That's Innovation!

[GodKlown]

I really enjoyed this article, but it made me only think of independent developers who may not use the most modern of graphics, but tweak play elements. Frankly, as long as things look fairly close to what they are supposed to be, such as a gun not look like a book, then that's about as detailed as I need them to be.
I don't know about anyone else, but aren't we all a little tired of having to play musical chairs with our hardware every 6-12 months to keep up with games? I would really like to see a firm graphics system that is 99% bug-free instead of a new version of light shading.

 

[Outright Villainy]

I don't know about anyone else, but aren't we all a little tired of having to play musical chairs with our hardware every 6-12 months to keep up with games? I would really like to see a firm graphics system that is 99% bug-free instead of a new version of light shading.

I'm with you, I think If games looked as good as half life 2 I'd be happy, and that was nearly 6 years ago. I really think it's pushing in the wrong direction, More dynamic worlds are indeed the way to go. Last game I played that really interested me was Fallout 3 actually, and that's a far cry from all the pretty games going around. It's almost ugly in parts, but the focus on broader scope and interaction With vast amounts of people and events wowed me no end.

 

[Vinticore]

Sounds interesting if nothing else, fingers crossed

 

[Aurora219]

I have to say I'm wholeheartedly agreeing with you on this front. Some of the most fun I've had includes Crysis's destructible buildings, simply for the sheer immersion factor.

But one game stands out over most any other for me - Company of Heroes. It's an RTS, yes, and it's not exactly nose-to-wall level, but it's graphical representation combined with the sheer ability to destroy everything means that the battlefield is constantly shifting, and I like being able to use the craters in the ground or rubble from the buildings you've battered as cover.

This innovation must persist!

 

[Lerxst]

I don't know about anyone else, but aren't we all a little tired of having to play musical chairs with our hardware every 6-12 months to keep up with games? I would really like to see a firm graphics system that is 99% bug-free instead of a new version of light shading.

I'm with you, I think If games looked as good as half life 2 I'd be happy, and that was nearly 6 years ago. I really think it's pushing in the wrong direction, More dynamic worlds are indeed the way to go. Last game I played that really interested me was Fallout 3 actually, and that's a far cry from all the pretty games going around. It's almost ugly in parts, but the focus on broader scope and interaction With vast amounts of people and events wowed me no end.

I'd be happy with Battlefield 2 graphics for every future game being released. I've gotten to the point where I don't bother upgrading my rig for a specific game. 9 times out of 10 the $400 investment won't be worth it since those 3 year old games are still taking up most of the hard drive space... and my free time

 

[copycatalyst]

Sorry Mr Young, but you haven't sold me on anything here. Seems like you're saying a dynamic game world has until recently been untapped, and until now the focus has just been on making things prettier. But is Half-Life 1 not more dynamic than Quake? It still used an engine that needed to compile the map geometry and run optimizations based on what would be visible at any moment, but that doesn't altogether preclude having a dynamic environment. Going back further, Duke Nukem 3D was more dynamic than, say, Descent. And with moving lifts, Doom was more dynamic than Wolf. Seems to me this trend has existed since the beginning of 3D.

Also, one of the examples of destructible environments you mention is really just about making things prettier anyhow. Don't get me wrong, I love the cinematic physics that are on display in Episode 2, but the finale would play exactly the same if they did an old-fashioned obscured-by-explosion-sprite model switcharoo. Of course, that wouldn't be as cool. So making things prettier actually does matter for player experience, too.

 

[Fearzone]

Interesting example you chose for a discussion of a gaming innovation other than graphics. I'm curious how fighting on top of a moving train improves the gameplay? Furthermore, the top-of-a-moving-train sequence reminded me of the one in Killzone 2.

 

[chaostheory]

Interesting example you chose for a discussion of a gaming innovation other than graphics. I'm curious how fighting on top of a moving train improves the gameplay? Furthermore, the top-of-a-moving-train sequence reminded me of the one in Killzone 2.

He was talking about how this game introduced fully traversable set pieces. Most games would reduce many of the sequences in Uncharted 2 to cut scenes or quick time events. The train is notable as being the largest of these interactive set pieces, so it gets a lot of attention, but the tech that went into that is the same tech that allowed you to maintain full control during the trucks sequence and the collapsing building sequence, neither of which would have been possible without the tech they developed.

 

[EBass]

But then again, we had Syndicate having fully destructible Goddam cities back in the early 90s.

The main challenge isn't engine or processing power though (Or at least it isn't always now, and certainly won't be by the next gen), its AI. We still have enough problems making AI react believeably when they know where all the cover and navigatable objects are and will be. How the hell are we going to get them to react to an enviroment that constantly shifts. If you look at the AI of nearly all games they only use immoveable or partyly immoveable objects as cover (by partly immoveable I mean objects which are destroyed or moved in Stages) they usually just ignore objects which are pushed around the world entirely by the physics engine.

 

[mooseodeath]

destructive access in games is a problem not a future. level design becomes a huge PITA, how do you control progression if someone can blow the bricks off the locked door? how do you stop the player driving a truck through your expertly setup chokepoint because trhe barriers could never be sufficient.

you end up with the original red factions problem, the first few missions feature all the destructive power the gamer wants then it gets reigned in hard with indestructible walls again. anyone who's played red faction and red faction geurilla will probably agree with me that the linear fps environments were more immersive than the open world ever felt.

EBass is raising another good point in that AI HATES dynamic anything. nav mesh's still get built procedurally and finetuned. later drop a truck across an edge in the navmesh and you cut off huge area's of navigation. the more dense the navmesh is the longer the AI needs to spend solving a path. so fewer points equals faster pathfinding. but it's prone to AI's getting stuck without a path because a car landed in it. more complex pathfinidng AI tends to be based on fixed world spaces.

to the people saying stop improving graphics and start focusing on the other stuff, the improvements allow for the other stuff. dx11 has added tesselation on the hardware, this sounds like wank to most people, but it allows the artists to make a 4,000 triangle character that when close up has as much physical detail as the 4 million triangle mesh it was extracted from. not just normalmap (which is used to simulate lighting recieved on a surface to APPEAR more detailled) but actual 3d bumps. to put this in perspective, marcus fenix is about 10,000 triangles. so you can fit 2.5 of him into memory for the same performance cost. these changes your opposing actually enable what your asking for. afterall epic hasn't stopped making perfromance updates to unreal3 so the next gears will play smoother and faster than the first did.

but back on topic, breaking buildings needs a fully dynamic game engine. physics need to be fast as the game will suddenly spawn a few hundred extra physical models when a grenade goes off. the renderer needs to be fast or the models need to be simple as even adding 100 cubes is a big performance hit. 1200 triangles is not big but 100 items instanced is. lightmaps are out on dynamic gameworlds you need to switch to dynmaic lighting. those are expensive. forward renderes struggle with more than 8 and defferred renderes struggle with transparency. you'll have seen this in many games as checquered patterns on "see through stuff" it's pretty obvious on the x360 saints row 2 and the last few halo games. you can get around the stipling by rendering in another pass but you can't have lit tranparent objects if you do that.

so in closing. the graphics engines outthere just are not up to fully dynamic worlds yet. AI is still where it was for quake. and to run engines that can hack full dynamic worlds your looking at reduced story telling capacity as players will just steamroll the game. when the next wave of consoles hit expect dynaimc worlds to be a focus as the median hardware in the market can handle the load. only high end pc's can really do it at todays graphical standard.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

I know XCOM Apocalypse was the mutant child chained in the basement as far as most fans were concerned, but the fully destructible environments really added to that game. And it made grenades fun as hell.

Aliens were hiding in a conference room waiting to ambush you, so you had one guy blow a hole in the wall and your other guy toss some grenades in while avoiding the line of fire.

 

[Skratt]

I'm still angry about the Pepsi Machine physics debacle that Bionic Command had. Pepsi was the big advertiser in a game that was all about wrecking havoc, but those damn Pepsi machines contained Anti-matter that invalidated your ability to smash them. I had dreams where I went on a rampage leveling everything in my path, and there stood that damn Pepsi machine, taunting...mocking...shining like a polished turd logo of omnipotence. I still don't drink Pepsi and people tend to give me extra space when they see me screaming and making lewd motions at Pepsi machines.

 

[Weaver]

Red Faction: Guerrilla brought us destructible environments.

Starfighter 3000 was the first game with fully deformable terrain, it came out in 1994.

 

[Geoffrey42]

destructive access in games is a problem not a future. level design becomes a huge PITA, how do you control progression if someone can blow the bricks off the locked door? how do you stop the player driving a truck through your expertly setup chokepoint because trhe barriers could never be sufficient.

While I certainly appreciate the technical examples you give, and I think you make an excellent point that there are still many technical hurdles to creating the wet-dream of a nearly dynamic gameworld, this first bit gave me the most pause. The issue of doors being destructible, and chokepoints being assaultable with trucks, are both things that people in real life deal with all the time. I would think that real-life solutions might offer possibilities for your game world. Alarms on doors, impassable vehicular barriers. Etc.

 

[Katana314]

This seems vastly incorrect. We get these super-realistic graphics because CPU power has advanced AND we still use those optimization strategies. Games with vast open environments apply model swaps for far-away models, and we still subdivide the world to speed up rendering, so no, we haven't started taking shortcuts; this stuff is still as complicated as ever.

Also as mooseodeath said, it doesn't matter how awesome it is. It is infinitely impractical to apply this sort of thing. It raises all sorts of technical AND design issues, all for one cheap "WHOAAAA!" from the player.

Also, HL2: Episode 2 had completely prescripted destruction. Even the exact physics of those explosions was precalculated, so it's essentially just an animation.

 

[Karacan]

It's quite the simple (and sad) equation: Graphics sell games. Gameplay doesn't.

You can print graphic screens on the box. You can send out screenshots that wow people. You can make cool-looking trailers for YouTube and Gametrailers. But all you can do about gameplay is list features that may or may not be actually included - how many games state "never seen before interactivity" or "the most thrilling gameplay you have ever played"?

Great gameplay makes people want to play the game again. AFTER they bought it - so from a business and marketing perspective, going for stunning graphics is always the better way.

 

[ReverseEngineered]

Destructible environments certainly do add a lot. Back in the days of Counterstrike, the better players memorized the sight lines and hiding places. With destructible environments, those hiding places are but a respite that may not exist 30 seconds later. It certainly adds a sense of urgency to the game.

I, too, welcome new innovation. Pretty graphics are impressive, but they make no difference to me in-game (other than often getting in the way). Bloom, smoke, camera shake: sure, it may be more "immersive", but it also gets between my sights and the thing I am supposed to be shooting. I'd rather have something that adds to the fun, like game modes, levels, new weapons and perks, or something entirely different than nobody has thought of yet. New and different is part of what makes a game worth playing. Fancy graphics just make for impressive trailers.

 

[Sol_HSA]

Old way + more polys: low risk, content pipeline is in place.

New way: tons of risks, whole new kinds of bugs to explore, possibly a whole new content pipelines to be built.

You're the guy with a big bag of money. Which would you invest in?

 

[badsectoracula]

People focus on realism, but i think that while realism is a very good thing to achieve, the games can do more than that. As long as a game is believable, it can get away with non-realism.

Beyond that, i avoid dynamic/open-ended games (i'm talking from a gameplay perspective - blowing stuff to pieces and having good interactivity with the environment, especially beyond just kicking barrels and boxes around, is something i like) because most of the time i feel lost. I prefer more linear games, although not to the point of telling me where to go. Probably a mix between linear and exploration (ie. the game is linear, but you have to find your way yourself to the next point). Obviously this needs good level design that helps the player and isn't against him (like not being a victim of Area Copypastiosis).

Talking about good levels, how about spending a little of those "bling" money to build more levels for games that aren't finished in 4-5 hours?

 

[Dhatz]

come on! how come raising water level in a tank should be any problem at all? f.e.a.r. had no trouble with it at all. and also buildings were completely destroyable in Mercenaries 2: world in flames(they fell to pieces as they were collapsing almost 9/11 style).