Question pertaining to the next gen consoles

lord.jeff

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Oct 27, 2010
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There where several features in the current gen consoles that weren't integrated in the past: online play, motion controls, downloadable content, 3D, and I was wondering what other innovations people would like to see on the next Gen consoles? I would personally would like to see microphones added into the controllers or a part of the console somehow by default, just so online multiplayer is easier.

Please don't turn this into a bashing tread with comments like "Anything but motion controls" or similar types of statements against any console or features.
 
Aug 21, 2010
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I'd like to see games go back to cartridges. Seriously. With 16 GB flash cards costing around £15 now, it could be more expensive, yes, but just think of how beautiful the minimal loading times would be.
 

DustyDrB

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Jan 19, 2010
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Don't care about 3D, don't care much about online capabilities. Graphics are good enough as they are, so I really don't care if they ever improve there. I still say motion controls are great when done well. Devs are going to have to step up their game in that regard sooner or later. But I can still take it or leave it as a whole.

All I want is whatever hardware they need to allow games to have better (way better) AI.
 
Apr 28, 2008
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I don't really want a new generation. We're still learning to do awesome things with current hardware. Plus, since game budgets seem to be rising a lot, a new console would just make that problem worse.

I suppose an innovation would be to make the games cost less. Both to make, and buy. But I doubt that'd happen.
 

Fayathon

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Nov 18, 2009
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Durananrananrananran said:
I'd like to see games go back to cartridges. Seriously. With 16 GB flash cards costing around £15 now, it could be more expensive, yes, but just think of how beautiful the minimal loading times would be.
Me and my friends have been wanting this for a long ass time. Games with no loading times would be sweet as hell, that and if we go to cartridges we won't have to install shit on our consoles any more. Seriously, if I want to install my games that's what my PC is for, consoles should be boot and play in relation to gaming, nothing more.
 

CrystalShadow

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Apr 11, 2009
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Durananrananrananran said:
I'd like to see games go back to cartridges. Seriously. With 16 GB flash cards costing around £15 now, it could be more expensive, yes, but just think of how beautiful the minimal loading times would be.
I know how you feel, but £15 is a fortune.

Cartridges were abandoned for 2 reasons: Small capacity. (now not such a huge issue), and incredibly expensive compared to the alternative.

If they were mass-produced ROM flash memory, I suspect the price could be a bit lower than £15, but contrast this to the cost of mass-producing a DVD/Blu-ray disk, which is about £0.10 a disk, and you can see where the reluctance comes from.

For cartridge games, the cost of the cartridge was typically $20-30 per cartridge for games being sold at about $60

That's 30-50% of the cost of the game.
By contrast, when they shifted to CD's, the cost of a CD was about $0.10-0.20 which isn't even 1/100th the cost of the game.

Considering they didn't change the prices, you can see where that led...


Still, you are right though. It would be great to go back to near zero loading times.
 

DeadlyYellow

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Irridium said:
I don't really want a new generation. We're still learning to do awesome things with current hardware. Plus, since game budgets seem to be rising a lot, a new console would just make that problem worse.

I suppose an innovation would be to make the games cost less. Both to make, and buy. But I doubt that'd happen.
A man after my own heart.

Indeed, I'd like to see lower prices. But since companies know that people will cough up the dough for their current asking price, I doubt we'll see a drop anytime soon. But who knows. Maybe Activision will decide people need to pay $100+ for their next Call of Duty game (subscription services notwithstanding) and raise the standard price for all new games again.
 

viranimus

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Nov 20, 2009
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Im not keen on the mic idea. I think its been established that audio communications for games are in the fad/niche area.

One thing I would like to see is a more streamlined profile/save docking capability that makes it much easier to migrate from one console to another. Its sad I know we have somehow lost the practicality of cartridge saves and memory cards. So something that effectively restores that would be nice.

Also file hosting services would be solid use of cloud computing networking. Playing a game via network connectivity might not make sense, but accessing your recorded videos, pics, stored music, save files from anywhere you can access the same brand console seems like it could be a beneficial concept.
 

Ciaran Lunt

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Mar 25, 2010
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3d isn't practical and only sony would even consider encouraging it at all as they have the 3d telly market majority share (just) I don't think generations will be defined like they used to wii u comes out in 2012 and they're isn't going to be any new competitors whatsoever so I don't know
 

Juk3n

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Aug 14, 2010
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Wants for next Gen consoles;

XboX720 team should discover 'lithium ion' and sever their contract with Duracell or Energizer or w/e company they have a deal with so they don't make my controller require fricking BATTERIES. This is an area where PS3 has them beat fo'shure.

A dedicated Screenshot button located somewhere on the controller, and a folder all the shots get sent to on the menu screen so they can be transferred to mem'sticks and such.

Built in 720p screen capture recording upto say 10 mins of footage, perfect for a round of TDM. Though this is unlikely it'd rock my socks off and make the system that implemented it a garunteed first day buy.
 

Maxtro

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Feb 13, 2011
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Flash cartridges would be great. With enough volume the cost will go down. One thing I really hated is that with new generations loading times actually seemed to get longer rather than shorter. It would also eliminate the problem of smudging or scratching disks.

The next innovation I'm waiting for is VR. It's probably two generations away.
 

Pingieking

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Durananrananrananran said:
I'd like to see games go back to cartridges. Seriously. With 16 GB flash cards costing around £15 now, it could be more expensive, yes, but just think of how beautiful the minimal loading times would be.
They are doing that with the PSVita. It uses a Flash based memory-stick style device for the games.

Would these things actually make games load faster? Does flash memory read that much faster than DVDs?
 

lord.jeff

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Oct 27, 2010
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CrystalShadow said:
Durananrananrananran said:
I'd like to see games go back to cartridges. Seriously. With 16 GB flash cards costing around £15 now, it could be more expensive, yes, but just think of how beautiful the minimal loading times would be.
I know how you feel, but £15 is a fortune.

Cartridges were abandoned for 2 reasons: Small capacity. (now not such a huge issue), and incredibly expensive compared to the alternative.

If they were mass-produced ROM flash memory, I suspect the price could be a bit lower than £15, but contrast this to the cost of mass-producing a DVD/Blu-ray disk, which is about £0.10 a disk, and you can see where the reluctance comes from.

For cartridge games, the cost of the cartridge was typically $20-30 per cartridge for games being sold at about $60

That's 30-50% of the cost of the game.
By contrast, when they shifted to CD's, the cost of a CD was about $0.10-0.20 which isn't even 1/100th the cost of the game.

Considering they didn't change the prices, you can see where that led...


Still, you are right though. It would be great to go back to near zero loading times.
Money would be saved on the pirating protection thou, and the flash drives and SD cards are cheaper to produce then the old cartridges were, overall the cartridges would cost more but not nearly to the extent your stating.
 

CrystalShadow

don't upset the insane catgirl
Apr 11, 2009
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lord.jeff said:
CrystalShadow said:
Durananrananrananran said:
I'd like to see games go back to cartridges. Seriously. With 16 GB flash cards costing around £15 now, it could be more expensive, yes, but just think of how beautiful the minimal loading times would be.
I know how you feel, but £15 is a fortune.

Cartridges were abandoned for 2 reasons: Small capacity. (now not such a huge issue), and incredibly expensive compared to the alternative.

If they were mass-produced ROM flash memory, I suspect the price could be a bit lower than £15, but contrast this to the cost of mass-producing a DVD/Blu-ray disk, which is about £0.10 a disk, and you can see where the reluctance comes from.

For cartridge games, the cost of the cartridge was typically $20-30 per cartridge for games being sold at about $60

That's 30-50% of the cost of the game.
By contrast, when they shifted to CD's, the cost of a CD was about $0.10-0.20 which isn't even 1/100th the cost of the game.

Considering they didn't change the prices, you can see where that led...


Still, you are right though. It would be great to go back to near zero loading times.
Money would be saved on the pirating protection thou, and the flash drives and SD cards are cheaper to produce then the old cartridges were, overall the cartridges would cost more but not nearly to the extent your stating.
If the Nintendo DS is any indication, I wouldn't put too much faith in cartridges being all that useful for piracy protection.

Although... To be fair, all the various ways of pirating DS games exploit other features of the handheld.

On the original DS, the GBA slot was used to allow games stored on SD cards to be played.

The DSi removed the GBA vulnerability, but made it redundant by including an actual SD card reader.

Flash memory is just a storage medium, so yes it'd probably be quite a bit cheaper. But how much cheaper isn't so clear. Comparing the cost of a thumb drive, memory cards, SSD hard drives, and DVD's, it's quite obvious the relative cost is huge. For a given capacity, flash memory seems to sell at about 100 times the cost. That's not trivial.

Cartridges obviously are even more expensive than that, although they had some amusing features due to how the interface was designed. (SDIO ports suggests to some extent flash memory readers can share some of these abilities.)

Over time, I've seen cartridge based game systems contain quite a few odd features.

The game boy had cartridges containing gyroscopes, a digital camera, a light sensor... Among commercial piracy related developments they've been adapted to read SD cards and compact-flash.
In homebrew development I've seen a digital oscilloscope, and an interface to connect a standard 3.5" HDD (To a game boy advance - Complete with a custom version of DOS)

Going back to the SNES, the was the GBSNES, which allowed an Snes to play game boy games. (by plugging them into an adapter that plugged into the cartridge slot)

The Super-FX chip that made starfox possible was perhaps a very early example of a 3d graphics chip...
And it was part of the game cartridge, NOT the console.

Similarly, Megaman X-2 and X-3 had vector graphics processing chips which made graphical effects possible that the SNES itself couldn't cope with.

For that matter, the Sega-32x took that to it's logical extreme and upgraded the mega drive/genesis, turning it into a 32 bit system by creating a 'cartridge' with basically what amounts to entirely new console in it.


Cartridges really were quite an impressive concept when you think about it. Even though it looks like a storage device, in reality it has more in common with a PC expansion card that just happens to have a read-only storage device built onto it.

Still, with all that, I don't know what the relative cost of a flash-memory based game would be compared to a CD (or newest equivalent) based game...
That a return to flash memory doesn't seem to be a direction anyone is taking suggests there must be some kind of reason, but who knows?

Nintendo was the one company that didn't like CD's, and they got burned pretty badly for insisting the N64 used cartridges...

Would anyone take the risk? It'd be interesting to see it...