Hyakunin Isshu said:
I?m just not very qualified to argue on the subject?
1 Red Faction:
While I must admit that would be cool. How necessary is it? In limited games it may certainly be a plus, but imagine if most games had it. What about the balancing and either permanent damage to the game world, or the immersion breaking of buildings respawning. Especially in a sandbox game you may have players destroying the entire world before they even begin.
If your argument is about choice rather than linearity in particular, such a system is not required to give you a choice. It is a development decision whether to give the player a choice or not.
While you request I not provide any examples of games that already do it, I don?t see why I should heed it, unless you simply don?t want evidence against you. What about Bad Company? I only played the demo myself, but I was under the impression that its environments were touted as highly destructive. Those environments really didn?t make gameplay less linear, I hardly even noticed them through the course of play.
I just noticed that, and most of your examples, aren?t PC only games. So nothing you say actually needs newer tech.
2 Real Water:
I assume not drowning in Bioshock was a design choice, it would not require a better system to do. In other games I think it tends to be a design choice to not work hard on water too, especially since it tends to just be used for boundaries.
You can move rivers in the games where is applies. In Minecraft you can, as well as From Dust. The majority of games wouldn?t gain much from this mechanic. Unless it is a game where you do have godly power or a building game (both of which can clearly already be done with this mechanic), this wouldn?t really be helpful. Once again, if the sandbox is too free, players will entirely screw up the game. For those that WANT that ability, we have things like god simulators.
3 Body Physics:
It does work already, look at GTAIV. The reason it isn?t in all games is because GTAIV development was DAMN expensive. While it was good with realism, many people, myself included, found Saints Row 2 a much better game because it was FUN.
4 Real Pixels:
They are pixels, they are never real. No matter how cool it looks when it goes boom, those shapes are always decided. It may be 5,000,000 polygons programed to break apart based on highly complex strings of impact data, but they are still polygons.
Once again though, really cool. I would like this.
5 Giant Physics:
Well in most sandbox games you can fight anywhere, so you must specifically mean giants? Or do you mean the entire city is destructible? If you want to break the whole city, refer to #1. I have thought to myself how cool it would be if I could make skyscrapers tumble, then the next day I return to see scaffolding set up, and an in game week later a full building (which was slowly build as I roamed the town), but I just don?t really see much game play that it would add. Other than being able to get a bit crazier when you want to go on rampages
6 Plants:
They would still have to grow in stages (which would be based more on effort of the developers than processing power). Either that or hog so much processing power that the entire rest of the game went to shit. Not many people want a farm simulator? At least not something that is only a farm simulator due to processing requirements.
7 FPS/RTS:
I don?t know how many players want to switch seamlessly between the two genres. Other than that most RTS games require constant attention and micromanaging (at least unless you are on ?easy noob? level), even the so called ?seemless? switching would be kind of out of place. Even the design of such a game would break immersion. You have to constantly switch between the two or lose? If you don?t have to constantly switch between the two, it?s not really a question of power so much as is the dev team willing to develop two games, each inferior to any of their counterparts.
Many of your requests are more for graphical enhancement than actual gameplay improvement. Even those which aren?t tend to be choices of ?How much money are we willing to spend on a game that might go nowhere??
Most of them also already exist, as you have pointed out yourself. The thing is, you have to justify the cost to all of the consumers of buying another console, you have to justify the cost of developing that console, the cost for developers of trying to create games that actually take advantage of the new hardware.
Even PC gamers have trouble with running high quality games. PC gaming is supposedly affordable as platforms as long as you are willing to turn the graphics way down. If you want good graphics, you need to spend far more, much more than most console gamer?s price range. Now add all of the hundreds or thousands of extra calculations you want. Can your requests even be done (to the extent you desire) on current computers without spending $2,000? Can some of them even be done? And what about mixing a few of them into the same game.
All this expense must be considered while still looking at the current generation. Developers are just finding out how to best utilize the consoles, this always happens, and with the step up in price, you may get a step up in graphics, but the real innovation tends to be by the small guys.
Innovation doesn?t usually come from the top. When your games cost tens of millions to produce (hundreds of millions with your ideas taken to the next level), you don?t take win-big-or-fall-hard risks, you play it safe with what you know people like. The innovation happens lower down the chain, where losses are minimal if it fails.
Finally, I must admit I would like to see most of that in games, but I am happy with games as they are. Those small improvements can already be implemented without a new generation. Perhaps not to the degree you want, but I don?t want to fork over $500 for a new console (more if you want it to be able to do all of that well).
The increase in development costs may mean there are some crazy good games, but it would also mean there would be far fewer titles to choose from, with far longer development times.
Also take into account that if we wait three more years for the next generation rather than one, we will have better, cheaper machines that can do more of what you want.
TL;DR: I probably contradicted myself a few times in that, and for the most part, I like the ideas. I just don't feel the costs of a new generation are necessary to move closer to them, and question whether they could be done in the first place without the new generation being beyond the price range of the majority.
