix this' but not suggesting any ways around it.

And yes, the game's called Spore and it's gonna be uber cool :D There's a link somewhere around the net with Will Wright's 1 hour long GDC presentation of it. You start as a microscopic organism swimming through a 2d world, eating stuff until you can evolve into a 3d creature and then you can evolve all the way up to an entire civilisation and fly your UFO to other planets in the galaxy. Those planets can have other species created by other people that you can play with like making contact or blowing them up etc. Nearly everything is procedurally created. You can design your own creature with a HUGE amount of possibilities and the movements and attributes of the creature are calculated based on this design. Because of this the creature file can be like 1kb big so you can upload your creatures to a huge online database and download thousands upon thousands of other people's creatures to play with.

EDIT: here's the presentation. You can use bugmenot.com to get in.

Wow I think that guy was saying what every gamer has been thinking... mad props and awesome read!

dude, this thread is 2 years old. stop necroposting :/

haha necroposting, i like it

Not totally a bad thing though, means he's reading through all our old stuff.