Dice
Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
This came back to my mind because of X, but really it applies to SO MANY games. Basically, I see technology advancing so far that the visual depiction is at odds with what happens in gameplay, and the better graphics get, the greater this chasm becomes. It happens in a few different ways...
Wounds: Does it bother you that we're still often just attacking enemies that act completely unharmed until they simply keel over? We seem to have the concept of the headshot down, but beyond that you're lucky to get much else. Shooters do try to seem to at least have human enemies act wounded for 5 seconds before they go back to 100% mode, but for things like X there is pretty much nothing. You have this massive creature and you're shooting it and slashing at it and there is no signs of damage either visual or behavioral until it just dies.
Some are trying to move things forward significantly. Dead Space and Binary Domain especially, but other than them, I just don't see much progress in this. Games are actually working towards ways of gimping the player when they get hurt at a faster rate than figuring out how to affect the enemies in a similar way. Bottom line for me is that if I shoot a huge beast with a rocket launcher, a chunk of that beast should be gone. Anything less pulls me out of the experience because the visuals (image and movement) are too real anymore.
Destructible environments: This seems to be getting more attention, but it's still incredibly limited. After playing Red Faction: Guerrilla I was hoping to see the idea take off with middleware helping developers do this more often and easily, but it just didn't take off. Battlefield now seems to be moving forward, but I don't see much else happening.
Town scale: There seem to be valid attempts to move this forward, but it's fairly slow. Just Cause 2 and Far Cry are getting the "vast jungle area with spots of villages" thing down, and GTA and such are developing the city concept. On the other hand, you have stuff like Skyrim where you are supposed to feel like the hero of a nation but the supposedly grand cities of the land are filled with maybe 30 people. To me they come off like a joke because it's not like you're playing a Final Fantasy on SNES anymore. Mass Effect at least tried to convey larger metros while trapping you in a small corner of them.
AI: This gets more complicated since you're messing with player expectations and gameplay focus and such, but AI doesn't only have to mean combat tactics. Advanced AI could be used to create entirely new genres. I play something like L.A. Noire and while the conversation system is interesting, it's still just taking a linear path through the branching options. Maybe not with this particular game, but in others we could have really dynamic personalities and work out a new kind of game entirely. Antichamber makes me think we could give environments AI somehow...
The problem: As the title of the thread implies, I think the main problem with these is the huge investment of graphics development. We are constantly trying to push that bar forward, and it's incredibly expensive to do so. Anything you expand would have to be visually rendered at a high quality. But I wouldn't mind falling back to say, Left 4 Dead 1 visuals if that's the investment tradeoff that would be required to get these other gameplay dynamics in working order.
Ultimately, that kind of decision is what it's going to take. There are projects with "older" graphics on Wii and such, but the Wii has the old hardware limitations on gameplay as well. The only way to move all this forward is to have high hardware resources but then choose to use them for gameplay advancement rather than pushing the graphical detail bar higher. How long will we go before we finally decide that the image is pretty enough and the rest needs to catch up?
Wounds: Does it bother you that we're still often just attacking enemies that act completely unharmed until they simply keel over? We seem to have the concept of the headshot down, but beyond that you're lucky to get much else. Shooters do try to seem to at least have human enemies act wounded for 5 seconds before they go back to 100% mode, but for things like X there is pretty much nothing. You have this massive creature and you're shooting it and slashing at it and there is no signs of damage either visual or behavioral until it just dies.
Some are trying to move things forward significantly. Dead Space and Binary Domain especially, but other than them, I just don't see much progress in this. Games are actually working towards ways of gimping the player when they get hurt at a faster rate than figuring out how to affect the enemies in a similar way. Bottom line for me is that if I shoot a huge beast with a rocket launcher, a chunk of that beast should be gone. Anything less pulls me out of the experience because the visuals (image and movement) are too real anymore.
Destructible environments: This seems to be getting more attention, but it's still incredibly limited. After playing Red Faction: Guerrilla I was hoping to see the idea take off with middleware helping developers do this more often and easily, but it just didn't take off. Battlefield now seems to be moving forward, but I don't see much else happening.
Town scale: There seem to be valid attempts to move this forward, but it's fairly slow. Just Cause 2 and Far Cry are getting the "vast jungle area with spots of villages" thing down, and GTA and such are developing the city concept. On the other hand, you have stuff like Skyrim where you are supposed to feel like the hero of a nation but the supposedly grand cities of the land are filled with maybe 30 people. To me they come off like a joke because it's not like you're playing a Final Fantasy on SNES anymore. Mass Effect at least tried to convey larger metros while trapping you in a small corner of them.
AI: This gets more complicated since you're messing with player expectations and gameplay focus and such, but AI doesn't only have to mean combat tactics. Advanced AI could be used to create entirely new genres. I play something like L.A. Noire and while the conversation system is interesting, it's still just taking a linear path through the branching options. Maybe not with this particular game, but in others we could have really dynamic personalities and work out a new kind of game entirely. Antichamber makes me think we could give environments AI somehow...
The problem: As the title of the thread implies, I think the main problem with these is the huge investment of graphics development. We are constantly trying to push that bar forward, and it's incredibly expensive to do so. Anything you expand would have to be visually rendered at a high quality. But I wouldn't mind falling back to say, Left 4 Dead 1 visuals if that's the investment tradeoff that would be required to get these other gameplay dynamics in working order.
Ultimately, that kind of decision is what it's going to take. There are projects with "older" graphics on Wii and such, but the Wii has the old hardware limitations on gameplay as well. The only way to move all this forward is to have high hardware resources but then choose to use them for gameplay advancement rather than pushing the graphical detail bar higher. How long will we go before we finally decide that the image is pretty enough and the rest needs to catch up?
