Name something you want to improve in games...

[inertianinja]

any major or minor change that you think should - and realistically could - improve in games in the near future.

i'll name a few, for FPS games...

(1) clothes separate from character bodies (this is improving)
(2) hair. no more bald space marines.
(3) gravity and friction. in FPS games, there is no convincing connection between a player's feet and the ground.
(4) realistic reaction to walls. if a character runs into a wall, or walks along a wall (especially if they're dragging alongside it), their posture should change. their hand position should change (if i run at a wall full speed, i'm going to put my hands up before i hit it)

little things like that tip me into the uncanny valley :)

now you go.

[joeyrock]

Physics. I want to be able to break down any wall I want. I want to be able to, pop out bricks, shoot holes, chip away or dent any wall floor or ceiling. If I start jabbing at the dirt with a knife I want it to move the dirt and make a hole... if I'm a Superman type character and fly full speed at a city I want to be able to smash through walls and level buildings.. by mistake. And I want all that stuff to stay as I left it until a little NPC comes along with a van and a tool belt to fix it.

It's the little things that make a game fun :p

[tokenuser]

Physics engines for car racing sims have really improved.

You crash, you don't come back with a fully functional car ... it might have an engine running on 3 cylinders, the passenger door might flap open on a corner, the car might pull to the right.

I like that sort of thing. Damage has consequences, and not just a reset button.

Even in games like Motorsport (notice the theme here - guess what type of game I enjoy ;) ), you can effect the environment. A truck can crash through the wall of a building, but a car can't ... and on the next lap around if someone has crashed into a pile of crap beside the track you could be running over it (or hitting an oil drum that has rolled into the track) as you pass the same spot.

Mechanical physics is far easier to model than bio-mechanical physics though. And for the environments, the trade off between gameplay and storing every nuance of environment that has been altered is tough to balance. I'll take the gameplay and deal with the dumbed down physics - because it is a game afterall.

[inertianinja]

Physics engines for car racing sims have really improved.
You crash, you don't come back with a fully functional car ... it might have an engine running on 3 cylinders, the passenger door might flap open on a corner, the car might pull to the right.
I like that sort of thing. Damage has consequences, and not just a reset button.


i liked damage implementation too, but was initially frustrated because i'd have to restart the race. the new "quick rewind button" is a great fix for this.

which reminds me - racing sims (particularly Gran Turismo...the prologue anyway) need to do better to give a sense of speed. my speedo says i'm doing 125 but i don't feel it, so i screw up every turn.

[az0madman]

Well, Mirror's Edge did number 2, 3, and 4 well enough. I would like more games that utilize a geo-mod type engine like Red Faction Guerrilla. Building destruction was a lot of fun in that game.

The one thing I want above all is a game that has a definitive good/evil system. One where the minute you decide to be evil, you go down a completely different path from being good, instead of a lot of the games where you either fight the good guy or you choose to reason with him and that's that.

[siraim]

i liked damage implementation too, but was initially frustrated because i'd have to restart the race. the new "quick rewind button" is a great fix for this.

which reminds me - racing sims (particularly Gran Turismo...the prologue anyway) need to do better to give a sense of speed. my speedo says i'm doing 125 but i don't feel it, so i screw up every turn.

Racing sims? Ha. Those are glorified arcade racers when compared to sims like GTR and rFactor. I always feel an appropriate sense of speed with those racers, but can't seem to get the same feeling from Console racers.

I do love the rewind feature.. let me just go back and fix my mistake, i want to play the game, not jsut the first three laps before I try to take a turn too tightly.

[icu]

I like your suggestion about reaction to coming into contact with the floor and obstacles (wall). That would just add to the immersion and that's really something I look for in my FPSs.

It reminds me of the great UT mod Infiltration where your gun would hit a wall if you were up against it - so if you were against a wall and you turned in toward it (to face it say) you'd here "clank" as your gun hit the wall stopping you from turning further. Little things like that = good imo.

I guess the one thing I'd like added to FPS shooters is more freedom of movement. I'm tired of being restricted from doing the most basic things such as:

- Not being able to jump onto an object because it is 3 inches above your knees. I want to be able to jump up to and pull myself up to obstacles at a reasonable height. Jumping over a handrail should require a jetpack.
- Not being able able to fit through or under a small opening because all I can apparently do is stand or crouch. I should always be able to get down on me belly and crawl if I so choose.
- Being able to lean around corners (again - something I had back in the Infiltration mod YEARS AGO)

There are some less basic movements I'd like to see more widely available. Things any human could do to varying degrees:

- Dive! Dive! Dive! I mean, it was such a revolutionary thing we found in such games as Max Payne, but why is it treated like a gimick? I could dive around a corner so why not my Bioshock guy or my CoD guy?
- Slide, slide, slipity slide! Another pretty basic movement, but relegated to gimickdome by the gaming developers. A simple run and dive or foot-first (baseball) slide.

Being a huge fan of The Specialists mod for HL I long for these kinds of movement options in every FPS.

Things like this just open up the gameplay and really give you the feel like you are navigating the world. It comes down to immersion again for me. I have to think, if I were in this crazy nutso situation what would I do - even not being a super special forces/biologically or magically enhanced super being - what would I do? Circle-strafe around a corner and duck while firing? Not bloody likely. etc.

We get more and more Photorealistic graphics and realistic physics is great, but I want more realism in movement and more freedom. Not as a focus of the game - I mean Mirror's Edge was a great idea, but it was not the best FPS. Why must dives and flips be relegated to "flip n' dive" games?

[blacksymbiote]

The thing that bugs me the most about a lot of games, is when a hanging piece of clothing or an equipped weapon clips through a running leg or an arm. You see this a lot in RPGs since they have all that fancy gear hanging off of them and since it's often in a 3rd person view of the character.

[masherscf]

I don;t need anything improved. I do need something degraded...the price.

[blacksymbiote]

I don;t need anything improved. I do need something degraded...the price.

And we have a WINNER!!!

Totally agree!

[quantumtheory]

I don;t need anything improved. I do need something degraded...the price.

DING DING DING DING DING!!

60 bucks is way to much for games. 50 was about right, cause if there were sales at release or at random times throughout the year after release, games would be 40 bucks or so.

Not only that, but since the base version of the game is 60, it raises the price of Special Edition versions of the game. That's probably why I'm playing WoW again. 15 bucks a month isn't much, and if I gotta spend 40 bucks every now and then (more if I want the special edition) on expansions, I'm cool with that. but 60 bucks a pop is just too much. I hardly buy games anymore unless it's something I GOTTA have.

MW2 coming out will be the first game on 360 that I'm gonna be buying at the full price. All other games I've gotten have been used, a lower price cause they've been out for awhile, or gifts.

[satori]

PC games that are designed from the ground up as PC games and not console ports. I'm really getting sick of the evolution of games into a lowest common denominator affair. Quality, depth are things that exist on Consoles as well, why can't well designed control systems exist on a PC? Why do I have to use the same ridiculous saving system as consoles do?

[inertianinja]

I don;t need anything improved. I do need something degraded...the price.

dude...buy used!

I got fallout 3 from half.com for 27 bucks and spent 78hours on a playthrough
even at $60, that's *value*

[johnnysix]

PC games that are designed from the ground up as PC games and not console ports. I'm really getting sick of the evolution of games into a lowest common denominator affair. Quality, depth are things that exist on Consoles as well, why can't well designed control systems exist on a PC? Why do I have to use the same ridiculous saving system as consoles do?

I'm a big PC guy. I grew up playing PC games and still prefer to play shooters on the PC. However, I think PC games of the past have put developers in this position. Whilst it's cool to make a game like Crysis and push graphics forward, it's not very cool when only a small portion of people can afford a PC that will play it. From a player and developer point of view, a console gives you a standard. I own a 360, I can play these games. I own a PS3, I can play these games. I own a Wii, I can play these. System specs don't work because they will always be set for the lowest common denominator. Console ports have both their good and bad points.

[satori]

To this day I do not understand the backlash with Crysis. It received bad reviews because it required some higher end hardware, or at least some very specific hardware that wasn't so high end. The game was forward compatible, meaning that yes it was high end when it came out, but by the time you can afford to play it is when you should buy it. The game is still available now, and considering at the time of launch you could build a high end machine (despite what some reviewers were saying at the time) for about $800... you could now build one for about $400, and I honestly doubt that there's a better looking game out there for any platform.
I have no issue with people playing consoles, but I prefer high end games that don't compromise. Something like Supreme Commander is perfect for me. I want to be able to play something that hasn't had it's heart ripped out in order to sell units on an inferior control system. Homeworld 3, I feel, will be that game.

[tsmith15]

a) when you get shot in the leg, you move slower until it gets healed
b) large-scale battlefields populated as much by friendly units as enemy units (some games do this, but many don't). picture the beach at Omaha with a couple hundred friendly units storming the bunkers, etc.
c) particle effects. when someone runs across dirt, powder should kick up; when a grenade goes off, the smoke should linger for a while, and swirl if someone runs by it/through it; if you shoot a wall, powder/dust/whatever should come out (think of The Matrix lobby scene)
d) blood effects, body wounds. if someone suffers a non-fatal wound you should see it accurately modeled on their body. blood should splatter from them onto walls, ground, etc. and it should drip off people, at least temporarily, onto the ground.
e) chaos. you should not be able to play through a ten hour campaign and know whats going on the whole time. explosions should rock your view, kick dirt into your eyes, dizzy you or knock you down; gunfire should be spraying around the battlefield, instead of enemies just keying right on you and not your AI allies. If you think of stuff like Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan, you can't keep track of where everyone is, so the battles are really fought dynamically around buildings/obstacles & such, instead of just one line against another like in the civil war.
f) health systems. regenerating health is okay in some games, but i find it now to be overused as a counter-movement to the "medkit" era. I think a cool alternative could be something you carry on you that you can use to stop bleeding from moderate-sever injuries (not using it would result in steady decline in health) and then needing to either use a med-kit/station (not ones you can carry with you) or have a medic heal you in the field. Imagine crouching behind a broken down car and having to lay down suppressing fire over it so a medic could make it to your position.
g) AI allies that actually die. In lots of games where you have a squad, the fact that they suck at killing things is counteracted by the fact that they can't die (the case in Battlefield: Bad Company, which I just finished). I want my action to be very realistic, without becoming a straight sim; but it is reasonable to ask for characters that are vulnerable.
h) scope. this goes sort of hand-in-hand with chaos, but when you're confined in hallways or tight areas for most of the game, it really turns the game into a series of linear encounters in the hallways (Half Life to a certain extent, F.E.A.R, etc.). A lot of games have been moving toward the sandbox type of thing, like Red Faction: Guerilla, but there still isn't really anything happening in the environment unless you're there. Imagine a wide open battle field, and your objective is in the opposite corner. You can take any route to get there, and any way you go there are people fighting. Both sides are bombing certain areas, there are groups of men engaged in battle across the map. Really stress a dynamic battlefield, where you're not the centre of the game, you're just a piece of it (think of Defense of the Ancients, the Warcraft 3 mod; with the AI units going off to attack each other constantly, and then dropping players (heroes) into the action; but on a much larger scale ideally).
i) freedom of movement. this is tricky because there's the argument of how much do you bind to controls and how much to context. Gears of War wasn't bad but sometimes you got caught doing what you didn't want to do, and stuff was really 'sticky' in Stranglehold. Max Payne was super cool with the contortiony bullet time stuff. If a real person can go prone, I want to be able to go prone. If a real person can grab a ledge and pull him/herself up I want to do it too.
j) last thing, because I'm tired of typing, fatigue. Some games use it to varying degrees (Call of Duty i think). If you're running around, getting shot, jumping, sliding, diving, etc. you're going to get tired. And when you get tired you slow down, lose some of your aim, probably reload slower, etc.

[totallyradroach]

I'd like for every game developer to be forced to create original plots and characters for their games rather then copy/pasting from popular movies or other games.