So this is the new year. Do you feel any different? When thinking about what 2009 holds, I want to think slightly beyond the many exciting games we’re looking forward to and get a bit more thematic. On what journey should gaming take us in the following year?
2008, despite containing a ton of great games, felt a bit of a filler year in terms of progress. 2007 felt so huge probably purely thanks to Portal, and the impact that had on our expectations of gaming. But did it have an impact on last year? I’m not sure it did, beyond a few games making references to it (World of Goo Sacred 2 to name the first that springs to mind). Will the last year of the decade see us beginning to define what the twenty-teens will be about?
The question really becomes about: what do you want to see games do this year? You know, developers read this site – post your thoughts below and they might get read by the right people. Let’s inspire them. So here’s a few thoughts I’ve had:
- Let’s start with Portal. Like so many interesting games, Portal was released to a cry of prophecies, forecasting the short-form game as an option for major publishers. But unless you count Mirror’s Edge’s five hour main game (and I’m betting EA would rather you didn’t), this hasn’t come to pass. Certainly indie games have clocked in at similar lengths, and similar prices, but we’ve not seen a major publisher commission themselves, or hire a dev team, to try and create something in a similar bracket. This is something I would love to see, despite being very aware of the stack of issues that come with it. Would Valve have been able to create Portal without bundling it in the Orange Box? Now they could, certainly, but how would it have been received if it weren’t riding on the back of hugely anticipated games like TF2 and Episode 2? Sometimes I think it could have. The point of a big publisher is they’ve got big advertising budgets, so it wouldn’t be a case of word-of-mouth sales. Why aren’t we seeing Ubisoft, EA, and so on creating novella games to a public that has proven they’re interested?
- I’m worried about the FPS. I’ve been worried about it for years now. I think it’s the most under-served genre on the PC, and the one most likely to be poop. Long ago the adventure game reached stagnancy because it stopped reinventing itself, and started photocopying. It’s never recovered, obviously. I believe the FPS is deeply in the same mire, and 2009 must be the year of its reinvention? What should that be? I dunno – I’m the bastard who writes about them later. That’s the developers’ challenge. But I’m fairly sure the answer isn’t “RPG elements”.
- Voice acting. Come on now, that’s enough. Developers, you must employ a voice director. It’s not enough to cast and give them lines in isolation. Sure, it takes a lot more work, but if there’s someone in the room making sure the standard is above a primary school play, and ensuring the intonations make sense, your games will seem so much better. It strikes me as very odd that few companies would be happy to ship a game with a glaringly obvious graphical glitch, but nearly all don’t seem to care if the lines are read out incorrectly. Not any more in 2009.
- I want 2009 to be the year of the comedy game. Brutal Legend is a good sign. So let’s have some laughs this year. But things have been a bit po-faced for a while now. It must be remembered, funny games need comedy writers. Hire them.
- Virtual reality hyper masks. No, I’m lying.
So what are your wishes/demands?
Related Stories:
Why didn’t RPS cover A Vampyre Story?
Or maybe RPS did.
@Post Maker: With regards to that fog you mentioned previously, you could also use it to screw with the player by making the game world loop around in a similar manner to how, for instance, the left/right exits in pacman merely lead to eachother rather than to different levels.
(Doubly so if theres only 4 roads leading into the town, all of which have a welcome to town-name sign and thank you for visiting town-name sign)
Wishful thinking probably, but the US government may be getting involved in the DRM fiasco.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/06/do-consumers-need-govt-protection-drm-it039s-agenda-ftc-conference
I’d normally not mention something relating to DRM due to potential thread derailment issues, but this could be BIG news.
Less CensoRPS.
No seriously. Spam filtering, I can get. Cutting out well-formulated opinions critical of such and such aspect of the RPS format, I can’t and don’t. The “it’s my blog” excuse doesn’t register with me when there are literally hundreds of blogs that foster heated debates, often aimed toward the very validity of said blogs as sources of information. And when a particular blog attain such lofty heights of “influence” as, say, RPS for the PC gaming community, such debates are key in legitimating that influence.
This is the internet people. Anything less than total freedom for well-developed criticism usually has a nasty political content attached. And a nasty smell at this point.
Larington:
We were tossing around a similar idea for a chase during the later levels, where one of the larger monsters (not a killzone monster, just a really big regular one) would be following the player (who was hopefully in a vehicle) around the town, with the fog closing in and cutting off the player’s view of the surroundings, then drawing back to reveal that they had been transported to some other area of town (one of maybe 20-30 randomly-chosen spawn points that the player be could dropped into during the chase).
The catch was going to be that you could avoid being teleported, but if you were the monster wouldn’t be teleported with you. The danger was that some of the teleport points were going to be underwater (drowning) or on top of buildings (deadly fall damage/ long trek down the stairs), so it was a gamble on how you wanted to escape. We put it to the side because of a large amount of problems that came up during another idea tossing session. If the fog makes the monsters, and it wants you dead (at this point we were considering the idea that the fog was sentient [we tossed that because it was the stupidest fucking thing we had ever heard]), why is it giving you the chance to escape? Why not teleport the monster to you if you managed to drive away? That, and we were still figuring out how the world would work at the time (something that still hasn’t quite been halfway finished) so it didn’t make sense to plan out a huge exciting gameplay section that we might have to scrap if the rules were changed later on.
The other idea (and the one that is closest to yours) was to use the fog to simplify the unplayable area, with the player running through the same section over and again (provided they were going away from town) with the fog drawing in behind them the longer they ran away (to disguise the fact that they weren’t actually moving anywhere). Keeping track of distance travelled would allow for a realistic amount of time required to travel back to town and help prevent a bunch of comparisons to Bowser’s Endless Staircase.
I’ve set a blog on about the game but there’s nothing on it yet, I’ll write a few posts and then poop out a link maybe? It’s on Wordpress.
HINTS.
@Candid
We delete a lot of stuff. If you don’t like it, tough. It’s how we run this blog. If your stuff has been deleted you’ll just have to deal with it.
You aren’t going to delete my stuff, are you?
I don’t really have it saved anywhere and I’m kind of enjoying the conversation here.
Maybe! Depends how crazy we’re feeling.
Oh my.
Post Maker – Cut and paste your ideas into a document!
Srejv – No, because it wasn’t very good.
@Jim
A bit irresponsible as an answer, is it not? I should “tough”? Censorship =/= Weather.
I don’t think I’m the only one who’s uncomfortable with this. Along with your articles themselves, the comments threads are a major part of “your blog’s” content. There are many commenters here who are, if not in the industry itself, at least a very knowledgeable bunch. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to consider that many of your articles depend in good proportion of the good will of these same commenters to keep you guys in the loop (regarding such and such mods, games, news, etc.). This good will, I feel, is not reciprocated with your policy of “tough-guy” arbitrary Censorship. Discuss.
The thing about authoritorial control, is that its usually wielded to prevent content being associated with things that the owners are uncomfortable with or dislike.
I certainly hold no ill will against RPS if they feel they need to protect the integrity of this blog through, as you say, censorship. The alternative is that this place potentially becomes like that gawker site – A fate I regard as being worse than death.
And at seeing Kierons reply, I’m going to force myself to stop at this.
I’m going to try and be helpful. Generally speaking, abuse gets deleted. Things like “First post” get deleted. Trolls get deleted. Borderline is stuff which we think is changing the tone of the comments threads. A debate isn’t the same thing as a free for all.
Occasionally we’ll try and push people towards the right topic or our favoured approach with a few gentle words. Occasionally we’ll get out the big ol’ hammer and annihilate it.
Things calling us corrupt mainly form into the latter, because frankly, if someone wanted to make constructive criticism on the site, they’d have gone to the criticism and comments section on the forum. And – really – if someone’s first response to critiquing us is to call us corrupt, we’ve got little interest in what you’re going to say.
Clue: Turning this thread into a debate about whether our moderating is too tough is not something we’re going to let you do. Go to the forum. This is a thread about people making their best wishes for 2009.
KG
I just want to add, on a note almost completely unrelated to anything in this post besides John’s obscure reference to Death Cab for Cutie, that Ben Gibbard (he of that band) is engaged to Zooey Deschanel and it broke my little indie heart. The bast.
To make it slightly more relevant: in 2009 I want to see Zooey Deschanel leave Ben Gibbard for me.
If you look anything like your avatar then I wish you the best of luck.
[Candid Man Would Like To Talk About Something A Bit Off-topic. Go And Join him! - Ed]
No more invincible children in games.
Fable 2’s word mechanics under the bonnet of Fallout 3s’ engine.
The slow, agonising, mute demise of all internet trolls (myself excluded).
Ditto Ps.
The introduction of invincible children is a direct result of developers hitting the question of just how far a players actions should be allowed to go. Some developers, right or wrong, have their own collective feelings about whether or not its right to depict the slaying of children and those feelings will inevitably be influenced by whether the developers staff have children themselves.
Alternatively, I once read word of a games developer being told to allow the slaying of children in a game (This occured some time ago) by a publisher. The developer understandably agonised about this decision and eventually found it necessary to send a query regarding the wisdom of such an addition to the legal department of the publisher making the demand – Which was then quietly dropped. No idea who the publisher and developer were and I have no doubt they’d prefer it stays that way.
Personally, I’m more in favour of developers doing everything they can to prevent child characters being so annoying that you end up wanting to strangle the life out of them.
This is one of these almost taboo issues in games development that I’d love to read articles about. Any offers Internets?
Little Lamplight in Fallout 3 is the perfect example of how not to write for children. Specifically the mayor, McGrady I think it was. I understand that the idea was to create characters that the player could hate but I’m never going through Fallout 3’s main stoyline again because of that place.
Blog is up. I came across the url while entering randomly cobbled together names when the first 3 attempts didn’t work. I like it well enough.
URL went a tad wayward there, http://gamepoop.wordpress.com/
I’ve added it to my favourites.
Pags: is that Zooey out of Left 4 Dead?
Larrington: I can understand the publishers concerns in this ago of peado-hysteria. Publish and be darned says me – from the safety of Noresponsibityville, granted.
Funky Badger: not quite. Though it would go some way to affirming my belief that musicians aren’t real people (or that game characters are, or something, either way it’s something really meta).
Wishes for 2009..(or more realistically 2 more years down the road)
Firstly to probably to see an upturn in the global economy.
Second to that and more game related, I guess I’d like to see Rockstar break free of the narrow constraints of what makes a GTA game (Go here and kill these guys for me) and actually deliver the more immediate, sandbox, stat free RPG/adventure game that is begging to be revealed in the game environment of a Liberty City. GTA IV was so nearly there.
I actually think something like Fallout 3s quest structure could work in a GTA IV context. Having an overall objective to achieve and being given some pointers on people to speak to rather than the linear progression of pick up X, take him to Y etc
Take the bank job missions for instance, it would be delightful if they told you that the bank needed robbing and you have the option of just wandering off and doing it yourself or digging a bit deeper and finding someone to disable the security first etc etc
Actually, I’m talking out of my arse, since what I apparently want is an action-RPG mod thing for GTA IV, which really I just a whole different game. Bugger.
@Schmung
Nope I hear exactly what you are saying, and it’s what I’d like also. Straight out of leftfield the other day I was reading something about Youtube and Marshall McLuhan and how he’d noted that whenever a new media appears initially it apes what’s come before until it matures and creates it’s own universe and dialogue (When TV first appeared, the early shows used to feature people reading radio scripts because the producers hadn’t fully realised they could enact the plays on screen). I couldn’t help but think about how computer RPGs have done this; for a long time they’ve copied and aped the old P&P RPG rule sets, but now with vast and detailed open and reactive world environments at their disposal developers have the opportunity to step beyond these environs into games that are less about statistical meta gaming and more about a players direct actions. GTA IV is frustratingly paddling in the shallows in this respect simply because it plays to previous expectations, rather than plunging into the lake fully, most irksome.
I’d like a couple more campaigns for Left 4 Dead. Also a Sniper pack for TF2. I’m easy to please.
Also some cool games, I guess.
Also, I’d like RPS to run more articles as good as the Pathologic dissection. The day to day stuff is good, but that series was excellent.
I have a list of games from 2008 which are under the
“Purchase once the mod scene has chewed them up and spit them back out.” These include:
Stalker: Clear Sky (Here’s hoping the oblivion lost team work similar magic here)
Fallout3: I want pre-animated death sequences which are over-the-top, but, importantly, funny. The gore in FO3 is just gratuitous. Funny it ain’t. I’m hoping fans will just copy the animations styles from the originals.
FarCry2 – if only to remove the ‘everyone wants you dead’ so I get to feel like the game world is a bit more coherent on its own terms and does not revolve around me.
Totally agree with Feet.
Plus everyone quits wow and gets back to real games.
Feet says:
I’d like…
- More mad
- More meaningful choices
- Less faux choices
- Less MMOs
- Less crappy or late or both ports
- Less DRM bs
- More rewarding paying customers
- More turned-based games
- Less graphics
- More gameplays
- More games with writing
- Less games with stupidness
Interesting Article ,
and Nice blog, I have already subscribed to it,
looking forward to reading the updates :p
keep up the good work!