I don't really think this console launch could have gone any better. Or worse, for that matter. I'm kind of a determinist about corporate behavior: it rarely surprises.
The problem is that consoles are fundamentally played out. They can't generate much more innovative IP.
Ahhh, that sounds annoying just hearing it said in my head. Let me explain:
In each console generation until the 360/PS3 season, every new console would bring a new technology. That new technology did more than look shiny on the TV ads - it allowed for new kinds of games. The NES allowed for games with real levels and save games. SNES and Sega improved the handling and performance so that the games were actually fun to play. Then the CDs with their ultra-high data levels, then the poly-pushing monsters of the PS2 and XBOX one the first.
Not all these attempts succeeded. Full-motion video, for example, crashed and burned until it became a part of every game ever in the PS2 era. But at its heart, every generation of console brought a technology to the home, and that new technology allowed for games which would have been very hard or impossible to create on earlier models. Not just in terms of graphical fidelity, but in terms of core gameplay.
There were jumpy platform games before Super Mario - even ones with scrolling levels. But the NES came out and made it easy. You didn't need to work through clever, delicate algorithms to get this shit to run - anyone could make a game that did it, and therefore everyone did. It allowed for innovative IP. New games which played in new ways.
the thing is, you could always clearly see what the next technology was going to be. It was always foretold by the adjustments to the earlier consoles as they aged. They got add-ons, pushed new kinds of gameplay... these late-life techniques were rarely impressive, but when you saw the Sega CD you knew that this piece of crap was what the next console was going to polish. You could always see it coming down the line.
Late game in the PS3 and XBOX 360 lifespan. What innovations did you see?
Motion tracking.
That's it.
Unlike the CD, motion tracking is obviously not ready to have a solid generation of consoles based on it. When you saw crappy CD games - Dragon's Lair or Sewer Shark, for example - they were crap. But you could see that there was a new resource there. They were incredibly impressive while, at the same time, being crap.
But there was never so much as a single motion tracking game this generation that was even vaguely impressive. They were 100% universally panned, at least in terms of what motion tracking brought to the table.
No, the real innovation in this console generation is the tablet - the new winner of the console market.
Tablets (and smart phones) offer new kinds of play, an evolution of the handheld consoles that allows for touch screens and tipping. They give us new affordances that make it easy to create complex physics and timing games in ways that consoles and computers have a hard time with. All of the phone and tablet games can run on a PC, but the PC has different affordances so they feel very awkward. Diner Dash is fun on a tablet because you poke the hot spots. On a PC you have to scroll over to them each time, it's not nearly as intuitive or nice. And this is just the first generation of tablet games, the equivalent of Dragon's Lair and Sewer Shark.
Ironically, it seems MS and Sony really did know that tablets and smartphones were winning, because they tried to make their consoles into the same kind of massively multi-purpose device. But it seems unlikely that the use cases for a small portable device can be mirrored into a large, immobile device. Fundamentally, part of the innovative nature of games on tablets is that they are played in your hands, right there.
Nintendo obviously noticed. The WiiU is literally a tablet attached to a console. There might have been something to that idea, but we already have tablets. The WiiU probably has new affordances, but Nintendo failed to sell us on them. In fact, they didn't sell their device at all. We basically have no idea what experience it's intended to give us.
What I'm saying is that consoles really didn't have anywhere to go. Their market is being eaten by tablets, but the new technologies they need to give new affordances isn't really ready... fuck it! JUST GO!
So of course they suck.
The question is whether consoles are "dead".
To me, a console is fundamentally a "place". You go to the console, you sit down with the console, and you play with the console. It's a bit like board gaming. The whole point is that consoles create an immersive environment.
Computers can play all the games consoles can, but my computer is not a "place". It's an interface. My computer doesn't exist separately from my life, it is a core part of my life. The complex controls and daily routine that are my computer interfere with my ability to get immersed in a game. This is an especially large problem because I have two screens, which means I can always see the computer behind the game.
Right now, consoles are marketed more or less to "people who don't have proper computers but want to play games". But they cost as much as computers because, guess what, they're computers. So those people are happy with their laptops or smart phones or tablets.
But if a new device came around, one which embraced the idea of being a "place"... I think that'd be really interesting.
It'll probably involve motion controls.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Thursday, June 06, 2013
Minecraft Construction-Based Worlds
I've been doing a video series about building a Minecraft world in Unity, and it's kinda fun. One thing about me and Minecraft is that I don't really like fighting. I like building.
So... while my computer installs Microsoft's updates, I got to thinking about how to make what is essentially a game stuck in creative mode, or maybe survival-no-monsters mode, and how to make it fun.
A lot of Minecraft's actual challenge comes from the threat of monsters. Remove that, and Minecraft is a much more shallow game where you make scenery. The mechanisms in Minecraft are sub-par and don't really offer the kind of juicy worldbuilding I want from my mechanisms, and the scenery you create is not really useful or inhabitable. Well, aside from farms, but even those are only as useful as whatever you're growing, and that's not very useful because there's not really any fun end result. Just book cases or cakes that nobody will read or eat.
There are a few ways to make construction-based games more interesting.
The first is to do chunk-sharing. For example, if you build a house, you can hit "submit" and it has a chance of randomly popping up in other people's worlds. Of course, your world contains their stuff, too. This adds a lot to the exploration aspect of the game, but not to the actual crafting aspect. How do you make your house matter?
I'm thinking two things: evolving life forms and displays.
Let's start with displays.
Displays are something that happens when conditions are met, and creates something really interesting to witness. For example, I might have trees which, as night falls, shoot fireworks into the sky. I might have bushes which, shortly after rain stops, explode with a musical "BZANG!" and throw seeds everywhere. Or, of course, you might build a house that flashes light patterns whenever anyone gets nearby. Either way, the "devices" in my world are expanded to include a lot of things that can happen independently of you, and these devices can often grow and propagate under their own power. If you grow a field of wheat, then silver motes will dance through the air just before dawn, getting everywhere. If you plant apple trees, then the birds will flock there every morning and flock away every evening (or whenever you walk nearby).
Displays are useful because they are only valuable to a player in the region. While they may have some effect (spreading seeds, attracting animals, etc), they can be ignored in the larger sim when the player isn't actively in the area. We can use a good logical-dependency system to simulate their occurrence even when the block isn't loaded if needed, but we can still get away without showing the flashy visuals.
These displays will make the world fun to explore, as at different times of day and different weathers you'll see different kinds of displays. And you'll wait with bated breath when the sun sets, to see the exploding trees and see the patterns of fireworks the local trees emit. Maybe it varies based on their altitude, or maybe there is some kind of DNA-like thing going on.
Anyway, aside from displays there are evolving life forms. I think this is really important: you have to be able to build a living environment. And that means that things have to live. Not simply be green in the places you want, but grow and change in ways you can shape and meaningfully use.
This means having entities with unique appearances or behaviors. This obviously means you can't simply say "a sheep", but instead need to have a more complex object representing the sheep that has some persistence in the game world. Physically this would actually not be terribly hard, but in terms of memory consumption it might be extremely annoying if all living entities in the game world had genetics, such as every random flower or tree you walk by. To offset this, wild trees and plants would have a genetic system defined by the chunk's seed value. It's only made into a specific example if it is taken or planted by the player.
It's going to be a lot of fun to come up with cool things that can vary. Like growing a vast field of sparkler-mushrooms and carefully culling out the ones that don't sparkle in quite the right way... there's going to be a challenge in terms of computation, but I think it'll be okay.
In terms of challenge, none of these things outright offer challenge. None of them say "do this or die". I think there's room for that, sure, but I think the room is already full from every other game ever made being in it. I'm thinking the challenge should be about finding or creating some kind of very limited energy stones or something. If you are within range of an energy source, you have the ability to break bricks, glide, have a deep inventory, craft magic stuff, maybe see through walls - lots of cool possibilities. The further from the energy stone, the longer it takes to gather enough energy to do that, until you quickly have no special capabilities at all. Fine for exploring, but the cool stuff is where the energy stones are.
Of course, the devices in the game would also largely rely on energy from the energy stone, often piped out in pipe bricks...
Anyway, that's the direction I'm thinking.
... THE UPDATES STILL HAVEN'T INSTALLED.
So... while my computer installs Microsoft's updates, I got to thinking about how to make what is essentially a game stuck in creative mode, or maybe survival-no-monsters mode, and how to make it fun.
A lot of Minecraft's actual challenge comes from the threat of monsters. Remove that, and Minecraft is a much more shallow game where you make scenery. The mechanisms in Minecraft are sub-par and don't really offer the kind of juicy worldbuilding I want from my mechanisms, and the scenery you create is not really useful or inhabitable. Well, aside from farms, but even those are only as useful as whatever you're growing, and that's not very useful because there's not really any fun end result. Just book cases or cakes that nobody will read or eat.
There are a few ways to make construction-based games more interesting.
The first is to do chunk-sharing. For example, if you build a house, you can hit "submit" and it has a chance of randomly popping up in other people's worlds. Of course, your world contains their stuff, too. This adds a lot to the exploration aspect of the game, but not to the actual crafting aspect. How do you make your house matter?
I'm thinking two things: evolving life forms and displays.
Let's start with displays.
Displays are something that happens when conditions are met, and creates something really interesting to witness. For example, I might have trees which, as night falls, shoot fireworks into the sky. I might have bushes which, shortly after rain stops, explode with a musical "BZANG!" and throw seeds everywhere. Or, of course, you might build a house that flashes light patterns whenever anyone gets nearby. Either way, the "devices" in my world are expanded to include a lot of things that can happen independently of you, and these devices can often grow and propagate under their own power. If you grow a field of wheat, then silver motes will dance through the air just before dawn, getting everywhere. If you plant apple trees, then the birds will flock there every morning and flock away every evening (or whenever you walk nearby).
Displays are useful because they are only valuable to a player in the region. While they may have some effect (spreading seeds, attracting animals, etc), they can be ignored in the larger sim when the player isn't actively in the area. We can use a good logical-dependency system to simulate their occurrence even when the block isn't loaded if needed, but we can still get away without showing the flashy visuals.
These displays will make the world fun to explore, as at different times of day and different weathers you'll see different kinds of displays. And you'll wait with bated breath when the sun sets, to see the exploding trees and see the patterns of fireworks the local trees emit. Maybe it varies based on their altitude, or maybe there is some kind of DNA-like thing going on.
Anyway, aside from displays there are evolving life forms. I think this is really important: you have to be able to build a living environment. And that means that things have to live. Not simply be green in the places you want, but grow and change in ways you can shape and meaningfully use.
This means having entities with unique appearances or behaviors. This obviously means you can't simply say "a sheep", but instead need to have a more complex object representing the sheep that has some persistence in the game world. Physically this would actually not be terribly hard, but in terms of memory consumption it might be extremely annoying if all living entities in the game world had genetics, such as every random flower or tree you walk by. To offset this, wild trees and plants would have a genetic system defined by the chunk's seed value. It's only made into a specific example if it is taken or planted by the player.
It's going to be a lot of fun to come up with cool things that can vary. Like growing a vast field of sparkler-mushrooms and carefully culling out the ones that don't sparkle in quite the right way... there's going to be a challenge in terms of computation, but I think it'll be okay.
In terms of challenge, none of these things outright offer challenge. None of them say "do this or die". I think there's room for that, sure, but I think the room is already full from every other game ever made being in it. I'm thinking the challenge should be about finding or creating some kind of very limited energy stones or something. If you are within range of an energy source, you have the ability to break bricks, glide, have a deep inventory, craft magic stuff, maybe see through walls - lots of cool possibilities. The further from the energy stone, the longer it takes to gather enough energy to do that, until you quickly have no special capabilities at all. Fine for exploring, but the cool stuff is where the energy stones are.
Of course, the devices in the game would also largely rely on energy from the energy stone, often piped out in pipe bricks...
Anyway, that's the direction I'm thinking.
... THE UPDATES STILL HAVEN'T INSTALLED.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Crew of the Starship
So, I've been thinking a little about space ship games. Generative roguelikeish space ship games like FTL or any of the bajillion space cargo games, for example.
The gap between these and TV shows is pretty big. Compare the Star Trek TV show with the games that are supposed to be "Star Trek like". They're basically combat simulators.
But the combat was never really the focus in Star Trek. Every combat played a role in the overall plot of the episode, but it was just a small cog among politics, characterization, mystery, relationships, science...
Every game just simulates combat. Characterization and politics and mystery, if there are any, are relegated to scripted sequences.
Is there any way to create a game where these matter? Where they are the play and evolve as you dictate?
Sure.
The beating heart of the game is the crew (main characters). Even if your ship has 3000 crew, only ~6 of those are going to start off as named characters with screen time. Just assign each of them a personality/alignment. We'll pretend we have the rights to a real Star Trek series - say, Star Trek TNG - and use them as an example.
Data is logical, post-beard Riker is confident and relaxed, Picard is an honest negotiator, Worf is the honorable warrior, etc. Sure, this isn't universally true and it varies depending on episode and season, but let's go ahead and assume those are how the characters are defined in our engine.
Now, just having a personality isn't really enough. They have to make those personalities matter, which means encountering things they can judge. Here is the first little trick: deciding who has what roles is important not necessarily because of skills, but of because how that person will react to the things they will encounter. The other half of this is that the first person who encounters and judges something will frame it for the rest of the crew.
In an ordinary game, you'd just send Data everywhere on his own, because he speaks every language, hacks every computer, is pretty much immune to damage, and could probably take on an entire wall of armed Klingons. But in our game, Data's personality is a serious limitation.
For example, if he beams over to a damaged ship and finds that there is only one survivor and it's a suspicious new alien, his reaction would be to consider it logically. The alien probably trashed the ship and killed everyone. The logical thing to do is to play it very safe, not go anywhere near the alien, maybe see if you can stun it or talk in semaphore or something.
On the other hand, if you send Riker over, he'll see the alien and be all "Data, cover me, I'll go and see if I can talk to it" and actually get stuff done.
If you send Worf over, he'd say "It doesn't seem hostile..." (IE 'doesn't set off my warrior-sense') and then Data would be convinced and go over to talk.
This really begins to shine when the situation grows more complex and more things are being thrown at the crew.
For example, let's say the crew goes down to talk to an isolated culture that's interested in negotiating with the Federation. There's a secret here - there's always some sci-fi conceit in every episode, and in this one it's that they're all clones and are suffering "genetic fatigue". There are a lot of pieces in motion - some locals want to steal genetic information from the crew, others want to hide the situation, others want to explore options to cure the fatigue, others are worried about the destabilization that new people bring to their dozen-people-over-and-over society... and, of course, there's also the question of whether they are at war, have unusual technologies they want to use or trade with, and so on.
So Picard is doing most of the talking to the officials, Riker is chatting with the locals unofficially, Worf is getting hit on, and they are all reacting and acting according to their personalities. If they were in a different roles, they would be encountering the same things but have different reactions. Worf chatting with the locals and Riker getting hit on have a completely different feel and resulting vector.
For example, Riker chatting with the locals means he discovers the complex social norms that threaten to be destroyed by their intervention, which would plunge the world into chaos. Worf chatting with the locals means he awkwardly ends up talking to the resistance movement and discovers the plans to destroy the capital while the captain is in negotiation with all the world leaders. In both cases, these threats exist whether or not they are discovered. Although, for fairness' sake, there's no threat of actually losing crew to a blast you didn't know would happen.
Now let's say you throw a doctor into the mix. The doctor's skills discover that they are all clones. How does she react to this info?
Beverly was a pretty typical Star Trek doctor, representing "standard human impulse". I would maybe classify her personality as "conservative and discreet". So she would react in a specific way: she would whisper to the captain about it, and then her judgment would filter the captain's opinion. Her judgment is probably "this seems like a bad way to build a society".
But let's say that Data played that role instead. His reaction would be logical: "this seems like a reliable way to build a lasting society" - all the same parts working in the same way. Like a machine. Seems good!
So depending on who brings Picard the news, he'll either get the impression that the society is wonky and fragile, or that the society is smooth and functioning well. This, in turn, will change his opinion on what the negotiations need to accomplish.
If Picard thinks the society is about to collapse, he'll negotiate aggressively to bring in social assistance, even at the price of damaging the local culture. On the other hand, if he thinks the society is solid and not in any trouble, he's going to take a more relaxed stance and generally try to work out simple foothold treaties like nonaggression pacts and a cultural exchange.
So, basically, we've broken everything that happens into two groups. Things you can judge, and things you can influence. Every plot arc is a scientific conceit wrapped up in a scenario. You affect it using the things you can influence, and how you influence those things depends on the judgments your crew makes and tells you about.
Discovering that the aliens are clones is something you judge, not something you influence. So you just tell the captain your judgment.
Negotiating with the politicians isn't something you judge, but instead is something you influence. It has a bunch of different vectors depending on your personality. On his own, Picard's "honest negotiator" personality will result in a simple, slow unfolding of the relationship between that planet and the Federation. However, news that the society is very interesting and stable might change his personality to "friendly negotiator", while news that it's unstable and weird might change his personality to "aggressive negotiator" or "nanny".
Then the player's duties are changed from shooting at people and optimizing skills. Their new duties are to send out feelers and collect judgments. Then they decide how to propagate those judgments.
For example, Beverly discovers that the locals are clones and passes a skeptical judgment. You, as the player, get to decide. Does she tell the captain? Does she tell Riker? Maybe she even just tells Worf. Maybe she dithers around for a while without telling anyone. Each of these has different results, because it changes (or doesn't change) the personalities of the other crew members and exactly what they are trying to do in their situation.
Maybe you tell Riker, who is currently talking to some cultural leaders. This changes his personality from "relaxed and confident" to "dismissive and confident", and he goes from talking to them in a reassuring manner to telling them that their culture cannot survive, and they need to start laying the foundation for a new culture this second.
Later on, Riker's cultural leaders and Picard's politicians are going to play a big role in resolving the situation. If Riker was reassuring to the cultural leaders while Picard pushed to get cultural advisers assigned, the two factions are going to be at loggerheads and perhaps unify against the Federation. On the other hand, if Riker convinced the cultural leaders to pioneer a new culture and Picard simply opened basic negotiations, the two factions aren't going to be at loggerheads. One is vaguely pro-Federation, the other is very pro-Federation.
So... yeah. That's the kind of structure I've been thinking about.
The gap between these and TV shows is pretty big. Compare the Star Trek TV show with the games that are supposed to be "Star Trek like". They're basically combat simulators.
But the combat was never really the focus in Star Trek. Every combat played a role in the overall plot of the episode, but it was just a small cog among politics, characterization, mystery, relationships, science...
Every game just simulates combat. Characterization and politics and mystery, if there are any, are relegated to scripted sequences.
Is there any way to create a game where these matter? Where they are the play and evolve as you dictate?
Sure.
The beating heart of the game is the crew (main characters). Even if your ship has 3000 crew, only ~6 of those are going to start off as named characters with screen time. Just assign each of them a personality/alignment. We'll pretend we have the rights to a real Star Trek series - say, Star Trek TNG - and use them as an example.
Data is logical, post-beard Riker is confident and relaxed, Picard is an honest negotiator, Worf is the honorable warrior, etc. Sure, this isn't universally true and it varies depending on episode and season, but let's go ahead and assume those are how the characters are defined in our engine.
Now, just having a personality isn't really enough. They have to make those personalities matter, which means encountering things they can judge. Here is the first little trick: deciding who has what roles is important not necessarily because of skills, but of because how that person will react to the things they will encounter. The other half of this is that the first person who encounters and judges something will frame it for the rest of the crew.
In an ordinary game, you'd just send Data everywhere on his own, because he speaks every language, hacks every computer, is pretty much immune to damage, and could probably take on an entire wall of armed Klingons. But in our game, Data's personality is a serious limitation.
For example, if he beams over to a damaged ship and finds that there is only one survivor and it's a suspicious new alien, his reaction would be to consider it logically. The alien probably trashed the ship and killed everyone. The logical thing to do is to play it very safe, not go anywhere near the alien, maybe see if you can stun it or talk in semaphore or something.
On the other hand, if you send Riker over, he'll see the alien and be all "Data, cover me, I'll go and see if I can talk to it" and actually get stuff done.
If you send Worf over, he'd say "It doesn't seem hostile..." (IE 'doesn't set off my warrior-sense') and then Data would be convinced and go over to talk.
This really begins to shine when the situation grows more complex and more things are being thrown at the crew.
For example, let's say the crew goes down to talk to an isolated culture that's interested in negotiating with the Federation. There's a secret here - there's always some sci-fi conceit in every episode, and in this one it's that they're all clones and are suffering "genetic fatigue". There are a lot of pieces in motion - some locals want to steal genetic information from the crew, others want to hide the situation, others want to explore options to cure the fatigue, others are worried about the destabilization that new people bring to their dozen-people-over-and-over society... and, of course, there's also the question of whether they are at war, have unusual technologies they want to use or trade with, and so on.
So Picard is doing most of the talking to the officials, Riker is chatting with the locals unofficially, Worf is getting hit on, and they are all reacting and acting according to their personalities. If they were in a different roles, they would be encountering the same things but have different reactions. Worf chatting with the locals and Riker getting hit on have a completely different feel and resulting vector.
For example, Riker chatting with the locals means he discovers the complex social norms that threaten to be destroyed by their intervention, which would plunge the world into chaos. Worf chatting with the locals means he awkwardly ends up talking to the resistance movement and discovers the plans to destroy the capital while the captain is in negotiation with all the world leaders. In both cases, these threats exist whether or not they are discovered. Although, for fairness' sake, there's no threat of actually losing crew to a blast you didn't know would happen.
Now let's say you throw a doctor into the mix. The doctor's skills discover that they are all clones. How does she react to this info?
Beverly was a pretty typical Star Trek doctor, representing "standard human impulse". I would maybe classify her personality as "conservative and discreet". So she would react in a specific way: she would whisper to the captain about it, and then her judgment would filter the captain's opinion. Her judgment is probably "this seems like a bad way to build a society".
But let's say that Data played that role instead. His reaction would be logical: "this seems like a reliable way to build a lasting society" - all the same parts working in the same way. Like a machine. Seems good!
So depending on who brings Picard the news, he'll either get the impression that the society is wonky and fragile, or that the society is smooth and functioning well. This, in turn, will change his opinion on what the negotiations need to accomplish.
If Picard thinks the society is about to collapse, he'll negotiate aggressively to bring in social assistance, even at the price of damaging the local culture. On the other hand, if he thinks the society is solid and not in any trouble, he's going to take a more relaxed stance and generally try to work out simple foothold treaties like nonaggression pacts and a cultural exchange.
So, basically, we've broken everything that happens into two groups. Things you can judge, and things you can influence. Every plot arc is a scientific conceit wrapped up in a scenario. You affect it using the things you can influence, and how you influence those things depends on the judgments your crew makes and tells you about.
Discovering that the aliens are clones is something you judge, not something you influence. So you just tell the captain your judgment.
Negotiating with the politicians isn't something you judge, but instead is something you influence. It has a bunch of different vectors depending on your personality. On his own, Picard's "honest negotiator" personality will result in a simple, slow unfolding of the relationship between that planet and the Federation. However, news that the society is very interesting and stable might change his personality to "friendly negotiator", while news that it's unstable and weird might change his personality to "aggressive negotiator" or "nanny".
Then the player's duties are changed from shooting at people and optimizing skills. Their new duties are to send out feelers and collect judgments. Then they decide how to propagate those judgments.
For example, Beverly discovers that the locals are clones and passes a skeptical judgment. You, as the player, get to decide. Does she tell the captain? Does she tell Riker? Maybe she even just tells Worf. Maybe she dithers around for a while without telling anyone. Each of these has different results, because it changes (or doesn't change) the personalities of the other crew members and exactly what they are trying to do in their situation.
Maybe you tell Riker, who is currently talking to some cultural leaders. This changes his personality from "relaxed and confident" to "dismissive and confident", and he goes from talking to them in a reassuring manner to telling them that their culture cannot survive, and they need to start laying the foundation for a new culture this second.
Later on, Riker's cultural leaders and Picard's politicians are going to play a big role in resolving the situation. If Riker was reassuring to the cultural leaders while Picard pushed to get cultural advisers assigned, the two factions are going to be at loggerheads and perhaps unify against the Federation. On the other hand, if Riker convinced the cultural leaders to pioneer a new culture and Picard simply opened basic negotiations, the two factions aren't going to be at loggerheads. One is vaguely pro-Federation, the other is very pro-Federation.
So... yeah. That's the kind of structure I've been thinking about.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Navigation as Familiarization
While hurting my head with hair mechanics, I've thought a little bit about games where you move around a world.
I really love moving through a world. Crackdown was a good game to me, because running through the city was so damn fun.
In the prototypes I've created, I've found a few things out.
The biggest is that - shock - your world needs to be lumpy. That is, it needs to have lumps with very different flavor from each other. I think some people really underestimate this. It's a bit more complex than it looks.
First, the regions of the world have to look distinct so the player will be able to remember the various regions and know what to expect when they enter an area. This can't just be a visual change: the nature of the topology has to be different, so that each area feels unique to be in.
This is one reason I don't much like games where driving around is the primary method of getting around. Driving doesn't really feel that varied, and you can't easily look around.
There's a lot of different ways of getting around, and it feels like folly to try to make basically all your methods of getting around variations on the exact same basic method.
So the thing I've discovered: The world map isn't defined by the stuff in it. It's defined by the way you move through it.
So, obviously, when we talk about the way the world varies, we should vary it by changing how you move through it. More than that, we can combine various methods to allow you to explore along different grooves and get different views on the same areas.
For example, let's say our character has motorized roller blades. The state of the road will therefore matter, and we can create unique ground paths by varying between straight roads, tight roads, stairs, slopes, grass - all of this will change ground travel.
But we can also talk about the high travel across the rooftops. Here we can talk about dash capability on long roofs, traveling across beams that connect the roofs, leaping from roof to roof fluidly, leaping and catching a ledge, climbing sides, controlled falls, slides, and catapulting... these all lead to a different kind of groove, a different level of open-ness, and a different fundamental feel.
So you can build your city by mixing different ground and air travel types. Now, the key is that you don't say "zone 13 is parkland and smooth-jump". Instead, you use the various methods to work at odds. So "zone 13" might have parkland and smooth-jumping, but they would be crossing. If you were currently doing the smooth-jumping, you would be exploring in a different direction and seeing things from a different angle. Basically, this allows you to have the player treat the same space in different ways, moving in different directions, seeing different things.
But that's just the tip of the process.
What about vehicles? Well, cars and bikes aren't very useful because our character has magic roller blades. But there are other options. Gliders, sky rails, cannons that fire you at angles of your preference... There's also the option of underground travel, although this is done best with "open" undergrounds rather than sewers, because you want the player to frequently see the buildings and areas he knows from above ground.
Sky travel is frequently long-range, so we need to understand that when using it.
There's also different world modes we can explore. Night vs day. Rain verse clear. Spirit world versus real world. These can change the player's capabilities, the world's nature, and so on.
These days, most open worlds have very large worlds. I would actually prefer smaller worlds with higher density, and these different world modes open up a very easy way to increase the density. For example, in the clear day, the massive solar wings extend on many of the buildings, changing the way the high travel plays. In the night, the buildings retract slightly, conserving heat.
And so on.
I really love moving through a world. Crackdown was a good game to me, because running through the city was so damn fun.
In the prototypes I've created, I've found a few things out.
The biggest is that - shock - your world needs to be lumpy. That is, it needs to have lumps with very different flavor from each other. I think some people really underestimate this. It's a bit more complex than it looks.
First, the regions of the world have to look distinct so the player will be able to remember the various regions and know what to expect when they enter an area. This can't just be a visual change: the nature of the topology has to be different, so that each area feels unique to be in.
This is one reason I don't much like games where driving around is the primary method of getting around. Driving doesn't really feel that varied, and you can't easily look around.
There's a lot of different ways of getting around, and it feels like folly to try to make basically all your methods of getting around variations on the exact same basic method.
So the thing I've discovered: The world map isn't defined by the stuff in it. It's defined by the way you move through it.
So, obviously, when we talk about the way the world varies, we should vary it by changing how you move through it. More than that, we can combine various methods to allow you to explore along different grooves and get different views on the same areas.
For example, let's say our character has motorized roller blades. The state of the road will therefore matter, and we can create unique ground paths by varying between straight roads, tight roads, stairs, slopes, grass - all of this will change ground travel.
But we can also talk about the high travel across the rooftops. Here we can talk about dash capability on long roofs, traveling across beams that connect the roofs, leaping from roof to roof fluidly, leaping and catching a ledge, climbing sides, controlled falls, slides, and catapulting... these all lead to a different kind of groove, a different level of open-ness, and a different fundamental feel.
So you can build your city by mixing different ground and air travel types. Now, the key is that you don't say "zone 13 is parkland and smooth-jump". Instead, you use the various methods to work at odds. So "zone 13" might have parkland and smooth-jumping, but they would be crossing. If you were currently doing the smooth-jumping, you would be exploring in a different direction and seeing things from a different angle. Basically, this allows you to have the player treat the same space in different ways, moving in different directions, seeing different things.
But that's just the tip of the process.
What about vehicles? Well, cars and bikes aren't very useful because our character has magic roller blades. But there are other options. Gliders, sky rails, cannons that fire you at angles of your preference... There's also the option of underground travel, although this is done best with "open" undergrounds rather than sewers, because you want the player to frequently see the buildings and areas he knows from above ground.
Sky travel is frequently long-range, so we need to understand that when using it.
There's also different world modes we can explore. Night vs day. Rain verse clear. Spirit world versus real world. These can change the player's capabilities, the world's nature, and so on.
These days, most open worlds have very large worlds. I would actually prefer smaller worlds with higher density, and these different world modes open up a very easy way to increase the density. For example, in the clear day, the massive solar wings extend on many of the buildings, changing the way the high travel plays. In the night, the buildings retract slightly, conserving heat.
And so on.
Friday, May 24, 2013
Ranks and Tiers for Fun
I don't play Pokemon, so I never really learned much about the complex metagame that evolved around competitive Pokemon. In a normal fighting game, the characters are often ranked into tiers by the players - this player is top-tier, that player is bottom-tier, etc. This is normally based around how well they perform in the hands of the top-level players, but in general most of the top-tier characters will be better than most of the bottom-tier characters even in the hands of a relative newbie.
So you play top-tier characters more or less exclusively.
But Pokemon has a very different ranking system. I'm not 100% sure on all the details, but essentially the tiers are fundamentally similar to fighting game tiers... except that they are divided into leagues.
IE, both sides will play top-tier Pokemon (or lower). Or, alternately, perhaps it's a mid-tier and lower... or even a low-tier and lower. If you really love your shitty Pokemon, or have come up with an interesting combo using low-grade mons, you can dominate the lower-tier competition and not worry about the battles between the overpowered heavy hitters. It's sort of like boxing: you don't generally mix heavyweights and flyweights in one battle, but the flyweight battles are still very intense and interesting.
Unlike boxing, we divide up by global performance rather than by something like weight. This means that as the games iterate and evolve, mons can climb or fall. This keeps the whole arrangement flexible enough to support tiered play regardless of whether the balance shifts or not.
I really like this method. It gives us a way to have hundreds of options without making 85 of them useless to a top-flight player. More like the opposite: perhaps 85 of them will be useful to a top-flight player depending on which category he participates in. The others will be in the awkward state of being too strong for one tier, but too weak to be useful on the next tier up.
Now, the Pokemon ranking system focuses on rather simple conflicts rather than the more complex conflicts that are becoming the norm. It becomes very hard to come up with a ratings system when, for example, one character is point and two characters are support, and they can swap out.
Then you get something like the new "vs Capcom" tiers, where the characters have a front-line tier and a support tier. A character that is strong at one and weak at the other isn't exactly mid-tier... they are top-tier when used correctly, or bottom-tier when used badly.
This complexity adds a lot of metagame (can you force them to switch out their front line combatant for their support?) but it also adds a lot of complexity to the idea of weight classes. If you are playing a mid-tier conflict and you use a mid-tier support character, fine... but that character is god-tier front-line, so what happens if you switch to him mid fight? Similarly, if you simply ban all characters with any tier higher than the weight class, you'll end up with the mid-tier class dominated by people who are blandly balanced - mid-tier at everything. But in actuality, that means they are better than mid-tier, because they can serve reliably in all roles regardless of the situation. So they aren't mid-tier characters... but in a top-tier battle, they can't reliably hold up in any role...
There are a lot of really fun options you can play with how you implement this kind of thing. Rather than win/loss ratios, you could simply go by how often they are used. If a particular mid-ranked character is used in 30% of all mid-ranked matches, you know they are dominating the mid-rank and should be promoted even if their "stat" ranks are all mid-tier.
Another option is a point-buy system where each tier allows you to spend a certain number of points on characters, and the ranks are not about banning, but about deciding price.
Another option is an auto-nerf system. At the end of each month, each character is gently nerfed or buffed depending on whether it was over- or under-utilized. With a significant player base (> 1000, each using 3+ characters), this should actually settle pretty quickly.
...
MOREOVER, this can all be applied to user-generated content.
The big problem with user-generated content is that it is generally not seen by very many players. Most players are going to try out most Pokemon. Most players are going to try out most fighting game characters. But most players are not going to try out most quests created by random internet people. This leaves a very fractured ranking that tends to result in a few excessively popular pieces of content and millions that never get seen by anybody.
Rather than say that the good content is simply better, you could divvy up the content into weight classes. This super-popular content is top tier, the most polished and highly regarded. But you earn points by using content from the lower tiers - the amateur tier and the beginner tier. Of course, just by using them you push them towards the next tier up...
Hm. Maybe rather than giving "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", you rank it before you start on #/5 and then, afterwards, as "better/worse than expected"...
So you play top-tier characters more or less exclusively.
But Pokemon has a very different ranking system. I'm not 100% sure on all the details, but essentially the tiers are fundamentally similar to fighting game tiers... except that they are divided into leagues.
IE, both sides will play top-tier Pokemon (or lower). Or, alternately, perhaps it's a mid-tier and lower... or even a low-tier and lower. If you really love your shitty Pokemon, or have come up with an interesting combo using low-grade mons, you can dominate the lower-tier competition and not worry about the battles between the overpowered heavy hitters. It's sort of like boxing: you don't generally mix heavyweights and flyweights in one battle, but the flyweight battles are still very intense and interesting.
Unlike boxing, we divide up by global performance rather than by something like weight. This means that as the games iterate and evolve, mons can climb or fall. This keeps the whole arrangement flexible enough to support tiered play regardless of whether the balance shifts or not.
I really like this method. It gives us a way to have hundreds of options without making 85 of them useless to a top-flight player. More like the opposite: perhaps 85 of them will be useful to a top-flight player depending on which category he participates in. The others will be in the awkward state of being too strong for one tier, but too weak to be useful on the next tier up.
Now, the Pokemon ranking system focuses on rather simple conflicts rather than the more complex conflicts that are becoming the norm. It becomes very hard to come up with a ratings system when, for example, one character is point and two characters are support, and they can swap out.
Then you get something like the new "vs Capcom" tiers, where the characters have a front-line tier and a support tier. A character that is strong at one and weak at the other isn't exactly mid-tier... they are top-tier when used correctly, or bottom-tier when used badly.
This complexity adds a lot of metagame (can you force them to switch out their front line combatant for their support?) but it also adds a lot of complexity to the idea of weight classes. If you are playing a mid-tier conflict and you use a mid-tier support character, fine... but that character is god-tier front-line, so what happens if you switch to him mid fight? Similarly, if you simply ban all characters with any tier higher than the weight class, you'll end up with the mid-tier class dominated by people who are blandly balanced - mid-tier at everything. But in actuality, that means they are better than mid-tier, because they can serve reliably in all roles regardless of the situation. So they aren't mid-tier characters... but in a top-tier battle, they can't reliably hold up in any role...
There are a lot of really fun options you can play with how you implement this kind of thing. Rather than win/loss ratios, you could simply go by how often they are used. If a particular mid-ranked character is used in 30% of all mid-ranked matches, you know they are dominating the mid-rank and should be promoted even if their "stat" ranks are all mid-tier.
Another option is a point-buy system where each tier allows you to spend a certain number of points on characters, and the ranks are not about banning, but about deciding price.
Another option is an auto-nerf system. At the end of each month, each character is gently nerfed or buffed depending on whether it was over- or under-utilized. With a significant player base (> 1000, each using 3+ characters), this should actually settle pretty quickly.
...
MOREOVER, this can all be applied to user-generated content.
The big problem with user-generated content is that it is generally not seen by very many players. Most players are going to try out most Pokemon. Most players are going to try out most fighting game characters. But most players are not going to try out most quests created by random internet people. This leaves a very fractured ranking that tends to result in a few excessively popular pieces of content and millions that never get seen by anybody.
Rather than say that the good content is simply better, you could divvy up the content into weight classes. This super-popular content is top tier, the most polished and highly regarded. But you earn points by using content from the lower tiers - the amateur tier and the beginner tier. Of course, just by using them you push them towards the next tier up...
Hm. Maybe rather than giving "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", you rank it before you start on #/5 and then, afterwards, as "better/worse than expected"...
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Maker Academy
Games built around a school setting have a bunch of advantages. There is a strong scaffold for goals and rewards, there are clear social relationships and subcultures, the choices are easy to understand but still important, there is a good place to hang your statistical gameplay, people all start at a similar power level, and it's appealing to people who have been to a school and like to see echoes of that, except better.
The obvious example of a school setting is Hogwarts, and the "magic school" setting is so widespread it's gone from being a subgenre to almost being a genre in its own right. Hogwarts certainly wasn't the first, but it was probably the popularizer. Dozens of comics, anime, and games are based in schools and benefit from many of the advantages listed above.
The big innovation Hogwarts popularized was the idea of houses. That feeling of being lost or adrift that you may have felt during school is gone. You instantly belong, you instantly know the kind of person you're expected to be and the kind of things people will look for in your actions. If you value pushy heroics, join Gryffindor and they'll value your personality. If you like considering and understanding things, join Ravenclaw, that's where they'll value your personality. Just create a house for each kind of audience member and your audience will project themselves into your universe faster than you can blink!
In games this is also quite an opportunity, allowing players to instantly tell you what variant of your game they want to play. But, oddly, most games don't use factions that way. They use factions to give statistical bonuses, which is totally dropping the ball. Factions such as school 'houses' should be there to give the players a framework of valuation, not a particular bonus and penalty. You can be a smart Gryffindor or a mighty Ravenclaw, both are perfectly acceptable. It's just that your actions would be rewarded based on your houses' preferences. You can be a smart hero, a muscular buddha.
This is the strength that games leave at the door. The opportunity they throw away.
Also, if you make it into an open game where players can live their student life as they see fit, you need to have a more heavyweight backbone of adventure and progression than most school-based games use. Of course, that's because actual school doesn't exist to let you adventure or choose your path. Real schools exist to teach you a million things you need to learn to work at a factory, and then kick you out. So you'll have to build a framework that goes much further than simply 'classes and grades'.
Let's posit a game, just for the sake of being clear.
This is a school for scientists and makers, rather than magicians. The reason? Well, fundamentally science is about discovering stuff and making is about creating stuff. That'll form the backbone of our adventure and progression system, with classes forming the backbone of our basic goal and reward scaffold.
For houses, rather than use different personality types, we'll use different kinds of cooperation. We'll play a bit fast and loose with this. Rather than actually talking about different kinds of cooperation that scientists use, we'll instead codify it as famous science projects that have different kinds of behavior within them.
This was based on this G+ post via this G+ post. The examples are all from astrophysics, but I would argue that this isn't bad. Astrophysics is full of projects which are big, concrete, and open. You can see how the pieces work, they are actual pieces that keep working for years or decades, and they work in specific ways to get science done. These sorts of things could form the basis of our house system, reflecting how you would prefer to acquire knowledge and build the future.
For example, the LHC is about slamming particles together as hard as possible, generating so much data that it takes weeks to filter through it. House Hadron students might therefore be expected to perform big experiments and then spend quite a bit of time poring over every detail of the experiment. The makers would, for example, build a complex 3D printer and then run it into the ground by stress-testing it for ten weeks.
On the other hand, House Curiosity is about observations in places people can't reach or rarely go. Curious students would be expected to search caves, mountains, the bottom of the pond out front, the steam tunnels, the headmaster's locked desk drawers... anywhere people don't ordinarily go, Curious students would go - looking for inspiration and information. A Curious maker might build a submersible to explore a pond, or a quad-copter to fly to the top of a mountain.
Once you get over the extremely geeky nature of the game, I think you can see that there's meat here. Players would be able to decide pretty quickly whether they would prefer large projects or exploration. Or any of the other houses that get put into the game.
Moreover, the fact that the students are gathering data, investigating, and building means that they have a scaffold for adventures and growth outside of the classroom, whereas in a magic-based game you might have to script all those adventures line by painful line.
The obvious example of a school setting is Hogwarts, and the "magic school" setting is so widespread it's gone from being a subgenre to almost being a genre in its own right. Hogwarts certainly wasn't the first, but it was probably the popularizer. Dozens of comics, anime, and games are based in schools and benefit from many of the advantages listed above.
The big innovation Hogwarts popularized was the idea of houses. That feeling of being lost or adrift that you may have felt during school is gone. You instantly belong, you instantly know the kind of person you're expected to be and the kind of things people will look for in your actions. If you value pushy heroics, join Gryffindor and they'll value your personality. If you like considering and understanding things, join Ravenclaw, that's where they'll value your personality. Just create a house for each kind of audience member and your audience will project themselves into your universe faster than you can blink!
In games this is also quite an opportunity, allowing players to instantly tell you what variant of your game they want to play. But, oddly, most games don't use factions that way. They use factions to give statistical bonuses, which is totally dropping the ball. Factions such as school 'houses' should be there to give the players a framework of valuation, not a particular bonus and penalty. You can be a smart Gryffindor or a mighty Ravenclaw, both are perfectly acceptable. It's just that your actions would be rewarded based on your houses' preferences. You can be a smart hero, a muscular buddha.
This is the strength that games leave at the door. The opportunity they throw away.
Also, if you make it into an open game where players can live their student life as they see fit, you need to have a more heavyweight backbone of adventure and progression than most school-based games use. Of course, that's because actual school doesn't exist to let you adventure or choose your path. Real schools exist to teach you a million things you need to learn to work at a factory, and then kick you out. So you'll have to build a framework that goes much further than simply 'classes and grades'.
Let's posit a game, just for the sake of being clear.
This is a school for scientists and makers, rather than magicians. The reason? Well, fundamentally science is about discovering stuff and making is about creating stuff. That'll form the backbone of our adventure and progression system, with classes forming the backbone of our basic goal and reward scaffold.
For houses, rather than use different personality types, we'll use different kinds of cooperation. We'll play a bit fast and loose with this. Rather than actually talking about different kinds of cooperation that scientists use, we'll instead codify it as famous science projects that have different kinds of behavior within them.
This was based on this G+ post via this G+ post. The examples are all from astrophysics, but I would argue that this isn't bad. Astrophysics is full of projects which are big, concrete, and open. You can see how the pieces work, they are actual pieces that keep working for years or decades, and they work in specific ways to get science done. These sorts of things could form the basis of our house system, reflecting how you would prefer to acquire knowledge and build the future.
For example, the LHC is about slamming particles together as hard as possible, generating so much data that it takes weeks to filter through it. House Hadron students might therefore be expected to perform big experiments and then spend quite a bit of time poring over every detail of the experiment. The makers would, for example, build a complex 3D printer and then run it into the ground by stress-testing it for ten weeks.
On the other hand, House Curiosity is about observations in places people can't reach or rarely go. Curious students would be expected to search caves, mountains, the bottom of the pond out front, the steam tunnels, the headmaster's locked desk drawers... anywhere people don't ordinarily go, Curious students would go - looking for inspiration and information. A Curious maker might build a submersible to explore a pond, or a quad-copter to fly to the top of a mountain.
Once you get over the extremely geeky nature of the game, I think you can see that there's meat here. Players would be able to decide pretty quickly whether they would prefer large projects or exploration. Or any of the other houses that get put into the game.
Moreover, the fact that the students are gathering data, investigating, and building means that they have a scaffold for adventures and growth outside of the classroom, whereas in a magic-based game you might have to script all those adventures line by painful line.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Farewell to Consoles
It's a little depressing to see something that was the foundation of my entertainment life veering away from me.
It'd be nice to think of myself as a computer gamer, but that was really only true for a few years - when computer games were good. Then came a vast wasteland of real time strategy games followed by MMORPGs - none of which are even vaguely interesting to me. I guess you could say that Blizzard killed my interest in computer games, and then killed my interest in MMORPGs. Pretty impressive for a company that actually produces good products!
So I've mostly been a console gamer. Kinda skipped the Playstation, because that's when computer games were good, but before and after that... consoles. Sure, a steady diet of indie PC games, and games that are ubiquitous cross-platform releases on the computer for modding purposes... but mostly console-oriented.
Of course I knew the PS4, NameStillStupidEvenAfterFiveYearsU, and the XBox Fucking Stupidname were all going to be aimed away from me. I'm not a "bro gamer", nor am I the "living room audience".
But seeing the consoles actually announced, seeing them come out and just totally say "BRO GAMER LIVING ROOM BRO BRO LIVING ROOM" is incredibly depressing. It really hammered home: not only am I not the core audience, they are actively blocking me out. Their features are actively things that annoy me and drive me away, and they are building their whole business strategy around telling me to go away.
I hate TV. I hate always-on social bullshit. I hate trophies. I hate water coolers. I hate that when you want to build an emotional attachment in a bro game, you have to make the buddy a dog because your humans are so inhuman that you can't bond with them. I'm interested in a tiny science fiction subset of bro shooters... oh, wait, they're going to be TV shows instead.
I hate TV.
The hardware is awesome. I want to play games on it.
But I can't. There aren't going to be any games I can play. Even the games aimed vaguely in my direction, such as RPGs or indie titles on their inevitable indie marketplace, are going to be poisoned by the "features" they must use. This isn't some kind of paranoid fantasy: games on the PS3 and 360 are already poisoned by trophy popups, scoreboards, ambient friend noise, another layer of trophies... and, of course, the omnipresent obsession with dehumanization that bleeds into every game on the console, even games which aren't about murdering people.
People thought Bioshock Infinite was awesome. To me, it was a ruined game. It was a shit game with shit mechanics further ruined by shit add-ins required to support shit social play... the part that everyone loved was the tiny kernel of humanity hiding beneath all that crap.
Well, if you released it on the computer, you wouldn't have needed the bullshit. It could have been a much shorter, more human game. But the console's restriction on content, length, trophies, marketing requirements... all of them destroyed the game. And this is the current generation of console.
The next generation of consoles literally came out and said "yeah, a lot more of that."
... Well, no.
I'm sorry, consoles. I love standalone games. I love the ritual of popping in a CD and booting up a machine and grabbing a controller. I love immersing myself in a world where there is no alt-tabbing, no keyboard, no mouse.
But that world doesn't exist any more. Those consoles don't exist any more.
There is nothing for me in this new world of big media companies force-feeding you bullshit all day. I don't like TV.
I don't like games that try to be TV.
I don't like these new consoles.
I guess I'm a computer gamer "for realz", now.
The only problem is that most of the computer games I play are small, indie games. The fat, poly-heavy AAA titles are all console-based. I need me some eye glitter from time to time.
Sure, those games come out cross-platform. But they're poisoned by consoles. The current generation consoles already stain these games with requirements for crappy play, marketing-demanded content, DLC, trophies, social play... you can take the game out of the console, but you can never take the console out of the game.
Are there going to be any epic, high-quality games on the PC in the upcoming generation?
Oh, right, MMORPGs. Just as fucking bad.
... Sigh...
I really hope indies start putting out serious eye candy, or I'll be getting plenty of vegetables but no meat in my gaming diet.
Actually, I guess that summarizes the argument. I love my older consoles. They're meat. The new consoles are high fructose corn syrup soda drinks.
I cannot deal with that. I can't pretend it's not happening, or just be okay with it. It's not the same thing, it tastes bad, and it's a company actively pushing bad shit on you in an attempt to make money more easily.
No! Gimme meat!
Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat!
It'd be nice to think of myself as a computer gamer, but that was really only true for a few years - when computer games were good. Then came a vast wasteland of real time strategy games followed by MMORPGs - none of which are even vaguely interesting to me. I guess you could say that Blizzard killed my interest in computer games, and then killed my interest in MMORPGs. Pretty impressive for a company that actually produces good products!
So I've mostly been a console gamer. Kinda skipped the Playstation, because that's when computer games were good, but before and after that... consoles. Sure, a steady diet of indie PC games, and games that are ubiquitous cross-platform releases on the computer for modding purposes... but mostly console-oriented.
Of course I knew the PS4, NameStillStupidEvenAfterFiveYearsU, and the XBox Fucking Stupidname were all going to be aimed away from me. I'm not a "bro gamer", nor am I the "living room audience".
But seeing the consoles actually announced, seeing them come out and just totally say "BRO GAMER LIVING ROOM BRO BRO LIVING ROOM" is incredibly depressing. It really hammered home: not only am I not the core audience, they are actively blocking me out. Their features are actively things that annoy me and drive me away, and they are building their whole business strategy around telling me to go away.
I hate TV. I hate always-on social bullshit. I hate trophies. I hate water coolers. I hate that when you want to build an emotional attachment in a bro game, you have to make the buddy a dog because your humans are so inhuman that you can't bond with them. I'm interested in a tiny science fiction subset of bro shooters... oh, wait, they're going to be TV shows instead.
I hate TV.
The hardware is awesome. I want to play games on it.
But I can't. There aren't going to be any games I can play. Even the games aimed vaguely in my direction, such as RPGs or indie titles on their inevitable indie marketplace, are going to be poisoned by the "features" they must use. This isn't some kind of paranoid fantasy: games on the PS3 and 360 are already poisoned by trophy popups, scoreboards, ambient friend noise, another layer of trophies... and, of course, the omnipresent obsession with dehumanization that bleeds into every game on the console, even games which aren't about murdering people.
People thought Bioshock Infinite was awesome. To me, it was a ruined game. It was a shit game with shit mechanics further ruined by shit add-ins required to support shit social play... the part that everyone loved was the tiny kernel of humanity hiding beneath all that crap.
Well, if you released it on the computer, you wouldn't have needed the bullshit. It could have been a much shorter, more human game. But the console's restriction on content, length, trophies, marketing requirements... all of them destroyed the game. And this is the current generation of console.
The next generation of consoles literally came out and said "yeah, a lot more of that."
... Well, no.
I'm sorry, consoles. I love standalone games. I love the ritual of popping in a CD and booting up a machine and grabbing a controller. I love immersing myself in a world where there is no alt-tabbing, no keyboard, no mouse.
But that world doesn't exist any more. Those consoles don't exist any more.
There is nothing for me in this new world of big media companies force-feeding you bullshit all day. I don't like TV.
I don't like games that try to be TV.
I don't like these new consoles.
I guess I'm a computer gamer "for realz", now.
The only problem is that most of the computer games I play are small, indie games. The fat, poly-heavy AAA titles are all console-based. I need me some eye glitter from time to time.
Sure, those games come out cross-platform. But they're poisoned by consoles. The current generation consoles already stain these games with requirements for crappy play, marketing-demanded content, DLC, trophies, social play... you can take the game out of the console, but you can never take the console out of the game.
Are there going to be any epic, high-quality games on the PC in the upcoming generation?
Oh, right, MMORPGs. Just as fucking bad.
... Sigh...
I really hope indies start putting out serious eye candy, or I'll be getting plenty of vegetables but no meat in my gaming diet.
Actually, I guess that summarizes the argument. I love my older consoles. They're meat. The new consoles are high fructose corn syrup soda drinks.
I cannot deal with that. I can't pretend it's not happening, or just be okay with it. It's not the same thing, it tastes bad, and it's a company actively pushing bad shit on you in an attempt to make money more easily.
No! Gimme meat!
Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat!
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