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What would you like the "Next Gen" to offer games?

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    What would you like the "Next Gen" to offer games?

    The current gen has as usual improved the visuals and allowed a few scenarios that weren't possibly due to technological constraints, services like LIVE have also expanded upon gaming as a social experience , offering us more and more ways to connect to other people around the world

    The Wii has brought us a new way of interfacing with our games, with it's interesting input devices.

    What else could be made better?
    Do you feel any aspects of games design is overlooked?
    What things do you believe would improve games?

    I'd personally like to see more care and attention put into the animation within games, we are at a stage where we don't need to rely so heavily upon the hand animation. There are ways of producing animation routines which are a lot more flexible , but very few games choose to use this despite the obvious improvement it makes.
    If you performed the same movement 10 times in a row, every single on of those motions would be slightly different, I want games have the facility yet to make minor adjustments to repeated animations. This would certainly lead to a more natural looking motion and would stop the robotic appearance that for instance a character in an RPG always has when you run.
    Halo 3 uses a small amount of this for the breathing animation of the Spartan characters, which is a step in the right direction, but I want more of it dammit.
    These techniques can be used to at the very least to blend the hand animations together.
    Natural Motion and several other Physics software providers such as Havoc offer middle ware that allow for things similar to this, so it isn't exactly science fiction.

    More procedural animation please, I can't wait to see the day when an enemy character dives or rolls out of the way, not because it has a pre determined rolling animation, but because it knows how to work it's entire body and how to move it in the most efficient way.
    That brings me nicely onto AI, I want to see more improvement in AI, outside of FPS games nothing ever seems to change. There must be some more interesting uses for it other than squad AI.

    Try and keep this discussion nice and positive, use your imagination to offer up some genuine improvements that the next generation hardware can make possible.
    Last edited by EvilBoris; 07-09-2007, 16:09.

    #2
    Less HUD clutter. Fight Night was revolutionary and Killzone 2 seems to be following in that respect.

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      #3
      For me, next gen has always been about a more immersive experience. Like in Gears when your in that forest at night, and it's raining. Or that first step into Rapture.

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        #4
        But what things would make games more immersive for you?

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          #5
          The removal of cut-scenes. If a character wants to talk to me in a game they can call me over and I can stand and listen, there is no need for the game to switch into a cut-scene. It is stuff like that that pulls you out of the game-world and actually makes it less cinematic, which is clearly not what developers are aiming for.

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            #6
            More consistency in the realism of environments. I'd rather I wasn't able to break anything at all instead of just some predetermined things, e.g. searchlights but not lights in general.

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              #7
              Originally posted by EvilBoris View Post
              But what things would make games more immersive for you?
              Things that kill a game?s immersion for me, off the top of my head?

              ? stupid inventory systems that mean you can carry far more than your body weight
              ? any complex inventory management system (especially those that rely on repositioning things) ?in real life you?d put it all in a simple bag
              ? enemies disappearing when killed
              ? enemies leaving items that are completely unrelated to them (such as odd ammo) when they die
              ? odd weapon upgrader or seller in convenient places through the game
              ? controls that don?t enable me to side step and turn at the same time (in a first or third person game)

              All of the above are gaming clich?s of days gone by.

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                #8
                A crackdown or GTA game where I could break down any door, or get into any building, instead of them mostly being non-playing areas.

                Perhaps the next gen could do that without having to keep the playing area small.

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by Soi View Post
                  Things that kill a game’s immersion for me, off the top of my head…

                  ? stupid inventory systems that mean you can carry far more than your body weight
                  ? any complex inventory management system (especially those that rely on repositioning things) –in real life you’d put it all in a simple bag
                  ? enemies disappearing when killed
                  ? enemies leaving items that are completely unrelated to them (such as odd ammo) when they die
                  ? odd weapon upgrader or seller in convenient places through the game
                  ? controls that don’t enable me to side step and turn at the same time (in a first or third person game)

                  All of the above are gaming clich?s of days gone by.
                  I wonder what game your talking about?

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                    #10
                    I'm impressed that it took only 5 minutes for someone to spot!

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                      #11
                      Get to cover Soi! Lynch mob!
                      Quick tell them you are talking about the PC version, you are allowed to slag that one off!

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                        #12
                        OK a few quick ones of the top of my head

                        Firstly I second this
                        Originally posted by Profit View Post
                        Less HUD clutter. Fight Night was revolutionary and Killzone 2 seems to be following in that respect.
                        There's no excuse for game not to use the increased visual clarity to do away with health, ammo etc.

                        Visually I want to see games that couldn't of been created in the last generation. I'm bored the emphesis on high polygon charater models and pretty corridors, even with a game such as Bioshock, while fantastic, could easily of been developed for the last generation all be it in slightly uglier form. I want my caves in RPGs to be be the epic caverns not identikit corridors and my battles to feature hundreds maybe thousands of characters not barely reaching double figures.

                        Lastly no more disembodied guns or hands in FPSs. Give me a body and most of all some legs and feet.

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                          #13
                          More 'serious', weighty themes, like in Bioshock. I certainly wouldn't like to see all games making crass, failed attempts at handling 'issues', but doing so can add a lot of depth and even prompt players to think philosophically about things they may never have considered before.

                          Taking Bioshock as an example, most people in the West take it for granted that extreme capitalism and individualism are inherently good, but the game challenges us to examine that belief by taking it to an extreme conclusion.

                          I think it would also help if more games tried to tie the experience of playing the game into the emotional content within the story. A good example of what I mean is Shadow of the Colossus, which forces the player to experience the same lonliness, guilt and uncertainty as the protagonist character. That's not just playing a game, it's a game playing you.

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by Soi View Post
                            I'm impressed that it took only 5 minutes for someone to spot!
                            It's funny though because it's things like that which don't bother me. I don't mind abandoning common sense and realism (of that kind) if it ultimately makes the game experience itself more fun. One of the cool things about games as a medium is that it doesn't have to obey reality.

                            Then again, I am one who advocates the return of the magic chests of old Resi :P

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                              #15
                              You have to bear in mind that a lot of the incongruent things about Resi 4 are deliberate design choices. It's supposed to play like a videogame, rather than a movie-like experience, or else why would they put in such credibility-stretching features as the merchant and his shooting galleries?

                              One thing I do believe all next gen games should have though - REAL TIME WEAPON CHANGE!!!1!1!11

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