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What Devs Want from the Next Gen - Eurogamer

[Nintex] said:
Team Meat

The truth right there.
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After everything that's happened this gen I agree with that. Game design is what needs to be innovated, and we still definitely haven't hit a wall there.

As for the buttons thing it looks like thanfully Wii U has that covered except for clicky shoulder buttons and analog sticks. Still, at least it has a second stick (compared to Wii, Move, and Kinect), plus that touch screen could be a good virtual button in a pinch.
 
Blue Ninja said:
I've said it before: if the end of this generation is an indication of what the next gen is going to be like (especially on the Microsoft front), I'm going to defect to the master race.
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Do it, Do it. You wont regret it.

I did it acouple years ago and i havent looked back. It will probally be 2016 by the time i get a console again, i will wait till the Xbox 720/PS4 Slim.
 
Djungelfrukt said:
But as of now, they're still there, which means that developers can include how many buttons they want in their games.
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True but Team Meat just accentuated they strongly support buttons and diverging from them is bullshit. Maybe in a few years, buttons will be nonexistent.
 
Djungelfrukt said:
But as of now, they're still there, which means that developers can include how many buttons they want in their games.
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Maybe for consoles (maybe), but handhelds are being largely being replaced by buttonless smartphones and MP3 players...(and tablets)

I guess it's what the market wants, but personally, I love playing handhelds with real buttons, not virtual ones...and this might be the last generation (3DS/Vita) of them
 
Dr Eggman said:
True but Team Meat just accentuated they strongly support buttons and diverging from them is bullshit. Maybe in a few years, buttons will be nonexistent.
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Nah, that'll never happen. There will always be someone making a system with buttons. Even if Kinect technology had 100% of the kinks ironed out.
 
Vinterbird said:
I much prefer Chahi's way of thinking instead of the way Edmund McMillen puts it. Seems like all he wants is what we've been stuck with for the last decade, and don't want to see what new types of interface and input-methods could bring to the world of gaming.
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I'm inclined to agree. I appreciate McMillen's sentiment, but one important factor is that no-one has *actually* taken buttons away as a control option. Every system has all the controls required to run Super Meat Boy. Alternative options are available, and perhaps the Wii is a little light on controls for more expansive games if you don't want to use motion controls (but sufficient, as I said, for SMB), but this sentiment suggests that the only option right now is to dance in front of your screen, and that just isn't true.
 
what is this invisible threat against buttons? Only on handhelds is that kind of becoming the case but game consoles are more than safe
 
Andrex said:
Nah, that'll never happen. There will always be someone making a system with buttons. Even if Kinect technology had 100% of the kinks ironed out.
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Well maybe I exaggerated it but a strong percentage might have motion controls or some other buttonless fad.
 
_Alkaline_ said:
There are plenty of games on the system improved through its controls, just as there are many games made worse.
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I have to say: Godfather may have been a mediocre game, but it was *so much* better with Wii controls. It just gelled perfectly.
 
Dr Eggman said:
Well maybe I exaggerated it but a strong percentage might have motion controls or some other buttonless fad.
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Coming 2025: Team Meat brings you MeatBox, the *only* home console with buttons.

Actually, MeatBox just sounds like a very dodgy euphemism.
 
Blue Ninja said:
I've said it before: if the end of this generation is an indication of what the next gen is going to be like (especially on the Microsoft front), I'm going to defect to the master race.
Click to expand...

The "end" of this gen sort of suggests that there's nothing to worry about (at least from Sony and Nintendo). Sony doesn't seem to care too much about Move, and their two biggest devs (PD and ND) avoided implementing Move features into their games. Nintendo's already gone back to a traditional controller setup. You can still use the Wiimote, but their main controller is traditional.
 
Wow team sounded like my crazy family members(including my dad who married my foreign mom) speaking about foreigners(islamic people) claiming the netherland.

just replace foreigners with motion control.
Have to see i kinda like motion control(kinect) a bigger step toward my holo room im going to build later.
 
thelatestmodel said:
Link


Some very interesting and very different opinions here. Love Edmund McMillen's openness and Eric Chahi's "blame the artist, not the tools" viewpoint.
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Which is of course BS to some extent. Look at the creatures being done digitally back when Alias|Animator was the most powerful thing around compared to Z-Brush and Mudbox. The time it takes to sculpt a beautiful model now is 1/20th the time it took in the old ages. And if we go back to sculpting out of rock and clay, add another few weeks.

More power, more technology allows great artists to produce greater work. I understand what he meant, you make do with what you got, but lets say we were all stuck with the Atari 2600. You think the tools weren't the limit of creativity? Come on. Better tools allow talented artist to produce better art, and often faster.
 
FieryBalrog said:
There's only so much you can do with touchscreens.

Only so much.
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Not really. The second they're moved away from the actual screen where the action itself is, and perhaps isolated onto a controller (WiiU, perhaps?) then the experience gets better. But then you have to get over the disconnect of not having tactile feedback outside of haptics. For now, at least.

As a controller and a primary viewing space, however, it does limit you to what you can and cannot do with "traditional" (typical to consoles and PC; existing genres) gaming experiences. For instance, an FPS is a joke on a touchscreen, like an iOS or Android device, as of right now.

I say a hybrid of both is excellent though. Like the DS, for instance.

But even now, as an Android owner, the gaming experience thus far (outside of a handful of titles) is infuriating. The positive is that touchscreen gaming is in its infancy and a lot of developers are working to smartly leverage the interface's strengths and weaknesses accordingly. :]
 
SolidSnakex said:
The "end" of this gen sort of suggests that there's nothing to worry about (at least from Sony and Nintendo). Sony doesn't seem to care too much about Move, and their two biggest devs (PD and ND) avoided implementing Move features into their games. Nintendo's already gone back to a traditional controller setup. You can still use the Wiimote, but their main controller is traditional.
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I'm an Xbot, though, so I'm mainly talking about Microsoft here. Their "Kinect for everything"-attitude is really turning me off of the Xbox brand, and I don't see myself switching to another console either.
 
I think the Wii U model is great, tbh. I love how that controller's turning out, as I loved the DS and 3DS's control schemes. Solid all around.

TBH I think we'll see some smartphones move to more gaming-oriented setups as much as Sony and Nintendo's handhelds might move towards them. And then those that really game a lot on their phones would play using those smartphones. For instance, the ODROID (not technically a phone) and Xperia Play. Anybody who games using those would probably say it's a definite improvement over touchscreen-only gaming.
 
Martin Edmonson, Reflections co-founder, currently working on Driver: San Francisco

If you're talking about the next generation of consoles - and nobody knows exactly when they're going to be - if you say we're coming into the twilight years of the current generation, surely, surely - please god! - there's got to be easy to use tools like there used to be in the old Sega Model 2 arcade boards, where you can build games very quickly without worrying about the technology.

Because we can't be doing this - we can't be building rendering and physics tech from the ground up any longer. I don't think we'll be doing that again - in fact, I'm sure we won't be doing it again. It's incredibly slow, incredibly expensive and time consuming and it's like reinventing the wheel with a slightly rounder wheel.
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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-04-what-devs-want-from-the-next-gen-article?page=3
 
_Alkaline_ said:
His argument is that Wii Sports is the only game on the system that is improved by its controls.

There are plenty of games on the system improved through its controls, just as there are many games made worse.
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I get the impression from the way he phrased it that it was about games REALLY improved by the controls, as in they just wouldn't be the same without them. The pointer's great for quite a few games and even the motion controls add a little something extra to some, but it's hard to think of many great Nintendo-developed games where they couldn't be recreated nicely enough on a standard control.

Mind, I also think the bigger problem is that the Motion Plus technology wasn't standard. If Nintendo went for a more expensive controller (as long as it wasn't prohibitively expensive) from the start we probably would've seen more Skyward Sword-style games where the motion control is integral.
 
This part from epic should kinda inform people that dev costs shouldn't rise a lot next gen.

The closer we can get to building a single nice object and using it in the engine, it makes the workflow more efficient for the artists. If you look at some of the source art for Marcus Fenix, we have five million polygon versions of him that have every scar modelled and all of the detail, that we then process down to normal maps and render on a ten thousand polygon model. There's a certain point at which we're just utilising things we've already built. We're just utilising them more efficiently.

We're getting closer and closer with every generation of hardware to being able to just use those source objects, which will be great from the artists' point of view because they'll no longer be bound by quite the same restrictions. There will always be challenges we have to overcome and workflows we need to devise and learn how to use, but every step forward gives the artists more freedom in those respects.
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Artist guys dont have to optimize the shit out of the gameplay models cutting polys where they can. Unless of course every source of extra power will be pushed to shaders.
And when the 2 platforms have 25 gig plus optical storage devices im scared of the games filled with shitty cutscenes.
 
mclem said:
I have to say: Godfather may have been a mediocre game, but it was *so much* better with Wii controls. It just gelled perfectly.
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Yep I agree. Wii controls made Godfather really fun. I can't imagine playing No More Heroes without waggle either, it's probably the most boring beat-em-up ever.
 
McMillen's Kinect trolling is certainly very entertaining, but he's unknowingly expounding what's so interesting and promising about the philosophy behind the device and the games that have so far been made for it: it's about the here & now, the »new season« -- none of these games were built to be remembered, they were built to satisfy a very modern need for »fast entertainment«.

They're entirely disposable, like smartphone games.

That's a pretty big thing in the old home console world and maybe makes the device -- including its marketing -- pretty revolutionary and pioneering.
 
Yeah Edmund McMillen knows his shit and aint an MS puppy, that´s for sure.

And the same goes for Kinect. That thing is a piece of garbage. There is absolutely nothing good for it. It's a joke. It's a f***ing joke. It doesn't make any f***ing sense. It's painful because they justify it by saying 'a lot of people bought it', but that's just marketing.
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Yeah getting air time with Oprah, hiring a fucking circus at E3 and on top of that a launch marketing budget not shy of a new console launch, sure did the work, at least in the US.

But the type of games that work without buttons is quite limited which we already knew from the EyeToy. Wave-gaming is a niche that will probably be part of next gen, just don´t expect it to be the standard method of control.
 
[Nintex] said:
Team Meat

The truth right there.
Click to expand...

Only a half truth. The biggest issue is that it sucks. But if you could actually create a Kinect without the obvious flaws, it would open up huge territories. Fitness games are the obvious. Having a virtual trainer 24/7 is a killer app that rivals anything. Whether or not the technology can ever get there (in the near future) is debatable, but it's not a terrible concept. It's just lousy execution (which is the problem with all motion this gen. But early 3D graphics sucked too. I'm glad they weren't abandoned because 2D had easier times with framerates.)
 
[Nintex] said:
Team Meat

The truth right there.
Click to expand...

isn't it really the opposite? i thought the job of a designer was to solve problems. mcmillen's demonstrated quite clearly he's not in the realm of most other developers, so this isn't actually directed at him, but totally closing your mind to the possibility that one thing may offer (oh it's just a marketing gimmick) is doing yourself a disservice. i think the problem with kinect is the same that's been problematic with most motion control games, and it's that they barely scratch the surface of what you can do. they've been copying wii sports style gameplay for half a decade (and nintendo's guilty of this too). i'm not sure what the possibilities of a kinect-only game are, but i wouldn't close my mind to the possibility of something amazing waiting in the wings there.
 
Some fairly varied responses. I get the feeling progress can only be made with experiments and sometimes the intermediatary steps are worse than the status quo but they will lead to better things or dead ends.

dragonelite said:
And when the 2 platforms have 25 gig plus optical storage devices im scared of the games filled with shitty cutscenes.
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Better hope for lossless PCM audio instead.
 
1-D_FTW said:
Only a half truth. The biggest issue is that it sucks. But if you could actually create a Kinect without the obvious flaws, it would open up huge territories. Fitness games are the obvious. Having a virtual trainer 24/7 is a killer app that rivals anything. Whether or not the technology can ever get there (in the near future) is debatable, but it's not a terrible concept. It's just lousy execution (which is the problem with all motion this gen. But early 3D graphics sucked too. I'm glad they weren't abandoned because 2D had easier times with framerates.)
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You can't expect gamers or game developers to get excited about a fitness 'game'. That's a lifestyle application where the Kinect would be better off built into a TV or set top box, not a games console. Hell, you could create a Kinect style box that only played Zumba and it'd sell well but I doubt it would sell to 'gamers'.
 
It'd be nice if devs either stopped running their own online services or started encrypting their passwords appropriately after the EA Battlefield beta thing.
 
I'd think a universal compartmentalisation of game engines would be the biggest thing. Imagine how easy it would be to have a top of the line graphics module and then picking what kind of physics you'd like without having to put together your own engine...

I'm no tech nut but that would be much more efficient than most dev houses developing their own propriety software.

Possible?
 
AniHawk said:
isn't it really the opposite? i thought the job of a designer was to solve problems. mcmillen's demonstrated quite clearly he's not in the realm of most other developers, so this isn't actually directed at him, but totally closing your mind to the possibility that one thing may offer (oh it's just a marketing gimmick) is doing yourself a disservice. i think the problem with kinect is the same that's been problematic with most motion control games, and it's that they barely scratch the surface of what you can do. they've been copying wii sports style gameplay for half a decade (and nintendo's guilty of this too). i'm not sure what the possibilities of a kinect-only game are, but i wouldn't close my mind to the possibility of something amazing waiting in the wings there.
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The biggest problem with all motion controls is that they aren't as accurate as traditional controls. Controls are probably the most important part of any game. A game can still be great if the graphics or sound are bad, but bad controls? It's pretty much over for that game. Why should gamers or developers embrace controls that aren't accurate?
 
SmokyDave said:
You can't expect gamers or game developers to get excited about a fitness 'game'. That's a lifestyle application where the Kinect would be better off built into a TV or set top box, not a games console. Hell, you could create a Kinect style box that only played Zumba and it'd sell well but I doubt it would sell to 'gamers'.
Click to expand...

It was in larger response to his specifics about motion not creating any new genres.

But I'll stick to my assertion that motion this gen is less clunky than 3D during the 32-bit generation. Whether it makes the strides 3D has been able to make the past 15-20 years is debatable, but I'm not ready to declare anything a failure. Because Wiimote/Move and Kinect could be the foundation of something that's much better than dual analog. MUCH better. Plus, his whole diatribe against buttons is pretty stupid. Only Kinect has abandoned them. It's not like button war was truly declared this gen.

SolidSnakex said:
The biggest problem with all motion controls is that they aren't as accurate as traditional controls. Controls are probably the most important part of any game. A game can still be great if the graphics or sound are bad, but bad controls? It's pretty much over for that game. Why should gamers or developers embrace controls that aren't accurate?
Click to expand...

Controls sucked when the framerates were horrible for early 3D. Didn't kill 3D in its tracks.
 
Mael said:
How about they try to find what gamers want for the future instead of what devs want?
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If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.
Henry Ford
 
One thing that is tricky with the next gen, and is beginning to be tricky with this gen, is that [the platform holders] seem to be splitting and going in their own directions with features. You have Move, you have Kinect, the Wii, and Wii U now.
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this will be all too true

we'll end up seeing multiplatform games largely the same, save for a gimmick-mode to take advantage of the respective system's gimmick, rather than those unique hardware inputs lending themselves to any real and meaningful game design.

I think Kinect, Move/WiiRemote, and the controller screen will be stuck as gimmicks because there is no incentive for broad support past first party, salting any potential from the respective technologies. Instead Kinect will have Gun Club Motion, Wii U will have Gun Club Touch, and Sony will have Gun Club Fondle. Which is kinda sad, because I like motion control, and the Wii failed to present a compelling case for how neat it can be, save for a handful of smaller titles. There you have a game like Zelda Skyward Sword shoehorning in motion control when not needed (flying the bird with tilt, pulling back on the nunchuck for the bow) that, if anything, are a put off...but the sword combat looks great and is something that is unique to motion controls.

Things are probably going to get worse, what with the next Xbox and Playstation and the new control systems they'll have. There were rumors that Playstation 4 will have Kinect like camera or something? it's all so confusing
 
carroto said:
If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.
Henry Ford
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That's why you never ask your customers what they want but you study their behaviour to see what they need/want.
What Henry Ford didn't do was ask the people breeding horse what they wanted.
 
SolidSnakex said:
The biggest problem with all motion controls is that they aren't as accurate as traditional controls. Controls are probably the most important part of any game. A game can still be great if the graphics or sound are bad, but bad controls? It's pretty much over for that game. Why should gamers or developers embrace controls that aren't accurate?
Click to expand...
Most people don't seem to mind input lag, ghosting and other fantastic features of budget LCDs, so I wouldn't be shocked if people would embrace a control device that isn't as accurate as a standard controller.
 
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