All we’re really doing is tweaking to mitigate the issues of stick control – things being too sensitive while fine aiming/tracking, or not being sensitive enough when trying to turn through large angles. We certainly haven’t mitigated it to the point where there’s no skill involved, and we’re never pushing your aim in directions you haven’t explicitly asked for.

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if it’s activision then the greatest team shooter franchise is now dead

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What he DOES notice is that the controls are more intuitive and simple on older games, whereas the games themselves are easier now, but the controls are less intuitive. I think that’s a rather large condemnation of the industry I work in, and I am constantly asking myself what my son would think of whatever UI the game I’m working on has, or how he’d deal with the control schemes.

I know the saying that ‘if you design a system any idiot can use, you will find your system flooded with idiots’ (to paraphrase) is often true, I think too often we go the other way, usually designing a system only the designer of the system can use.

And we need to get the hell off of that, in addition to holding the hands of players, quickly. One thing my son DID mention is that he could more quickly figure out where to go/what to do in older games, without any hand-holding, but the second hand-holding failed in a newer game he was totally lost.

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“So you’ve actually played the game and know the level of aim-assist going on here?”

Like I said, I dont know what it is, but I WORRY because I’ve worked with it before. It’s not an instant fail, but anytime you take over control of something from someone it can lead to issues. Also, I hope it quickly falls into “if you’re in 10th of 15 players you get it, once you hit 9th you don’t” kind of thing.

Basically what I’m saying is that I appreciate that, when using something as imprecise as a controller, you’d consider an aim boost. I would say you don’t NEED one, because if no-one has one no-one is at an advantage. If you look back to the Quake series, the only time auto-aim was on was in single player, and that was because it launched as a DOS game. In multiplayer, however, auto-aim did not function. This trend towards hand-holding the player through every single action possible is not ideal, at least to me. I love the movement system that Brink is bringing to the table (heh), because it, according to SD at least, gives an advantage to players who do it manually. Auto-aim doesn’t do that, it’s ALWAYS helpful. Aim-assist, while it has problems with some situations, is also simply a boon. I would like a simple multiplayer experience where players aren’t hand-held the whole way, or totally fucks you for losing. There are games that are in the middle – TF2 for example. Games like Quake Wars had a tendency to screw you over if you had a bad start to a game – ie. being spawn killed over and over without the ability to stop it.

I do like the looks of a lot of this game, but aim-assist is a dark, dark path.

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Anyway, doubt this will be “hardcore” and it won’t take me away from TF2.

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“more realistic” doesn’t automatically = better

The real world often looks drab and boring. It is often very cluttered and messy. Both of these may work completely against the kind of game being designed. A game designer may want their game to look more dramatic and more beautiful than a typical real life scene. They may want to exaggerate the size shape and colour of everything to give it more visual impact. They may want to vasty simplify the graphics in order to focus on what is central to gameplay.

“…maxed out in terms of photorealism…” doesn’t just mean technically, it can also mean as a design philosophy: in the ‘old days’ someone looking at a scene might say ‘it’s OK but, it still looks a bit blocky – it would be improved by more realism and detail’. The point at which this becomes the main comment doesn’t just depend on technology – there may be a point reached where someone says: yes it looks very realistic but, I prefer a more stylised / cleaned-up / exaggerated / etc. look.

(And this is leaving aside the whole angle of why people prefer certain styles of comics or drawing, and why they might prefer this to more “realistic” and “photorealistic” styles.)

Presumably Nvidia, ATI and the TFT manufacturers are going to have a big push (at the high end) to get everyone to upgrade to +120Hz screens running in 3d. Having said that there is a vast ‘low/mid-end’ market out there in China/India/Brazil/etc. where the push will be to get a mass market to upgrade to what we would consider low-powered graphics – also getting better graphics into netbooks and other small devices. If we are lucky developers will ‘remix’ and reissue all their classic games with this kind of market in mind.

When a new technology arrives there will always be an initially creative surge using it to see what can be done, but once it has been done a few times people will sit back and say ‘do we actually like this better?’ It might be that developers realise that spending millions on photo-realism doesn’t actually make their games vastly more attractive in gaming terms and that in some contexts a more cartoonish or stylised approach is more popular. I expect there will always be a few developers who *do* pursue the ‘photorealism’ route, but this doesn’t mean it will always be the main design philosophy, if end-users actually prefer someting else.

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Honestly the only think stopping crysis from full photorealism (for everything except humans) is the fact that it needed to be playable.
Modded to massive detail (as the engine can be, and some people are doing) I bet that near photorealism has been achieved in that game just probably at 5FPS on people running beastly overclocked i7 quadcores and quad SLI.

Photo realism in humans can be achieved also, in still life – the problem isn’t appearance, it’s animation and physics… all of which serve to make the most photorealistic model in the world look like a corpse or a wax-work when viewed
Sitting in the deepest part of the uncanny valley.

No the main problem with the chase for photorealism now, is that the climb out of the uncanny valley (a theory I don’t fully agree with but one that sums up the issue in the simplest way, a graph) will take huge processing power that could be better used in games.
Simply put you could use 40% of your processing/memory budget on a minor increase in graphic fidelity (case in point the difference between high and very high in crisis, noticeable but so NOT worth the performance cost), or you could spend that budget on better physics, more enemies on screen so on so forth,

Physics is the new graphics, something that can be drastically improved and see noticeable (and thus sellable) generational improvements – HL2 had a cool physics engine, Red faction had destructible scenery, soon that kind of thing will be the norm in games. Realism in graphic fidelity has stalled, so realism in physics and interaction is the new hotness.

Hell just look at Nvidia desperately trying to take physics away from the CPU and put it on the GPU, because they KNOW that graphics cards have gotten as powerful as they need to be for just graphical rendering. There’s still room for upgrades atm, but they are minor.
I’m still running a 8800GT on one of my machines and it plays all new games just as well as my newer system (with a 4870X2 OC’d), the only difference is that the 8800GT system outputs to a 720p 32 inch TV or a 1440*900 monitor, while the newer system outputs at 1080p or 1920×1200 (often both) – the 8800 usually uses 4xAA while the other sits on 8xAA in most games…

And honestly unless I’m sitting so close that I can’t actually see the whole screen in my vision range, I can hardly notice the difference.
So Nvidia smelling the end of an era, where a user could upgrade a graphics card twice a year and get noticeable improvements each upgrade, to one where upgrading the graphics card every 2-3 years will be more than enough.

Anyway I could ramble on on this subject all day. It interests me as a Engineer that the kind of simulations I’ll run in Matlab to simulate various forces on various materials (what I like to call “bend, break or burn” simulations) will be making their way into video games.
Might be amusing when creating a video game engine, doesn’t just need software engineers, but all disciplines of engineers.

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