the "next big thing" in games...

[inertianinja]

what do you think the next big thing to enhance player experience will be?

i'm not talking about cloud gaming or digital downloads - i mean gameplay.
every round of new games gets a little better with graphics, so what else?

i'm thinking that a good improvement would be depth of field. when i'm looking at something close to me, things far away are a little blurred..and vice versa.

maybe a reticle-based automatic eye adjustment, instead of FPSs where everything is equally in focus.

[dolson]

Originally Posted by inertianinja

what do you think the next big thing to enhance player experience will be?

i'm not talking about cloud gaming or digital downloads - i mean gameplay.
every round of new games gets a little better with graphics, so what else?

i'm thinking that a good improvement would be depth of field. when i'm looking at something close to me, things far away are a little blurred..and vice versa.

maybe a reticle-based automatic eye adjustment, instead of FPSs where everything is equally in focus.

I've actually seen this in a game, but I can't recall what it was.. I'm thinking TimeShift?

As far as the next big thing, I think context is huge. What I mean is, why in a wrestling game, for instance, can you punch at the air, if your opponent is nowhere to be seen? Why can't the punch be turned into something else, based on where the enemy is? In this example, perhaps the punch doesn't need to change to something *completely* different, but say shadowboxing.. like a taunt. In a way, it's hand-holding, but in another way, it makes sense and would make games much easier to watch - more cinematic, truly cinematic, in a way. I don't know if I can explain it properly, and I can't think of another good example. Uncharted does a lot with one button, for example. A lot of automatic stuff is going on. But there are times where animations look wrong, or whatever. All of that stuff - if it were cleaned up, would provide a more believable experience. I hope someone knows what I mean.

[dylangiacon]

Originally Posted by inertianinja

i'm thinking that a good improvement would be depth of field. when i'm looking at something close to me, things far away are a little blurred..and vice versa.

I remember they did this a little in CoD world at war.
When you went into "look down the sights" mode it blurred out things that were slightly out of direct view, or thing that were really close.
Looked especially cool when you strafed while looking down your sights

[gojira]

There's 3d gaming that was shown at GDC this year. I don't know how much it'll effect gameplay though.

There's also head tracking. Boom Blox was supposedly going to use it as a hidden feature, but it was taken out.

[joeyrock]

What dylangiacon said. In COD5 (and 4?), when you look down the barrel of a gun etc you get a nifty DOF effect. It's quite well done actually. Crysis has it to a greater extent and they've done depth of field in many other games. A good few PS2 games had it. "The Bouncer" did and that was one of the first ps2 games.

I think the next big thing will be greater degrees of motion tracking. The next iteration of wii is going to have it for certain. The wiimotes probably won't have as big (think two nunchucks) and the little IR bar you put on the TV will have a camera on either end of it.

Other than that it's physics. Hopefully the next set of consoles will have far greater physics powers. The graphics won't take such a leap on the next gen. Personally I'd like to see fully destructible worlds. Then the possibilities are endless. Say you are trapped in a room and there's a pick axe on the wall... you would be able to choose any wall you like and punch a hole in it. Rather than dick about with a lock pick. Or maybe in a war game you could choose how to attack the enemy. Maybe you don't want to risk people on the ground so you level a city block with a aerial bombing raid. Or if there are Hostages you could spend a bit more in game cash and buy a massive gun and heat vision goggles.. then shoot the enemy through the walls. Basically you could make COD4... but there wouldn't just be a sniper mission and a 'mini-gun from an aircraft' level... you could use your favourite method for any or all the levels.

Along with that extra physics power it would allow other things. How cool would a GTA type game be if there were a thousand cars on screen at once and every building was destructive and had rooms in it? Yes.. VERY! Getting across town at rush hour would be a real challenge and mission planning would take on a new dimension. If you left a burning car in the middle of the street before a mission a massive traffic jam might result so you can't get away.

One thing I hope dies is games purposely fucking you over just to instil difficulty. GTA4 did this to me. I want to park my helicopter outside on the bank robbery mission. Then it's gone when I come back out. Why? Then it makes me follow a ridiculously long sequence of scripted events, just to make it difficult. I hate that. I've robbed a bank, let me work out how to get away, otherwise what's the point in having a sandbox world??

Fight Night 3 did a similar thing. If you get a move down and can pummel the opponent in one area of their face.. it works on the first few fights. But then you can hit a higher level fighter you could hit the opponent a thousand times on their jaw. Just because the game wants you to give some gut shots and vary it up, you never get a knock down. Even though in reality the opponent would be long dead... why? Make the game properly, and punish the player for being predictable. Greater AI processing power would go to improving that downfall in current gen gaming.

[inertianinja]

i think a good summary of this all would be that you want the game world to make more *sense*

even if it's a fantasy game, there are going to be some things that remain. destructability, depth of field, 6 bullets to the face actually kills a guy, cops don't stop chasing you just because you start a mission....

[az0madman]

The new Bionic Commando will had some third-person DOF goodness.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48193.html

I'm still waiting on the day where there's detail as far as the eye can see. I want to play GTA where the things I see in the distances are actually cars and not fake lights, or textures get better the closer you get. No pop-ins and such. But I don't know how much power that'd actually require and if we'll ever get there in the first place.

I'm also waiting for a game that lets you be the ultimate super hero. There are games like Prototype and InFamous coming out that let you have these super powers, but they're only restricted to that one. I want one where you can choose whether you want to have fire, ice or whatever capabilities and actually have the world behave in ways that accommodate your power. And have it feel like GTA where there's weight to your character. Sure there's X-Men Legends and the new DC MMO, but you don't feel like you are actually using those powers.

[everybodystalking]

Originally Posted by inertianinja

even if it's a fantasy game, there are going to be some things that remain. destructability, depth of field, 6 bullets to the face actually kills a guy, cops don't stop chasing you just because you start a mission....

As long as it's done correctly and in the right games. For example, I don't want the police in GTA chasing me down because I'm not going the speed limit that gets boring and repetitive quick.

I do have to agree with having developers not holding the players hands through the whole thing and saying, here's this space and here's the optimum way to get through it. It should be about giving the player all the tools he needs, and a situation, and saying, here deal with this how you please.

I also want legitimate reasons for why things happen. Take for example in Killzone 2, at one point you get a very wicked awesome electricity gun. At the beginning of that next level, you do not have it any more. Did it run out of juice? Did it get blown up? Did I have to throw it away to make my escape? I don't remember any of those things happening, yet somehow I didn't keep that electricity gun, despite the fact that's something I would not have parted with. Why too, can I not shoot down a wooden door with a rocket launcher if I want to? Yes there's no point in doing it, but what if I want to? You're going to make the door indestructible? Oh, and I can't climb over that little barricade there, I have to find another way around? These type of things infuriate me at times.

One more thing I'd like to see (that wouldn't improve, anything really) is this. I have an affinity for jumping up and down in FPS games when people are talking to me, relaying me story info, what have you, run around them, whatever. I've stood on peoples heads while they were talking to me before, and I find this all very humorous because it doesn't seem to bother anyone. I am waiting for a game in which I'm doing something completely stupid like that, or I don't know, looking off in a corner for some collectible, only to be called on it by another character. That would be completely epic to me personally.

More generally though, games just need to break out of the boxes they've put themselves in. This gradually does happen over time, but it goes a lot slower when no one is willing to get behind a truly original title, on either side.

[gonzooo]

Originally Posted by az0madman

I'm still waiting on the day where there's detail as far as the eye can see. I want to play GTA where the things I see in the distances are actually cars and not fake lights, or textures get better the closer you get. No pop-ins and such. But I don't know how much power that'd actually require and if we'll ever get there in the first place.

The return you get with rendering models in as much detail at a long distance and displaying really big textures is minimal at best, while taxing your system a crapload more. I'm no expert in 3D rendering, but the way I'd guess it'd be would be as follows:

Imagine a street in GTA4. You're seeing a crazy amount of things at the same time. The road, lamps, cars, people, etc.: now, imagine if you'd have to render all those things as if you were standing right next to them (actually, infinitely close to them, as close as the camera can come to them). The amount of detail being rendered would completely chew up your graphics card as you'll be displaying extremely high res textures for a big amount of things, and it'll probably even struggle with drawing all the vertices, being that model detail, if logic dictates, is being scaled with distance. Then add all the sweet close-up shader work you'll be doing for every object around you, even if you can't see the result of it because you're not close enough.

The above may be wrong; like I said, I'm not very well versed in 3D rendering. If the above is correct, I'll probably have missed a thousand other things that would go extremely wrong with that model as well. Anyone who knows his stuff is welcome to correct me either way.

[joeyrock]

There's a system called tessellation which dynamically adjusts the polygon count of objects depending on their distance. The 360 does this already, ati cards have supported for a while. But in the next Direct X release (11) is going to set it as standard. So it'll be a lot more common in a couple of years. That'll basically mean the end of blocky looking scenery. And there will be proper sphere shapes in games.... and so on.

The way the same thing is done with textures is through mip-mapping. When you see a texture pop in, a low res texture has been replaced by a higher res one. Using mip-maps means you need multiple low res textures for every high res one... it's not every efficient. But there are different things that avoid the need for mip-maps. shaders do a good job already. There are textures which are infinitely scalable vector graphics.. they've used that in some games already. Hopefully they'll push more into procedural textures, in which pieces of texture are put into memory and they are used to "grow" the full texture dynamically depending on what you need to render. That should be cool.