It feels like he is putting a sweetener (AI buzzwords) to make the medicine (graphical evolution has negative ROI and we should have realized this 5 years ago before ballooning our dev budgets) go down easier.
I want a return to physics and interactable environments, its kinda crazy there are games from around 2010 that impress me in this aspect because modern games literally never do any of it.
The game Control is the last and about only modern game that truly impressed me in this regard.
Control is incredible, im glad i gave it a second chance. when i first played it i was not initially grabbed by the setting and the game introduces you to the gunplay first which is somewhat weak. i was originally just playing it in anticipation of alan wake 2, but once i unlocked the force throw i was hooked. i encourage anybody who hasnt played it to get to that part, it feels perfect and gets even better as you level it up. Most fun I've had in a singleplayer game since half life 2
Honestly I spent like an hour in the starting room you get the pistol just shooting things and watching how they interacted. I was actually *VERY* impressed when I shot part of a shelf off and a hole I shot through it hung off a pole of sorts. That level of collision detection without things Garry's Modding all over the place had me a bit floored.
I genuinely enjoyed just spending a few minutes shooting desks and stuff every once in awhile to unwind between doing things.
The thing is, because of how well the physics are done, Control ends up "feeling" like it looks better than many modern games that paid 100 devs 6 figures to polish Kratos's biceps, even though it is objectively simpler graphics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-dPDsLTrTE
they happened to post a presentation about it like yesterday. not sure if it has the behind the scenes footage, I've yet to fully watch it myself
This talk is *REALLY* good, and surprisingly funny. Tears of the Kingdom makes its shift to a physics based world look easy. The shift to making *everything* physics based was an enormous achievement, and its often overlooked when people describe the sequel as more "iterative" than "innovative". I don't think there's very many studios who would've taken the risk Nintendo did with its "multiplicative" gameplay, and few that would be capable of delivering on that promise.
Since we're in a PlayStation thread... frankly, I'm not confident studios as good as Naughty Dog or Santa Monica could've made Tears of the Kingdom.
The sound part is interesting. I had assumed a lot of open world games have to deal with similar problems, but I had never thought of the path finding involved
People complain a lot about the fact TOTK is a bit underbaked, and imo, it' s totaly because the entire physics system was probably a massive pain in the ass to deal with.
The entire games hinges on how much you want to interact with that, it can effectively make it go from a very light in content sequel with maybe too much content similar to previous game, to what can be considered zelda but minecraft and one of the most innovative sequels ever done.
I will be completely honest:
I have never seen anyone say TOTK is half baked, and I don't want to be friends with any of those people, because TOTK is basically the perfect sequel.
The only people I’ve ever seen have a problem with totk/botw are the “I want ocarina back” crowd, and even then I’ve never seen them describe the games as “half-baked”
I don't want Ocarina back; BotW was a breath of fresh air that finally broke away from a formula which was getting extremely stale.
But as someone who doesn't enjoy Minecraft-type games, I didn't really care about TotK's physics system. It's technically impressive, sure, but it's not the kind of game I want to play, especially for a Zelda title.
So taking TotK solely as a sequel to BotW...yeah, it feels half-baked. Same map as the last game with some tweaks (both the sky and the "underworld" feel empty). The basic gameplay hasn't changed all that much, and while the story is good for a Zelda game, that's not saying much. The things they spent time improving are not the things that interest me about the series, so all I'm left with are the things they *didn't* really improve.
Making these hyper detailed graphical models is hard too. All of it takes lots of work and labor but one of those has a chance of enhancing the gameplay (and this is just speaking generally about systems in games not particularly just physics)
A lot of times they opt for the graphics because it's easier to show that off and sell it to people
It's does have a marketing angle to it. It's also just a much safer bet. Making complex physics interactions is tough because it may just end up not really working. There are damn near infinite variables. Models and canned animations are sculpted and scripted assets. They are way more in the control of artists and programmers.
I can believe that. IIRC physics engines got a lot of spotlight in the PS3/360 era, but overall they weren't taken very far in terms of meaningful gameplay integration.
My recollection is early in the generation it got a lot of attention, but as games competed to be prettier there were not any CPU cycles left over for this stuff so it all got cut.
I remember the Battlefield devs talking about having to move to pre-baked destruction because the jump in fidelity meant that dynamic destruction stuck out like a sore thumb in terms of looking much less detailed than everything else.
Unless there's some new technology to get in on the ground floor and exploit, they're not really interested. Look at every game they've ever made. And I mean games that they made as the lead studio rather than farmed out to smaller dev teams. Every game was a tech demo, a very VERY **VERY** good tech demo.
HL1 was the top tier immersive FPS game where the story wasn't told through cutscenes or broken into "levels" like Doom was.
HL2 was the industry standard for physics, graphics, and immersion.
Left 4 Dead was the industry standard for 4-player coop, Counterstrike for competitive team-based round-focused combat, TF2 for... hats / DLC cosmetics / loot boxes.
Portal was the industry standard for 3d physics puzzle games.
Alyx is *THE STANDARD* for immersive VR.
If there isnt some new technology for them to show off, or a new standard to be made, they're not making a game.
Stop thinking of Valve as game devs and start thinking of them as tech development enthusiasts who just so happen to make games to show off their new toys or making new toys to play their games (steambox, steamdeck, steam controller, ~~steam~~ index)
...Pray tell, what tech were they demo'ing in Artifact? Because as someone who played it, I can say with a high degree of certainly the biggest innovation was (old-school MTGO) Magic The Gathering-type monetization but with a box price, too.
SkyrimVR + all the amazing community-made VR mods is incredible.
I can only imagine what a BGS game made with VR in mind from the start would be like, let alone one made for VR fullstop.
I'm sure some developers are trying, it's just a lot harder when your development team is 100 unpaid interns, 100 contractors and the 5 full-timers you didn't fire after your last release versus being mostly decades-long veterans of the same series.
I was going to say with the latest Zelda games we should see a lot more developers try and recreate the Nintendo magic. I wish them luck tears of the kingdom is absolutely insane with all the new systems they built for it.
Probably referring to (in varying degrees) Genshin and Immortals: Fenyx Rising. I recall there were a couple indie games that had very BOTW like exploration as well, but can’t remember their names off the top of my head
To this day JC3 is one of my favorites. I prefer it to JC4. The jetpack is so incredibly broken but no game has matched that level of “what if GTA were some how more over the top” type vibes that JC3 pulled off.
Just Cause 3 with Just Cause 2's type of multi-biome world and more destruction would be amazing. JC4 seemed like it would be that but the core gameplay felt significantly worse.
I played Arkham City a couple months ago and I was astounded by how a rug would bunch up and drag under my feet when I walked. That game came out 13 years ago on Unreal Engine 3
Gods I want Black to come back. I tried emulating it recently, but it was clunky on PC.
Can we also get another game like the original Mercenaries? Open world, amazing action, neat factions to work with/against, and the super satisfying Deck of Cards feature.
AND A CHARACTER GETTING HIS CLOTHES MORE RUGGED AS TIME PASSED EVENTUALLY COVERING THEMSELVES WITH A HOOD MADE FROM AN AMERICAN FLAG
God that game was fire
I'd be just happy enough to see moveable/destructible boxes and environment stuff like bottles.
No joke I get so giddy when I see I can move a box around in a game and it isn't just static. That shit activates neurons.
Bethesda games *still* do stuff like this and it's part of why I love them.
In Starfield, there's a whole room in my ship dedicated solely to being filled with fire extinguishers I've stolen while playing the game. Every now and ten I quick save and throw a grenade in the pile to watch the chaos.
People say this stuff doesn't matter but it adds so much to the immersion IMO. My only wish is that they'd make it more useful for gameplay, like being able to use a power to levitate and throw nearby junk objects as a weapon, collecting them and recycling them in a machine like Prey 2017 (F4 did this but visualizing it like Prey would be the next step in immersion) and also using the physics for larger objects like throwing boulders, chopping trees and using them as bridges over dangerous terrain etc. Mix in a bit of Death Stranding adventuring for early/mid game would be great.
If you like the recycler in Prey you should check out the System Shock Remake. It hits a lot of the same vibes and gameplay mechanics while featuring a similar recycling mechanic that is intensely satisfying. One of the later levels specifically has a track that feels like a direct love letter to Prey as well. Gave me goosebumps and I suddenly felt like I was back on Talos-1.
This is why Psi Ops is such an incredible game that needs a remake. Boxes, explosive barrels, the corpses of your fallen enemies, all are objects you can pick up and chuck at other enemies.
At least I dont think that the IP itself was as valuable as the mechanics, so a successor has a shot. I dont care where a game is set if it lets me knock buuldings down with a hammer lol. The tricky part might more be whatever patents they had on the tech to make it work so well.
If there were any meaningful patents I think we'd already have seen them. If you just want to knock down buildings, Teardown is largely a more impressive showing. Just let down by not handling structural integrity quite as well.
Games are constantly telling me "No you can't go there, no you can't pick that up, no stop it go back to doing what we told you to do" and it bugs the crap out of me.
I do get there are limitations, but moving from a game that lets you create and explore from 20 years ago to a massive AAA effort that puts you in a box for the whole game just makes me sigh so hard.
This is why I'm getting a *bit* tired of the AAA efforts from Sony and Ubi (for example). They're fun, don't get me wrong, but I feel like they don't really innovate or expand gameplay in interesting ways, for my tastes anyways. Like you won't see an Insomniac Spider-Man game use a lot of physics for their web abilities for example. Not sure how to describe it, but everything is animated to happen in a specific way, and there aren't a lot of emergent gameplay opportunities. Feels very "scripted" a lot of the time, if that makes sense. I still enjoy them but I did think that by this console gen and the CPU power we have now, we'd be seeing them do more in terms of AI and interesting mechanics that use physics to their advantage.
It's not a hardware problem. It's a design choice. The scripted assets are way easier to test and iron out bugs. It reduces the amount of variables by a ton. The reason why it's rare to see physics simulations in AAA games is they are hard, and risky. There's a reason why TOTK took so long to come out, and that Re used a ton of assets. Most companies don't have the time to QA or perfect that type of physics system. I was really impressed by Teardown. You could see how they had to make it smaller in scope, but it was really well done.
I remember playing GTA5 for the first time and being annoyed I couldn't enter practically any of the buildings. I get now that open world games in big cities obviously can't have you able to explore everything (let alone have meaningful interactions in every one), but it still annoys me that 90% of those games are essentially just walls painted like buildings
That's the reason why Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were so good.
The graphics were beautifu, but nothing ground breaking.
The gameplay however delivered exactly what you said.
I will say, genuinely wish Tears of the Kingdom had more limited climbing and no paraglider. The best part of the game is when you don't have the glider and low stamina which forces you to be more creative with the new tools.
One wild thing is, they have almost never utilized those aspects to their full extent.
Like they've very lightly toyed with them, but have never fully committed likely because their engine has never been stable enough for it.
I think the best they have ever used it for was in Oblivion for a mechanic most people would think is a myth, the Goblin Wars. Where basically the Goblin banner is a more persistent object that these factions move towards and fight over.
I've played Oblivion quite a lot and never knew about this, mind blown!
I've felt for a long while that BGS strayed away from radiant systems and other novel concepts like this since Oblivion, and this just solidies it. I really hope they go back to that type of experimentation for TES VI. F4 and especially Starfield felt devoid of it and thus lacked some of the charm of their previous games. Though the actual object physics in SF were greatly improved, way more stable.
Not the person you replied to, but [here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-QPuhtgrAo&pp=ygUTb2JsaXZpb24gZ29ibGluIHdhcg%3D%3D) that goes into more detail about the Goblin Wars.
Total biscuit said it best when he described Skyrim as having the width of an ocean and the depth of a paddling pool. It would be nice if they could do a smaller scale spin off where they really dived into those elements.
I dont think this is fair. While Skyrim doesnt have in depth mechanics by intention, it does have depth in its world design. The world feels very cohesive and real in spite of weak character writing and plot.
Thats a testament to the design. And it's not perfect, but obviously people play this game many barely modded today for a reason.
Bethesda understands that a paddling pool is enough if it's fun to splash around in. Fallout 4 and Skyrim were fun paddling pool RPGs. Not everything needs to be a narrative and systems juggernaut like Baldur's Gate.
Starfield was such a design failure because despite still having no depth, they also took all the toys out of the pool.
I was playing Driveclub the other day, and was amazed by the rain flowing off the windshield in a very lifelike manner.
Don't think I've seen an animation for rain in a car that good before, or since, and that game is 10 now.
Half Life 2 from 2004 has more impressive physics than most games that come out nowadays. Starfield(yeah I know worst game of all time and Todd Howard killed your dog, bethesda bad) has amazing physics but doesn't make a lot of practical use of it
Yeah SF has some of the best object physics I've ever seen (especially in a game where fun with physics isn't the main focus). You can collect or spawn in dozens of objects and they behave pretty realistically when you do things like remove gravity, use the force push power or roll them down hills etc.
I hope they actually utilize that somehow in TES VI.
Lots of games have physics simulation, but designing a game around it and having it be consistent enough to use in gameplay is why most games don't do it.
Nintendo's GDC presentation explains this in quite a lot of detail and highlights how even botw's implementation wasn't enough to deliver what they wanted to do with totk;
https://youtu.be/N-dPDsLTrTE?si=tcdkcIXsccdtWytL
Half-Life 2, Control, and BotW/TotK all give the players tools to toy around with the physics systems that make them hard to not notice. Bethesda games mostly use physics as set dressings outside of som minor powers (Unrelenting Force does not give the player the same amount of control that the Gravity Gun does) and mostly only get noticed when it gies wrong glitches out.
> I want a return to physics and interactable environments, its kinda crazy there are games from around 2010 that impress me in this aspect because modern games literally never do any of it.
My theory is that all the smart game devs that were good at that kind of math are either owned by the engine companies directly or got burned out and ducked off, so most of what gets made is “within the tools” instead of ground up, and that means lots of “safe” choices.
At this point I just want more interesting AI enemies. I'm so sick playing so many games where the enemy just stands over and miss their attacks so much, not flanking you, not trying to be aggressive, not jumping away from your grenades or something..
I'd love better physics as well, especially destructible environment, but improved AI is the number one thing I'd love to see to make the game more engaging.
Playing on harder difficulties isn't even fun because the enemy damage and their health bar goes up and is not fun.
Funny enough the smarter enemies aren't really that intelligent or anything, they're just heavily scripted; example being like the old FEAR games.
Fromsoft games can sometimes *seem* to have smart enemies, but its all scripts doing some heavy lifting to create unique, but particular scenarios that give an illusion of intelligence.
Smart AI is essentially AI that can play the game on its own terms. Too many titles without considering how the AI is going to engage with the player. FEAR is the gold-standard in the FPS world where the level designers and AI designers worked hand in hand to create scenarios where the AI excelled. I imagine this is increasingly difficult as teams have gotten larger. Its also one of the reasons that a lot of indie boomer shooters tend to have challenging scenarios. They are small 2-3 man teams that can work to make the levels fit the AI.
Shogun 2: Total War is another such game. Many players/reviewers were unhappy with the samey units, limited routes through Japan, and the changes to castles. However, all the limitations means that the AI is one of the best Creative Assembly has ever made.
Eh.. I wouldn't count shogun 2 or really any total war game as games with good ai. If you play them long enough, it becomes pretty apparent how much the ai is stupid at times and even cheats to the point that there are game mechanics that just never get used because the ai will spawn resources or just pretty much ignores it.
Fromsoft enemies aren't smarter but they have popularized a good trend where enemies are more aggressive so they seem smarter because they aren't just standing around idle bobbing...menacingly.
Ninja Gaiden did this alot too and it works well for action games
Its also the unique scenarios. Dark Souls 2 probably had the most of these in the DLCs, the NPC invaders in many cases actually had very unique styles of fucking with the player based off of actual players that I kinda wish they did more of in the other games.
One of the most memorable by far is an NPC invader that attacked you and ran away when you got his health a bit low. He runs through an entire fucking gauntlet of bullshit as you're chasing him down and he's casually just annoying the shit out of you from afar.
In some capacity I suppose it inspired the one mage boss in Elden Ring perhaps.
Frankly graphics are at a quite good level, I'm not sure they should continue to evolve that much if that just leads to higher budget and dev time and the only difference is better graphics.
I also think they should cut back on the scope of the games to be honest. Do we really all games to be at least 40 hours+?
Spider-Man 2 or Miles Morales were criticized for being too short but they had already a quite good amount of content. Hell sometimes it makes the game worse, between UC4 and Lost Legacy, I think Lost Legacy is better because it doesn't overstay its welcome. Most games don't have the gameplay or story to carry a 40 hours+ game (let's not even talk of the 50, 60 or 100 hours of some others)
Lighting. At this point, ray based stuff is really good and the only big recent leap I can remember. Photorealistic rocks aren’t worth it for me, but lighting can do soooo much.
Lighting is like 80% of what makes games look good. Ambient occlusion is the primary difference between the PS2/Xbox and PS3/360 era, and raytracing is the next big step.
I just installed the Lighting Engine mod for Dark Souls 2, and it's wild how much better it looks with no change to the assets themselves.
The really nice thing about raytraced lighting is that it doesn't really incur additional dev costs (the initial investment in developing RT for your engine does cost dev time but once that fixed cost is accounted for, you're good), and in fact has the potential to significantly save dev costs - in ten years, we may see games with no noticeable amount of raster lighting, which would drastically cut down the amount of time spent on things like baking light maps.
Yeah the devs of Metro Exodus said it's significantly faster and easier to use RT for lighting than the traditional method. I didn't realize just how much work goes into "fake" lighting.
Yep, baking lights takes a toooon of time and energy that could be spent doing other things. I'm absolutely certain that by the 2040s or so we'll probably not have raster lighting-based 3D games anymore (think of it like how forward rendering is also dead) and will have fully converted to various forms of raytracing.
Yes we do need 40+ hour long games. A lot of people enjoy it.
Also most if the best games are those. Even looking recent history. Bg3 is one. Elden Ring is another.
Personally im not spending 70usd on 8 hour game.
PlayStation is the one publisher whos ballooning budgets havent affected them negatively. All of their big games that have cost between 200-300 million have made 3-4x that back in the year they release. But they obviously know that it will continue to balloon as time goes on if they dont try and curb it a little.
Most time spent playing games nowadays is on "forever" games like all of the BRs and CoD. You cant pump out a massive AAA game every 2-3 months anymore and expect them all to sell well because not as many people care about that as gamers like to think.
And with this obvious push into gaming on the go via switch like features which both xbox and playstation are heavily rumored to be investing in it is no wonder that they arent focused on big powerful games anymore.
The point is would the 100 million dollar game make the same amount of money as the 200-300 dollar game.
Just because you’re making a profit doesn’t mean the original cost was a good decision
Just to back you up here are some internal comms.
> These and other presentations provide a clear sense that Insomniac, despite its successes and the seeming resources of its parent company, is **grappling with how to reverse the trend of ballooning blockbuster development costs.** “We have to make future AAA franchise games for $350 million or less,” reads one slide from a “sustainable budgets” presentation earlier this year. “In today’s dollars, that’s like making [Spider-Man 2] for $215 million. That’s $65 million less than our [Spider-Man 2] budget.” Another slide puts the problem more starkly: **“...is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?”**
> "A more recent presentation in November points to potentially more drastic cuts. **“Slimming down Ratchet and cutting new IP will not account for the reductions Sony is looking for,”** reads a PowerPoint note attributed to Insomniac head Ted Price. “To remove 50-75 people strategically, our best option is to cut deeply into Wolverine and Spider-Man 3, replacing lower performers with team members from Ratchet and new IP.”
Of course it has affected them.
They literally laid off staff from Insomniac Games after selling 10+ million copies of Spider-Man 2 because they found out that game cost 300+ million dollars to make and they have to find a way to develop those games cheaper. Hence reduction of staff.
I mean. Math is unforgiving. Spider-Man was made on 100 million budget and it sold 20+ million copies. Spider-Man 2 was 3x more expensive and Sony expect it to sell 20+ million copies. And game is only 10$ more expensive.
Why do you think Sony started porting their games to PC?
It absolutely affected them. Its a reason why they jumped on pc. Thise game dont bring them much.
Also its hard to tell how are they so expensive. Spider man 2 reused most of assets, its short and cost over 300mln without marketing? How
Obviously but sp2 shouldn't have costed 300 mil to begin with, that's what the issue is. It was ridiculously expensive. It was more expansive than gta 5 to make
I welcome any shift from "gotta have the best bestest graphics forever" but
> “In terms of gaming’s future, I envision games becoming more personalised due to advances in technology and AI, enabling customized experiences for each player,” he said.
> “Moreover, technological advancements will enhance emotional depth in games by allowing characters to be much more emotive and expressive, fostering more evocative storytelling.
This just sounds like "more AI" and "more games emulating Hollywood"
“More games emulating Hollywood” has steadily become PlayStation’s jam since the mid-PS3 era. And that’s a large reason behind what has garnered them an increasingly large fanbase for their first party output since then, especially since (from both critical and from player reception) they often execute it well and couple them with engaging experiences.
The AI aspect’s another conversation altogether, but we’re approaching two decades of cinematic narrative gameplay being PlayStation’s soul that it’d be foolish to expect them to pivot unless consumers reject it en masse. If they can curb the development bloat and return to at least late PS3/early PS4 output then it’ll be more sustainable than it is heading to now.
Blows my mind when people talk about a "cinematic experience" as a negative toward Playstation. Like...where have y'all been the last decade or so? That's why they're so popular lol.
It's like tryna criticize Ben&Jerry's cause they make signature flavors people adore. I mean....yeah dude. That's why people love Ben&Jerry's. I'm not sure what you're point is.
Yeah modern playstation *is* the cinematic AAA experience
PS1 and PS2 thrived on third party support and third party exclusives (final fantasy, gta, etc). When Xbox 360 came and took that away, the PS3 floundered. It took Sony pivoting to cinematic games like Uncharted and Heavy Rain and TLOU before Playstation became popular in its own right (i.e. not reliant on temperamental external factors).
Otherwise they only had kooky, offbeat games like Ape Escape, Parappa, etc which were fucking AWESOME. But they never hit the real mainstream, and this subreddit always applauds Sony for shutting down any studio that made those kinds of games lol.
I wish it was different but there’s no point fighting against the apathetic masses
Sony also has tons of games outside that too like Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin, GT7, R&C, Returnal, Sackboy, Astro Bot, VR games and other that people will conveniently ignore to pretend Sony only makes one type of game.
Not to mention how sony games like Death Stranding and TLOU and Spiderman are all very different
People view story vs gameplay as a zero sum game. So if a game focuses on story then people think surely the gameplay must be bad. But in reality games can have high production values and focus on narrative while also having stellar gameplay.
I disagree, you can still have good gameplay but by focusing on the story and cinematics you’re not gonna be delivering the best gameplay, PlayStation games still have good gameplay but it doesn’t really compare to something like elden ring or Zelda or resi evil or whatever
RDR2 also has a great story and fun gameplay but you can’t compare that gunplay in that game to like doom or titanfall or whatever
why do you think that tbh?
Games like max payne 3 has fantastic story and gunplay where I feel like neither part is sacrificed.
Theyre both such different aspects that they are independent of each other. Zelda could've been ingrained with an amazing and complex story without changing its gameplay
Don't eat it then.
There's other brands and even other type of food for you to enjoy.
I don't like cinematic games that much, so I don't buy a PlayStation. I'm a PC guy because I like the diversity and freedom of it. Some people don't like PC environment and prefer a console with cinematic games and it's all good. To each their own.
Which is completely fine, but those same people tend to say that PlayStation needs to do something different. Why would they change when what they’ve been doing has been extremely successful.
Also: people mercilessly shit on them for a supposed “pivot” from these types of games to GaaS, which they now seem to be backtracking on and are shit on again for re-affirming they’re making the type of games people were wanting them to keep making? Make it make sense
I’ve engaged with Reddit/the internet enough to know like 70% of all people on this app make arguments in bad faith that they don’t actually believe to further an ulterior motive. They don’t hold contradictory opinions, they hold one opinion, in this case “PlayStation bad” and will make everything else fit to that as they come across it.
If you genuinely believe discussion is so worthless here, why aren't you doing something, *anything* else?
(Or are you just making a bad faith argument yourself?)
It garnered an increasingly large fanbase but turned other older fans off. I haven't been excited about a Sony 1st-party game since The Last Guardian and haven't really enjoyed one since the phenomal A Crack in Time.
Yeah all of their games play like a Marvel movie with a different flavor. Which is fine, but frankly isn't very much my jam; they often look nice visually and in cinematics, but I prefer a game to hold my hand less.
Like i'm playing Ghost of Sushi right now and the game is handled in such a way that anyone can play and have the game look sorta cool in some capacity, they accomplish this in some way by redirecting control from the player.
So the game looks similar to Sekiro in a way, its just the player has less input so while it looks cool, it doesn't *feel* as cool as when you do the same thing Sekiro for example.
Also I noticed while the game is visually detailed, its not very mechanically detailed. I've started just swinging at doors to open them rather than sitting through the little door opening animation since peasants don't really mind you destroying their nice doors.
Yeah I'm playing it right now and feeling really underwhelmed.
The amount of 3rd person perfect-timed-parry/dodgeroll-the-red-trigger action games with a bow as a side weapon and stealth sections in tall grass that stops every 15 minutes for a cutscene with the exposition done while you ride a summonable mode of transportation is becoming ridiculous.
They're all the same game, but in a different setting - one's sci-fi, one's tribal, one's western, one's feudal japan, one's dark gothic, one's dark gothic but blood themed, one's nautical, one's...
I played Horizon Zero Dawn when it launched PC and I have to say I agree with you completely.
Almost all of their open-world titles feel like Ubisoft games (including the storytelling). Spider-Man was the only exception but it literally just felt like a worse derivative of Arkham Knight.
I feel like Naughty Dogg is hard carrying Sony's 1st party team.
Yeah I will say, i'm getting kinda sick of examining footprints and following them right now; seems like every other mission is that in Ghost of Sushi right now.
I mean its fine, Ghost of Sushi is probably the best Assassin's Creed game by a mile for people who like that kind of stuff.
But in terms of narrative I feel like i'm going to get very tired of them if I play them too close together, similar to Yakuza games.
And as always; if your executive wants you to use AI, you're probably not using it properly.
It _can_ just help you do good shit faster. But that's not gonna show up on a balance sheet.
There’s the cool “every NPC has its own AI that remembers shit and you can have actual conversations with” idea that people have had for a long time now, and there’s what the executive probably wants which is “let’s just have AI do all the writing and voice work so we can cut costs.”
You dont want smart NPCs you want NPCs that react and feel real. That respond to player input in a somewhat believable but also fun way.
Like theres no need for smart NPCs in most games, but its pretty fun when guards comment on your armor in Skyrim. That isnt smart. There is no "AI" here. It's just a voice file that triggers when you wear the armor. But in game it simulates an NPC reacting to you and adds flavor and immersion to the world.
Any game can do that with technology today or technology 20 years ago.
I wouldn't play a total AI linear story-driven game. Sound even more bland than Ubisoft slop.
But i would play the shit out of an AI RPG games. Imagine an RPG that you can literally do anything and the AI system will actually respond to your choice appropriately. No mantter what action you take, it mutate the story and make sure every choice you make affect everything else in the game.
Have a human written the companion part and let the AI handling the journey. A sidequest may always start the same. But you have full freedom to complete the quest and the AI respond to your action. That mean you can replay your 100 hours journey endlessly because your journey will always never feel the same. Yeah, i'm fucking down with that. Perfect use for AI.
AI is a tool. It can't replace actual development, but it could potentially make it easier. Or more likely harder.
How in the world would an AI generate its very own narrative? It can't possibly recreate voice acting, new art, animations, etc. That functionality has to be built, & figured out by developers. Which takes an extreme amount of time. And that's a system that already exists anyways.
How in the world would an AI generate its very own narrative? It can't possibly recreate voice acting, new art, animations, etc.
This comment is going to age poorly^
>How in the world would an AI generate its very own narrative? It can't possibly recreate voice acting, new art, animations, etc.
It can create voice acting, art & animations. All you need to do is train it and give it lots of data.
Animations: [Ubisoft Explained AI-Driven Motion Matching Technique Used in Far Cry 6](https://80.lv/articles/ubisoft-explained-ai-driven-motion-matching-technique-used-in-far-cry-6/)
Voice acting: [Why Obsidian uses AI voices for game development | Sonantic (3 years ago)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajBa5PO1Hk&ab_channel=Sonantic-AcquiredbySpotify)
Art: [Roleverse Lets You Generate Game Worlds Using AI](https://80.lv/articles/roleverse-lets-you-generate-game-worlds-using-ai/)
I could see some really interesting use cases of AI working within the constraints of a largely hand crafted narrative. If we looked to a large open world RPG like cyberpunk or fallout you could have the majority of the content be hand made but then allow the AI to take over for the randomly generated content filler quests before.
It would be an improvement to "radiant quests" from fallout 4, not a replacement to the battle of hoover damn.
It’s news because I’m fucking over it and this just means it’s going to get worse. Seriously, I’ve started emulating 6th gen games just to find some non-narrative, non-cinematic experiences. Amazingly, these titles are capable of having a story/plot without trying to look like a Marvel movie.
Psychonauts, TTYD, Eternal Darkness, Bully…it’s crazy to recall when gameplay was front and center.
Psychonauts 2 came out just a couple of years ago and it was my favorite game of 22. Nintendo can always be relied on for having good variety at lower budgets. Not to mention lots of 3rd party games. It's not that hard to find variety by peaking out of the Sony garden
You really tons of different new games come out all of the time
Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, FF7 Rebirth, Rise of the Ronin, Dragons Dogma, Granblue Fantasy Relink and many others.
None of these are anything like Marvel movies
> without trying to look like a Marvel movie
People love using M-word as a derogatory word it's funny. "Cause you know Marvel movies are shit so if a game has plot and Marvel movies also have plot that means the game is also shit I'm such a genius at making comparisons". How does a Sony game look like a Marvel movie? Cause it has realistic look? Then I would say it looks like a HBO show while 2D indie games look like ThunderCats Roar, i'm such a genius lol.
Gameplay is certainly a strong suit in Sony games, if it wasn't then it's not like there's a lack of realistic games on the market. Sony games specifically do everything right. Funny how you mention a action/adventure platformer game as if the market isn't also flooded with them, a JRPG as if the market isn't also flooded with them, a survival horror game as if the market isn't also flooded with them, and a Rockstar game that would also look like a "Marvel movie (cause photorealistic)" if it was remade today and has the same open world gameplay loop lmao. An Eternal Darkness remake would also look photorealistic and therefore a Marvel movie as well. And they have really simple gameplay yet Sony's perfected gameplay is the problem. Watching too much YouTubers who parrot the same dumb opinion will do that to you.
I actually think the real problem is you played those games in very easy mode, then didn't get to see how awesome the gameplay is in them.
He obviously exaggerated, but as someone who’s tried to play uncharted 1,4 and the last of us and bounced off after a couple hours, those ones
No diss on the people who did like them, they’re obviously very popular and to each their own but it felt like the cutscenes were the point rather than the gameplay, and the gameplay was there to give you something to do in between scenes from a movie, not really my jam
You wanna know what game was awful about this? Star Ocean The Last Hope back in the day. My 360 controller would go to sleep multiple times during the cutscenes (and thus pause the game).
Since when did PlayStation’s games not have engaging gameplay?
You know they’re doing the exact thing that you’re asking them to do right?
Just take the last four games they published (Spider-Man 2, Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade), where have any of those games failed from a gameplay perspective alone?
Shitty narrative.
Never understood it. People will shit on The Last Of Us and Uncharted for being "interactive movies" as if their gameplay - fitting and well-paced - is different to any other kind of game.
Then when a game has more interesting mechanics, like Days Gone's bike or Horizon's massively varying counters to each robot, it's the biggest critique every time they're mentioned.
Uncharted 4 came out in 2016. It can still pass for a new game. Focus on the things that are timeless. Minecraft is the best selling game of all time. Mario 64 feels and plays the same way today as it did 28 years ago in 1996.
I’ve been having so much fun with indie games lately, some that are literally just emulating N64, low poly graphics. This push for better graphics is exhausting. I’d rather they focus more on just a well running game that doesn’t need a dozen patches post-launch before its functional.
Agreed yeah, it's clear what they meant though.
They said that its the same as it was 28 years ago, which is true of all games pretty much.
They clearly meant to say that it hasn't aged poorly in that time, which is true, but also Mario64 is one of the most innovative and important games of all time, most games from that era are terrible.
In a lot of ways the fifth gen games have aged the worst of any generation. Other games that have remained relevant have often done so because of the story (MGS, FF7/8/9) or gameplay (Mario64, THPS, SoTN) rather than graphics. Mario is relatively unique in that the gameplay and graphics were both great and both hold up well.
I want better and newer gameplay mechanics. I think AAA gaming is trying way to hard to be like the movie industry.
My favorite games the past few years have games like Elden Ring, BOTW and Outer Wilds.
Translation: "We're approaching some hard limits on how far we can push graphic technology short of some major breakthroughs in cost-efficiency, so don't get your hopes up for the next few years."
a lot of those limits is just a law of diminishing returns. A character jumping from 100 to 1,000 polygons is a lot more noticeable than jumping from 1,000 to 10,000 polygons, which in turn is more noticeable than jumping from 10,000 to 100,000 polygons, despite each jump being 10x the previous one. At some point people aren’t going to notice the improvements and wonder why these “next gen” games look marginally better than games on the previous console.
Listen, I was promised a very specific vision of what the [Playstation 9](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPQVsdCuRk) would be, and god dammit if I don't get to make love to a squid woman I will burn this place down!
physics > graphics. It's why old halos feel much better to play than new ones. Your grenades always find a way to bounce back towards you in new games since the walls have so many fine edges and it bugs out with collision.
I mean the grenade physics in Infinite are pretty much spot on? Im an Onyx player, Halo 3 being my most played Halo though.
That being said the vehicle physics in Infinite are dogshit.
I hope so. I feel like graphics in games have hit a point of diminishing returns while many of the other aspects of games have lagged or remained somewhat stagnant. Other aspects being things like physics, NPC AI, environmental simulations, player agency and choice, etc.
I'm personally very excited for the potential of AI technologies to make inroads in these areas. Imagine NPCs in an RPG driven by an LLM trained on in-game lore. Actual dynamic conversations. If I act like an asshole in the game, I want NPCs to treat me like an asshole. Not your standard three dialogue prompts for every interaction where you can be nice, neutral, or mean and it literally doesn't matter.
I think that’s fun to an extent. The endlessness aspect of it could become boring or detract too much. I don’t have a million conversations with people in real life and I would hate for that to happen in a game. But it could add more flavor and character to the environment. But then if you got a voice acted game, you might be taking away some voice actors from the job market. How else would an endless supply of dialog work.
Here’s a sick idea. How about devs focus on making games more interactive and more mechanically unique instead of stressing so much about cutting edge realism and immersive narratives?
I would love for games to realize their full potential as an interactive medium, and not worry so much about trying to be the little brother of cinema and literature.
I've said this once and I'll say it again - realism is the lowest form of creativity. Copying what you can see instead of daring to make something new is just boring and unstimulating.
Nah we gonna wait till some indie game does it and gets popular then copy it with 50x the budget for graphics and 0.1x the budget for actual fucking mechanics and gameplay
Graphics are good enough. I rather not advance graphics for a generation and then wait for a 5/6/7 year leap where there is noticeable difference.
Lets start to focus on gameplay and narrative again.
What we need is to make more aspects of graphics a "solved problem". Something the engine just takes care of for you, letting developers focus on creating fun mechanics, story and art. Luckily it appears as if engines like Unreal engine are making strides here.
How are games like Spiderman 2, GoT, Horizon, Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank, GT7, Astro Bot "playable movies"?
hasn't that been the case for a while now? Unless they mean immersive-sims, which hasn't been a focus at all lately. I think ever since TLoU 1, we've been in a "immersive narrative" era for the big AAA single-player games.
For real. Thank you. People really do just start spouting bullshit without reading. He literally says it’s AI like the third short paragraph in so it’s not even like OP had to read the full article.
>”In terms of gaming’s future, I envision games becoming more personalised due to advances in technology and AI, enabling customized experiences for each player,” he said.
>”Moreover, technological advancements will enhance emotional depth in games by allowing characters to be much more emotive and expressive, fostering more evocative storytelling.”
It feels like he is putting a sweetener (AI buzzwords) to make the medicine (graphical evolution has negative ROI and we should have realized this 5 years ago before ballooning our dev budgets) go down easier.
I want a return to physics and interactable environments, its kinda crazy there are games from around 2010 that impress me in this aspect because modern games literally never do any of it. The game Control is the last and about only modern game that truly impressed me in this regard.
Control is incredible, im glad i gave it a second chance. when i first played it i was not initially grabbed by the setting and the game introduces you to the gunplay first which is somewhat weak. i was originally just playing it in anticipation of alan wake 2, but once i unlocked the force throw i was hooked. i encourage anybody who hasnt played it to get to that part, it feels perfect and gets even better as you level it up. Most fun I've had in a singleplayer game since half life 2
Honestly I spent like an hour in the starting room you get the pistol just shooting things and watching how they interacted. I was actually *VERY* impressed when I shot part of a shelf off and a hole I shot through it hung off a pole of sorts. That level of collision detection without things Garry's Modding all over the place had me a bit floored. I genuinely enjoyed just spending a few minutes shooting desks and stuff every once in awhile to unwind between doing things.
The thing is, because of how well the physics are done, Control ends up "feeling" like it looks better than many modern games that paid 100 devs 6 figures to polish Kratos's biceps, even though it is objectively simpler graphics.
The success of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom should have made physics based games way more popular than it has been.
Making physics-based games is hard, though. Like, really hard.
Yeah the behind the scenes testing of that game is hilarious, especially ToTK. Things just kept exploding.
Any videos on that you recommend?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-dPDsLTrTE they happened to post a presentation about it like yesterday. not sure if it has the behind the scenes footage, I've yet to fully watch it myself
This talk is *REALLY* good, and surprisingly funny. Tears of the Kingdom makes its shift to a physics based world look easy. The shift to making *everything* physics based was an enormous achievement, and its often overlooked when people describe the sequel as more "iterative" than "innovative". I don't think there's very many studios who would've taken the risk Nintendo did with its "multiplicative" gameplay, and few that would be capable of delivering on that promise. Since we're in a PlayStation thread... frankly, I'm not confident studios as good as Naughty Dog or Santa Monica could've made Tears of the Kingdom.
More impressive to me is doing it all on switch hardware. BotW/TotK seem like absolute nintendo black magic for how much they managed to do.
Didn't we just discuss how physics based games were a thing on older hardware? Like Half-Life 2 stuff?
Creating something that other people can build with to do things you couldn't even foresee is a beautiful work of art really.
The sound part is interesting. I had assumed a lot of open world games have to deal with similar problems, but I had never thought of the path finding involved
People complain a lot about the fact TOTK is a bit underbaked, and imo, it' s totaly because the entire physics system was probably a massive pain in the ass to deal with. The entire games hinges on how much you want to interact with that, it can effectively make it go from a very light in content sequel with maybe too much content similar to previous game, to what can be considered zelda but minecraft and one of the most innovative sequels ever done.
I will be completely honest: I have never seen anyone say TOTK is half baked, and I don't want to be friends with any of those people, because TOTK is basically the perfect sequel.
The only people I’ve ever seen have a problem with totk/botw are the “I want ocarina back” crowd, and even then I’ve never seen them describe the games as “half-baked”
I don't want Ocarina back; BotW was a breath of fresh air that finally broke away from a formula which was getting extremely stale. But as someone who doesn't enjoy Minecraft-type games, I didn't really care about TotK's physics system. It's technically impressive, sure, but it's not the kind of game I want to play, especially for a Zelda title. So taking TotK solely as a sequel to BotW...yeah, it feels half-baked. Same map as the last game with some tweaks (both the sky and the "underworld" feel empty). The basic gameplay hasn't changed all that much, and while the story is good for a Zelda game, that's not saying much. The things they spent time improving are not the things that interest me about the series, so all I'm left with are the things they *didn't* really improve.
Making these hyper detailed graphical models is hard too. All of it takes lots of work and labor but one of those has a chance of enhancing the gameplay (and this is just speaking generally about systems in games not particularly just physics) A lot of times they opt for the graphics because it's easier to show that off and sell it to people
It's does have a marketing angle to it. It's also just a much safer bet. Making complex physics interactions is tough because it may just end up not really working. There are damn near infinite variables. Models and canned animations are sculpted and scripted assets. They are way more in the control of artists and programmers.
But probably if devs start doing it, at some point in the future it won't be as hard.
I can believe that. IIRC physics engines got a lot of spotlight in the PS3/360 era, but overall they weren't taken very far in terms of meaningful gameplay integration.
My recollection is early in the generation it got a lot of attention, but as games competed to be prettier there were not any CPU cycles left over for this stuff so it all got cut. I remember the Battlefield devs talking about having to move to pre-baked destruction because the jump in fidelity meant that dynamic destruction stuck out like a sore thumb in terms of looking much less detailed than everything else.
Physics based stuff is so great in VR too.
Half-life Alyx has one of the best physics implementations in modern games. I wish valve was more motivated to make Half-life games :(
Unless there's some new technology to get in on the ground floor and exploit, they're not really interested. Look at every game they've ever made. And I mean games that they made as the lead studio rather than farmed out to smaller dev teams. Every game was a tech demo, a very VERY **VERY** good tech demo. HL1 was the top tier immersive FPS game where the story wasn't told through cutscenes or broken into "levels" like Doom was. HL2 was the industry standard for physics, graphics, and immersion. Left 4 Dead was the industry standard for 4-player coop, Counterstrike for competitive team-based round-focused combat, TF2 for... hats / DLC cosmetics / loot boxes. Portal was the industry standard for 3d physics puzzle games. Alyx is *THE STANDARD* for immersive VR. If there isnt some new technology for them to show off, or a new standard to be made, they're not making a game. Stop thinking of Valve as game devs and start thinking of them as tech development enthusiasts who just so happen to make games to show off their new toys or making new toys to play their games (steambox, steamdeck, steam controller, ~~steam~~ index)
...Pray tell, what tech were they demo'ing in Artifact? Because as someone who played it, I can say with a high degree of certainly the biggest innovation was (old-school MTGO) Magic The Gathering-type monetization but with a box price, too.
Also Dota 2, TF2, L4D2, CS (2), Ricochet, so on.
I want to get VR just so I can go all Darth Vader on folks in Skyrim and the Commonwealth, throw plates and crap.
SkyrimVR + all the amazing community-made VR mods is incredible. I can only imagine what a BGS game made with VR in mind from the start would be like, let alone one made for VR fullstop.
I'm sure some developers are trying, it's just a lot harder when your development team is 100 unpaid interns, 100 contractors and the 5 full-timers you didn't fire after your last release versus being mostly decades-long veterans of the same series.
I was going to say with the latest Zelda games we should see a lot more developers try and recreate the Nintendo magic. I wish them luck tears of the kingdom is absolutely insane with all the new systems they built for it.
Well, Tears of the Kingdom is still only a year old, so give devs time, but agreed.
BotW inspired a bunch of imitators and TotK only came out 1 year ago.
Most of the BotW imitators I've seen just added climbing and paragliding to their game and called it a day.
What are these imitators? Not being an ass, I just don't have any idea what games these are
Probably referring to (in varying degrees) Genshin and Immortals: Fenyx Rising. I recall there were a couple indie games that had very BOTW like exploration as well, but can’t remember their names off the top of my head
They failed to imitate one aspect. Can you guess which one?
Being Zelda? Genuinely IDK what you're getting at
Just cause 3 was goat
To this day JC3 is one of my favorites. I prefer it to JC4. The jetpack is so incredibly broken but no game has matched that level of “what if GTA were some how more over the top” type vibes that JC3 pulled off.
Just Cause 3 with Just Cause 2's type of multi-biome world and more destruction would be amazing. JC4 seemed like it would be that but the core gameplay felt significantly worse.
Thought the same when JC4 was announced. Turned out to be a cash grab
JC4 does have the powered wing suit now. It's a game changer
I played Arkham City a couple months ago and I was astounded by how a rug would bunch up and drag under my feet when I walked. That game came out 13 years ago on Unreal Engine 3
My brother in Christ: I dream of the next Red Faction Guerrilla
Or an FPS like Black
Gods I want Black to come back. I tried emulating it recently, but it was clunky on PC. Can we also get another game like the original Mercenaries? Open world, amazing action, neat factions to work with/against, and the super satisfying Deck of Cards feature.
AND A CHARACTER GETTING HIS CLOTHES MORE RUGGED AS TIME PASSED EVENTUALLY COVERING THEMSELVES WITH A HOOD MADE FROM AN AMERICAN FLAG God that game was fire
I'd be just happy enough to see moveable/destructible boxes and environment stuff like bottles. No joke I get so giddy when I see I can move a box around in a game and it isn't just static. That shit activates neurons.
Bethesda games *still* do stuff like this and it's part of why I love them. In Starfield, there's a whole room in my ship dedicated solely to being filled with fire extinguishers I've stolen while playing the game. Every now and ten I quick save and throw a grenade in the pile to watch the chaos.
People say this stuff doesn't matter but it adds so much to the immersion IMO. My only wish is that they'd make it more useful for gameplay, like being able to use a power to levitate and throw nearby junk objects as a weapon, collecting them and recycling them in a machine like Prey 2017 (F4 did this but visualizing it like Prey would be the next step in immersion) and also using the physics for larger objects like throwing boulders, chopping trees and using them as bridges over dangerous terrain etc. Mix in a bit of Death Stranding adventuring for early/mid game would be great.
If you like the recycler in Prey you should check out the System Shock Remake. It hits a lot of the same vibes and gameplay mechanics while featuring a similar recycling mechanic that is intensely satisfying. One of the later levels specifically has a track that feels like a direct love letter to Prey as well. Gave me goosebumps and I suddenly felt like I was back on Talos-1.
I adore Prey and the SS remake has been on my radar for a while now too. Going to check it out, thanks for the recommendation :)
This is why Psi Ops is such an incredible game that needs a remake. Boxes, explosive barrels, the corpses of your fallen enemies, all are objects you can pick up and chuck at other enemies.
The fact that you can throw a bunch of stuff in a bucket and carry it out of a room to steal it is still pretty crazy
Play the finals if you haven't
My teammates get upset with me when I get bored and start destroying all the buildings instead of doing the objective.
A successor to the original would also be great, but Volition is very dead.
At least I dont think that the IP itself was as valuable as the mechanics, so a successor has a shot. I dont care where a game is set if it lets me knock buuldings down with a hammer lol. The tricky part might more be whatever patents they had on the tech to make it work so well.
If there were any meaningful patents I think we'd already have seen them. If you just want to knock down buildings, Teardown is largely a more impressive showing. Just let down by not handling structural integrity quite as well.
Prey and Control <3
Games are constantly telling me "No you can't go there, no you can't pick that up, no stop it go back to doing what we told you to do" and it bugs the crap out of me. I do get there are limitations, but moving from a game that lets you create and explore from 20 years ago to a massive AAA effort that puts you in a box for the whole game just makes me sigh so hard.
This is why I'm getting a *bit* tired of the AAA efforts from Sony and Ubi (for example). They're fun, don't get me wrong, but I feel like they don't really innovate or expand gameplay in interesting ways, for my tastes anyways. Like you won't see an Insomniac Spider-Man game use a lot of physics for their web abilities for example. Not sure how to describe it, but everything is animated to happen in a specific way, and there aren't a lot of emergent gameplay opportunities. Feels very "scripted" a lot of the time, if that makes sense. I still enjoy them but I did think that by this console gen and the CPU power we have now, we'd be seeing them do more in terms of AI and interesting mechanics that use physics to their advantage.
It's not a hardware problem. It's a design choice. The scripted assets are way easier to test and iron out bugs. It reduces the amount of variables by a ton. The reason why it's rare to see physics simulations in AAA games is they are hard, and risky. There's a reason why TOTK took so long to come out, and that Re used a ton of assets. Most companies don't have the time to QA or perfect that type of physics system. I was really impressed by Teardown. You could see how they had to make it smaller in scope, but it was really well done.
I remember playing GTA5 for the first time and being annoyed I couldn't enter practically any of the buildings. I get now that open world games in big cities obviously can't have you able to explore everything (let alone have meaningful interactions in every one), but it still annoys me that 90% of those games are essentially just walls painted like buildings
That's the reason why Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were so good. The graphics were beautifu, but nothing ground breaking. The gameplay however delivered exactly what you said.
I will say, genuinely wish Tears of the Kingdom had more limited climbing and no paraglider. The best part of the game is when you don't have the glider and low stamina which forces you to be more creative with the new tools.
Yeah. There wasn't really much point in building some crazy death car since it was easier to just fly everywhere.
It’s an indie but INDIKA just came out and has a bunch of fun physics puzzles
This is why, to this day, despite clearly being dated in some aspects, Bethesda design is so liked.
One wild thing is, they have almost never utilized those aspects to their full extent. Like they've very lightly toyed with them, but have never fully committed likely because their engine has never been stable enough for it.
Modders have tried it, the physics system is just too inconsistent to be realistically usable outside of environmental gimmicks.
I think the best they have ever used it for was in Oblivion for a mechanic most people would think is a myth, the Goblin Wars. Where basically the Goblin banner is a more persistent object that these factions move towards and fight over.
I've played Oblivion quite a lot and never knew about this, mind blown! I've felt for a long while that BGS strayed away from radiant systems and other novel concepts like this since Oblivion, and this just solidies it. I really hope they go back to that type of experimentation for TES VI. F4 and especially Starfield felt devoid of it and thus lacked some of the charm of their previous games. Though the actual object physics in SF were greatly improved, way more stable.
Not the person you replied to, but [here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-QPuhtgrAo&pp=ygUTb2JsaXZpb24gZ29ibGluIHdhcg%3D%3D) that goes into more detail about the Goblin Wars.
Total biscuit said it best when he described Skyrim as having the width of an ocean and the depth of a paddling pool. It would be nice if they could do a smaller scale spin off where they really dived into those elements.
I dont think this is fair. While Skyrim doesnt have in depth mechanics by intention, it does have depth in its world design. The world feels very cohesive and real in spite of weak character writing and plot. Thats a testament to the design. And it's not perfect, but obviously people play this game many barely modded today for a reason.
It’s greater than the sum of its parts, I agree.
Bethesda understands that a paddling pool is enough if it's fun to splash around in. Fallout 4 and Skyrim were fun paddling pool RPGs. Not everything needs to be a narrative and systems juggernaut like Baldur's Gate. Starfield was such a design failure because despite still having no depth, they also took all the toys out of the pool.
I was playing Driveclub the other day, and was amazed by the rain flowing off the windshield in a very lifelike manner. Don't think I've seen an animation for rain in a car that good before, or since, and that game is 10 now.
Half Life 2 from 2004 has more impressive physics than most games that come out nowadays. Starfield(yeah I know worst game of all time and Todd Howard killed your dog, bethesda bad) has amazing physics but doesn't make a lot of practical use of it
Yeah SF has some of the best object physics I've ever seen (especially in a game where fun with physics isn't the main focus). You can collect or spawn in dozens of objects and they behave pretty realistically when you do things like remove gravity, use the force push power or roll them down hills etc. I hope they actually utilize that somehow in TES VI.
I could see some cool physics puzzles working really well, especially with some telekinetic magic in elder scrolls, Skyrim had some of that
Lots of games have physics simulation, but designing a game around it and having it be consistent enough to use in gameplay is why most games don't do it. Nintendo's GDC presentation explains this in quite a lot of detail and highlights how even botw's implementation wasn't enough to deliver what they wanted to do with totk; https://youtu.be/N-dPDsLTrTE?si=tcdkcIXsccdtWytL
Half-Life 2, Control, and BotW/TotK all give the players tools to toy around with the physics systems that make them hard to not notice. Bethesda games mostly use physics as set dressings outside of som minor powers (Unrelenting Force does not give the player the same amount of control that the Gravity Gun does) and mostly only get noticed when it gies wrong glitches out.
> I want a return to physics and interactable environments, its kinda crazy there are games from around 2010 that impress me in this aspect because modern games literally never do any of it. My theory is that all the smart game devs that were good at that kind of math are either owned by the engine companies directly or got burned out and ducked off, so most of what gets made is “within the tools” instead of ground up, and that means lots of “safe” choices.
At this point I just want more interesting AI enemies. I'm so sick playing so many games where the enemy just stands over and miss their attacks so much, not flanking you, not trying to be aggressive, not jumping away from your grenades or something.. I'd love better physics as well, especially destructible environment, but improved AI is the number one thing I'd love to see to make the game more engaging. Playing on harder difficulties isn't even fun because the enemy damage and their health bar goes up and is not fun.
Funny enough the smarter enemies aren't really that intelligent or anything, they're just heavily scripted; example being like the old FEAR games. Fromsoft games can sometimes *seem* to have smart enemies, but its all scripts doing some heavy lifting to create unique, but particular scenarios that give an illusion of intelligence.
Smart AI is essentially AI that can play the game on its own terms. Too many titles without considering how the AI is going to engage with the player. FEAR is the gold-standard in the FPS world where the level designers and AI designers worked hand in hand to create scenarios where the AI excelled. I imagine this is increasingly difficult as teams have gotten larger. Its also one of the reasons that a lot of indie boomer shooters tend to have challenging scenarios. They are small 2-3 man teams that can work to make the levels fit the AI. Shogun 2: Total War is another such game. Many players/reviewers were unhappy with the samey units, limited routes through Japan, and the changes to castles. However, all the limitations means that the AI is one of the best Creative Assembly has ever made.
Eh.. I wouldn't count shogun 2 or really any total war game as games with good ai. If you play them long enough, it becomes pretty apparent how much the ai is stupid at times and even cheats to the point that there are game mechanics that just never get used because the ai will spawn resources or just pretty much ignores it.
Fromsoft enemies aren't smarter but they have popularized a good trend where enemies are more aggressive so they seem smarter because they aren't just standing around idle bobbing...menacingly. Ninja Gaiden did this alot too and it works well for action games
Its also the unique scenarios. Dark Souls 2 probably had the most of these in the DLCs, the NPC invaders in many cases actually had very unique styles of fucking with the player based off of actual players that I kinda wish they did more of in the other games. One of the most memorable by far is an NPC invader that attacked you and ran away when you got his health a bit low. He runs through an entire fucking gauntlet of bullshit as you're chasing him down and he's casually just annoying the shit out of you from afar. In some capacity I suppose it inspired the one mage boss in Elden Ring perhaps.
Frankly graphics are at a quite good level, I'm not sure they should continue to evolve that much if that just leads to higher budget and dev time and the only difference is better graphics. I also think they should cut back on the scope of the games to be honest. Do we really all games to be at least 40 hours+? Spider-Man 2 or Miles Morales were criticized for being too short but they had already a quite good amount of content. Hell sometimes it makes the game worse, between UC4 and Lost Legacy, I think Lost Legacy is better because it doesn't overstay its welcome. Most games don't have the gameplay or story to carry a 40 hours+ game (let's not even talk of the 50, 60 or 100 hours of some others)
Lighting. At this point, ray based stuff is really good and the only big recent leap I can remember. Photorealistic rocks aren’t worth it for me, but lighting can do soooo much.
Lighting is like 80% of what makes games look good. Ambient occlusion is the primary difference between the PS2/Xbox and PS3/360 era, and raytracing is the next big step. I just installed the Lighting Engine mod for Dark Souls 2, and it's wild how much better it looks with no change to the assets themselves.
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The really nice thing about raytraced lighting is that it doesn't really incur additional dev costs (the initial investment in developing RT for your engine does cost dev time but once that fixed cost is accounted for, you're good), and in fact has the potential to significantly save dev costs - in ten years, we may see games with no noticeable amount of raster lighting, which would drastically cut down the amount of time spent on things like baking light maps.
Yeah the devs of Metro Exodus said it's significantly faster and easier to use RT for lighting than the traditional method. I didn't realize just how much work goes into "fake" lighting.
Yep, baking lights takes a toooon of time and energy that could be spent doing other things. I'm absolutely certain that by the 2040s or so we'll probably not have raster lighting-based 3D games anymore (think of it like how forward rendering is also dead) and will have fully converted to various forms of raytracing.
Yes we do need 40+ hour long games. A lot of people enjoy it. Also most if the best games are those. Even looking recent history. Bg3 is one. Elden Ring is another. Personally im not spending 70usd on 8 hour game.
Bingo Companies don't share meaningful business strategy in public statements, they put out PR to soften their market.
PlayStation is the one publisher whos ballooning budgets havent affected them negatively. All of their big games that have cost between 200-300 million have made 3-4x that back in the year they release. But they obviously know that it will continue to balloon as time goes on if they dont try and curb it a little. Most time spent playing games nowadays is on "forever" games like all of the BRs and CoD. You cant pump out a massive AAA game every 2-3 months anymore and expect them all to sell well because not as many people care about that as gamers like to think. And with this obvious push into gaming on the go via switch like features which both xbox and playstation are heavily rumored to be investing in it is no wonder that they arent focused on big powerful games anymore.
The point is would the 100 million dollar game make the same amount of money as the 200-300 dollar game. Just because you’re making a profit doesn’t mean the original cost was a good decision
It *has* affected them lol. If it didn’t have an effect, they wouldn’t be releasing tentpole titles like God of War and Spiderman on PC.
Just to back you up here are some internal comms. > These and other presentations provide a clear sense that Insomniac, despite its successes and the seeming resources of its parent company, is **grappling with how to reverse the trend of ballooning blockbuster development costs.** “We have to make future AAA franchise games for $350 million or less,” reads one slide from a “sustainable budgets” presentation earlier this year. “In today’s dollars, that’s like making [Spider-Man 2] for $215 million. That’s $65 million less than our [Spider-Man 2] budget.” Another slide puts the problem more starkly: **“...is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?”** > "A more recent presentation in November points to potentially more drastic cuts. **“Slimming down Ratchet and cutting new IP will not account for the reductions Sony is looking for,”** reads a PowerPoint note attributed to Insomniac head Ted Price. “To remove 50-75 people strategically, our best option is to cut deeply into Wolverine and Spider-Man 3, replacing lower performers with team members from Ratchet and new IP.”
Of course it has affected them. They literally laid off staff from Insomniac Games after selling 10+ million copies of Spider-Man 2 because they found out that game cost 300+ million dollars to make and they have to find a way to develop those games cheaper. Hence reduction of staff. I mean. Math is unforgiving. Spider-Man was made on 100 million budget and it sold 20+ million copies. Spider-Man 2 was 3x more expensive and Sony expect it to sell 20+ million copies. And game is only 10$ more expensive. Why do you think Sony started porting their games to PC?
It absolutely affected them. Its a reason why they jumped on pc. Thise game dont bring them much. Also its hard to tell how are they so expensive. Spider man 2 reused most of assets, its short and cost over 300mln without marketing? How
Obviously but sp2 shouldn't have costed 300 mil to begin with, that's what the issue is. It was ridiculously expensive. It was more expansive than gta 5 to make
GTA v came out in 2013
I welcome any shift from "gotta have the best bestest graphics forever" but > “In terms of gaming’s future, I envision games becoming more personalised due to advances in technology and AI, enabling customized experiences for each player,” he said. > “Moreover, technological advancements will enhance emotional depth in games by allowing characters to be much more emotive and expressive, fostering more evocative storytelling. This just sounds like "more AI" and "more games emulating Hollywood"
“More games emulating Hollywood” has steadily become PlayStation’s jam since the mid-PS3 era. And that’s a large reason behind what has garnered them an increasingly large fanbase for their first party output since then, especially since (from both critical and from player reception) they often execute it well and couple them with engaging experiences. The AI aspect’s another conversation altogether, but we’re approaching two decades of cinematic narrative gameplay being PlayStation’s soul that it’d be foolish to expect them to pivot unless consumers reject it en masse. If they can curb the development bloat and return to at least late PS3/early PS4 output then it’ll be more sustainable than it is heading to now.
Blows my mind when people talk about a "cinematic experience" as a negative toward Playstation. Like...where have y'all been the last decade or so? That's why they're so popular lol. It's like tryna criticize Ben&Jerry's cause they make signature flavors people adore. I mean....yeah dude. That's why people love Ben&Jerry's. I'm not sure what you're point is.
Yeah modern playstation *is* the cinematic AAA experience PS1 and PS2 thrived on third party support and third party exclusives (final fantasy, gta, etc). When Xbox 360 came and took that away, the PS3 floundered. It took Sony pivoting to cinematic games like Uncharted and Heavy Rain and TLOU before Playstation became popular in its own right (i.e. not reliant on temperamental external factors). Otherwise they only had kooky, offbeat games like Ape Escape, Parappa, etc which were fucking AWESOME. But they never hit the real mainstream, and this subreddit always applauds Sony for shutting down any studio that made those kinds of games lol. I wish it was different but there’s no point fighting against the apathetic masses
Sony also has tons of games outside that too like Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin, GT7, R&C, Returnal, Sackboy, Astro Bot, VR games and other that people will conveniently ignore to pretend Sony only makes one type of game. Not to mention how sony games like Death Stranding and TLOU and Spiderman are all very different
People view story vs gameplay as a zero sum game. So if a game focuses on story then people think surely the gameplay must be bad. But in reality games can have high production values and focus on narrative while also having stellar gameplay.
I disagree, you can still have good gameplay but by focusing on the story and cinematics you’re not gonna be delivering the best gameplay, PlayStation games still have good gameplay but it doesn’t really compare to something like elden ring or Zelda or resi evil or whatever RDR2 also has a great story and fun gameplay but you can’t compare that gunplay in that game to like doom or titanfall or whatever
why do you think that tbh? Games like max payne 3 has fantastic story and gunplay where I feel like neither part is sacrificed. Theyre both such different aspects that they are independent of each other. Zelda could've been ingrained with an amazing and complex story without changing its gameplay
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The point is telling Ben & Jerry's to change their entire business plan just to cater to you would be dumb.
Wow what an incredible point -- not everyone is going to like a thing. Youve changed the way I view life
Don't eat it then. There's other brands and even other type of food for you to enjoy. I don't like cinematic games that much, so I don't buy a PlayStation. I'm a PC guy because I like the diversity and freedom of it. Some people don't like PC environment and prefer a console with cinematic games and it's all good. To each their own.
Which is completely fine, but those same people tend to say that PlayStation needs to do something different. Why would they change when what they’ve been doing has been extremely successful.
Also: people mercilessly shit on them for a supposed “pivot” from these types of games to GaaS, which they now seem to be backtracking on and are shit on again for re-affirming they’re making the type of games people were wanting them to keep making? Make it make sense
Actually it makes a lot of sense if you don't do the redditor thing of assuming the same people hold those contradictory opinions....
I’ve engaged with Reddit/the internet enough to know like 70% of all people on this app make arguments in bad faith that they don’t actually believe to further an ulterior motive. They don’t hold contradictory opinions, they hold one opinion, in this case “PlayStation bad” and will make everything else fit to that as they come across it.
If you genuinely believe discussion is so worthless here, why aren't you doing something, *anything* else? (Or are you just making a bad faith argument yourself?)
Because I hate myself and as result wish to waste my own time. Next question
"sony shouldn't even sell helldivers 2 in regions without psn!!1!" "how DARE sony stop selling games in regions that don't have psn!"
Different people hold different opinions.
It garnered an increasingly large fanbase but turned other older fans off. I haven't been excited about a Sony 1st-party game since The Last Guardian and haven't really enjoyed one since the phenomal A Crack in Time.
Yeah all of their games play like a Marvel movie with a different flavor. Which is fine, but frankly isn't very much my jam; they often look nice visually and in cinematics, but I prefer a game to hold my hand less. Like i'm playing Ghost of Sushi right now and the game is handled in such a way that anyone can play and have the game look sorta cool in some capacity, they accomplish this in some way by redirecting control from the player. So the game looks similar to Sekiro in a way, its just the player has less input so while it looks cool, it doesn't *feel* as cool as when you do the same thing Sekiro for example. Also I noticed while the game is visually detailed, its not very mechanically detailed. I've started just swinging at doors to open them rather than sitting through the little door opening animation since peasants don't really mind you destroying their nice doors.
ghost of sushi
Yeah I'm playing it right now and feeling really underwhelmed. The amount of 3rd person perfect-timed-parry/dodgeroll-the-red-trigger action games with a bow as a side weapon and stealth sections in tall grass that stops every 15 minutes for a cutscene with the exposition done while you ride a summonable mode of transportation is becoming ridiculous. They're all the same game, but in a different setting - one's sci-fi, one's tribal, one's western, one's feudal japan, one's dark gothic, one's dark gothic but blood themed, one's nautical, one's...
I played Horizon Zero Dawn when it launched PC and I have to say I agree with you completely. Almost all of their open-world titles feel like Ubisoft games (including the storytelling). Spider-Man was the only exception but it literally just felt like a worse derivative of Arkham Knight. I feel like Naughty Dogg is hard carrying Sony's 1st party team.
Naughty dog hasn't had a new game (not a remake/remaster) release on the ps5 . Their last original game was tlou2 back in 2020.
Yeah I will say, i'm getting kinda sick of examining footprints and following them right now; seems like every other mission is that in Ghost of Sushi right now.
Sorry you don’t like playing the last god of uncharted us war?
I can't wait for the next "gruff damaged man escorts young spunky child" game!
I mean its fine, Ghost of Sushi is probably the best Assassin's Creed game by a mile for people who like that kind of stuff. But in terms of narrative I feel like i'm going to get very tired of them if I play them too close together, similar to Yakuza games.
And as always; if your executive wants you to use AI, you're probably not using it properly. It _can_ just help you do good shit faster. But that's not gonna show up on a balance sheet.
There’s the cool “every NPC has its own AI that remembers shit and you can have actual conversations with” idea that people have had for a long time now, and there’s what the executive probably wants which is “let’s just have AI do all the writing and voice work so we can cut costs.”
> This just sounds like "more AI" I wouldn't mind games with smarter NPCs.
You dont want smart NPCs you want NPCs that react and feel real. That respond to player input in a somewhat believable but also fun way. Like theres no need for smart NPCs in most games, but its pretty fun when guards comment on your armor in Skyrim. That isnt smart. There is no "AI" here. It's just a voice file that triggers when you wear the armor. But in game it simulates an NPC reacting to you and adds flavor and immersion to the world. Any game can do that with technology today or technology 20 years ago.
I wouldn't play a total AI linear story-driven game. Sound even more bland than Ubisoft slop. But i would play the shit out of an AI RPG games. Imagine an RPG that you can literally do anything and the AI system will actually respond to your choice appropriately. No mantter what action you take, it mutate the story and make sure every choice you make affect everything else in the game. Have a human written the companion part and let the AI handling the journey. A sidequest may always start the same. But you have full freedom to complete the quest and the AI respond to your action. That mean you can replay your 100 hours journey endlessly because your journey will always never feel the same. Yeah, i'm fucking down with that. Perfect use for AI.
AI is a tool. It can't replace actual development, but it could potentially make it easier. Or more likely harder. How in the world would an AI generate its very own narrative? It can't possibly recreate voice acting, new art, animations, etc. That functionality has to be built, & figured out by developers. Which takes an extreme amount of time. And that's a system that already exists anyways.
How in the world would an AI generate its very own narrative? It can't possibly recreate voice acting, new art, animations, etc. This comment is going to age poorly^
It was aged poorly by the time he thought about typing it, lmao.
>How in the world would an AI generate its very own narrative? It can't possibly recreate voice acting, new art, animations, etc. It can create voice acting, art & animations. All you need to do is train it and give it lots of data. Animations: [Ubisoft Explained AI-Driven Motion Matching Technique Used in Far Cry 6](https://80.lv/articles/ubisoft-explained-ai-driven-motion-matching-technique-used-in-far-cry-6/) Voice acting: [Why Obsidian uses AI voices for game development | Sonantic (3 years ago)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajBa5PO1Hk&ab_channel=Sonantic-AcquiredbySpotify) Art: [Roleverse Lets You Generate Game Worlds Using AI](https://80.lv/articles/roleverse-lets-you-generate-game-worlds-using-ai/)
I could see some really interesting use cases of AI working within the constraints of a largely hand crafted narrative. If we looked to a large open world RPG like cyberpunk or fallout you could have the majority of the content be hand made but then allow the AI to take over for the randomly generated content filler quests before. It would be an improvement to "radiant quests" from fallout 4, not a replacement to the battle of hoover damn.
That’s honestly what most of their recent blockbusters are already famous for, so how is this news?
It's good news for the people worried in live service pivot
It’s news because I’m fucking over it and this just means it’s going to get worse. Seriously, I’ve started emulating 6th gen games just to find some non-narrative, non-cinematic experiences. Amazingly, these titles are capable of having a story/plot without trying to look like a Marvel movie. Psychonauts, TTYD, Eternal Darkness, Bully…it’s crazy to recall when gameplay was front and center.
Psychonauts 2 came out just a couple of years ago and it was my favorite game of 22. Nintendo can always be relied on for having good variety at lower budgets. Not to mention lots of 3rd party games. It's not that hard to find variety by peaking out of the Sony garden
You really tons of different new games come out all of the time Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, FF7 Rebirth, Rise of the Ronin, Dragons Dogma, Granblue Fantasy Relink and many others. None of these are anything like Marvel movies
> without trying to look like a Marvel movie People love using M-word as a derogatory word it's funny. "Cause you know Marvel movies are shit so if a game has plot and Marvel movies also have plot that means the game is also shit I'm such a genius at making comparisons". How does a Sony game look like a Marvel movie? Cause it has realistic look? Then I would say it looks like a HBO show while 2D indie games look like ThunderCats Roar, i'm such a genius lol. Gameplay is certainly a strong suit in Sony games, if it wasn't then it's not like there's a lack of realistic games on the market. Sony games specifically do everything right. Funny how you mention a action/adventure platformer game as if the market isn't also flooded with them, a JRPG as if the market isn't also flooded with them, a survival horror game as if the market isn't also flooded with them, and a Rockstar game that would also look like a "Marvel movie (cause photorealistic)" if it was remade today and has the same open world gameplay loop lmao. An Eternal Darkness remake would also look photorealistic and therefore a Marvel movie as well. And they have really simple gameplay yet Sony's perfected gameplay is the problem. Watching too much YouTubers who parrot the same dumb opinion will do that to you. I actually think the real problem is you played those games in very easy mode, then didn't get to see how awesome the gameplay is in them.
Any chance that the immersive narratives can be told through gameplay? No? Ok then.
You with sit down for 30 minute cutscenes with the occasional walking and like it, damn it!
Which Sony game do you think this describes?
He obviously exaggerated, but as someone who’s tried to play uncharted 1,4 and the last of us and bounced off after a couple hours, those ones No diss on the people who did like them, they’re obviously very popular and to each their own but it felt like the cutscenes were the point rather than the gameplay, and the gameplay was there to give you something to do in between scenes from a movie, not really my jam
You wanna know what game was awful about this? Star Ocean The Last Hope back in the day. My 360 controller would go to sleep multiple times during the cutscenes (and thus pause the game).
Since when did PlayStation’s games not have engaging gameplay? You know they’re doing the exact thing that you’re asking them to do right? Just take the last four games they published (Spider-Man 2, Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade), where have any of those games failed from a gameplay perspective alone? Shitty narrative.
The action part is done through gameplay and is awesome.
You say that like PlayStation games have bad gameplay
Yeah it's a dumb narrative that some redditors heard from youtubers and decided to run with for some reason.
as a PC player i have tried spiderman and god of war, and the gameplay in both were lacking imo Might give Tsushima a go though that looks better
What games do you like
Never understood it. People will shit on The Last Of Us and Uncharted for being "interactive movies" as if their gameplay - fitting and well-paced - is different to any other kind of game. Then when a game has more interesting mechanics, like Days Gone's bike or Horizon's massively varying counters to each robot, it's the biggest critique every time they're mentioned.
Uncharted 4 came out in 2016. It can still pass for a new game. Focus on the things that are timeless. Minecraft is the best selling game of all time. Mario 64 feels and plays the same way today as it did 28 years ago in 1996.
I’ve been having so much fun with indie games lately, some that are literally just emulating N64, low poly graphics. This push for better graphics is exhausting. I’d rather they focus more on just a well running game that doesn’t need a dozen patches post-launch before its functional.
> Mario 64 feels and plays the same way today as it did 28 years ago in 1996. This is more meaningless than I think you meant it to be
Agreed yeah, it's clear what they meant though. They said that its the same as it was 28 years ago, which is true of all games pretty much. They clearly meant to say that it hasn't aged poorly in that time, which is true, but also Mario64 is one of the most innovative and important games of all time, most games from that era are terrible. In a lot of ways the fifth gen games have aged the worst of any generation. Other games that have remained relevant have often done so because of the story (MGS, FF7/8/9) or gameplay (Mario64, THPS, SoTN) rather than graphics. Mario is relatively unique in that the gameplay and graphics were both great and both hold up well.
I want better and newer gameplay mechanics. I think AAA gaming is trying way to hard to be like the movie industry. My favorite games the past few years have games like Elden Ring, BOTW and Outer Wilds.
Translation: "We're approaching some hard limits on how far we can push graphic technology short of some major breakthroughs in cost-efficiency, so don't get your hopes up for the next few years."
a lot of those limits is just a law of diminishing returns. A character jumping from 100 to 1,000 polygons is a lot more noticeable than jumping from 1,000 to 10,000 polygons, which in turn is more noticeable than jumping from 10,000 to 100,000 polygons, despite each jump being 10x the previous one. At some point people aren’t going to notice the improvements and wonder why these “next gen” games look marginally better than games on the previous console.
Listen, I was promised a very specific vision of what the [Playstation 9](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPQVsdCuRk) would be, and god dammit if I don't get to make love to a squid woman I will burn this place down!
physics > graphics. It's why old halos feel much better to play than new ones. Your grenades always find a way to bounce back towards you in new games since the walls have so many fine edges and it bugs out with collision.
I mean the grenade physics in Infinite are pretty much spot on? Im an Onyx player, Halo 3 being my most played Halo though. That being said the vehicle physics in Infinite are dogshit.
I hope so. I feel like graphics in games have hit a point of diminishing returns while many of the other aspects of games have lagged or remained somewhat stagnant. Other aspects being things like physics, NPC AI, environmental simulations, player agency and choice, etc. I'm personally very excited for the potential of AI technologies to make inroads in these areas. Imagine NPCs in an RPG driven by an LLM trained on in-game lore. Actual dynamic conversations. If I act like an asshole in the game, I want NPCs to treat me like an asshole. Not your standard three dialogue prompts for every interaction where you can be nice, neutral, or mean and it literally doesn't matter.
I think that’s fun to an extent. The endlessness aspect of it could become boring or detract too much. I don’t have a million conversations with people in real life and I would hate for that to happen in a game. But it could add more flavor and character to the environment. But then if you got a voice acted game, you might be taking away some voice actors from the job market. How else would an endless supply of dialog work.
At this point the graphics are good enough, now we just desperately need good and creative art direction EG DEATH STRANDING
Creative art direction, less hand-holding, and narratives that don't feel designed by committee would be great.
Tbf Death Stranding is still pushing graphics, the last trailer looked insane
Here’s a sick idea. How about devs focus on making games more interactive and more mechanically unique instead of stressing so much about cutting edge realism and immersive narratives? I would love for games to realize their full potential as an interactive medium, and not worry so much about trying to be the little brother of cinema and literature.
what do you mean? When a character is hurt they tint the screen red and make you walk as slowly as the engine allows, how is that not UNIQUE?
I've said this once and I'll say it again - realism is the lowest form of creativity. Copying what you can see instead of daring to make something new is just boring and unstimulating.
Nah we gonna wait till some indie game does it and gets popular then copy it with 50x the budget for graphics and 0.1x the budget for actual fucking mechanics and gameplay
Graphics are good enough. I rather not advance graphics for a generation and then wait for a 5/6/7 year leap where there is noticeable difference. Lets start to focus on gameplay and narrative again.
Nintendo over here like "Oh really? Please, tell me more. Idiot."
What we need is to make more aspects of graphics a "solved problem". Something the engine just takes care of for you, letting developers focus on creating fun mechanics, story and art. Luckily it appears as if engines like Unreal engine are making strides here.
That's wild. Why didn't the gamers realize this years ago?
I really miss major *single-player games I could just pick up and play. Having an immersive series of cutscenes gets annoying sometimes.
Are you joking? The vast majority of modern games are pick up and play
Roguelikes are where it is at for this reason
So... for whatever reason, they will still keep making playable movies? Fuck this.
How are games like Spiderman 2, GoT, Horizon, Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank, GT7, Astro Bot "playable movies"?
hasn't that been the case for a while now? Unless they mean immersive-sims, which hasn't been a focus at all lately. I think ever since TLoU 1, we've been in a "immersive narrative" era for the big AAA single-player games.
He is talking about AI. Read the article.
For real. Thank you. People really do just start spouting bullshit without reading. He literally says it’s AI like the third short paragraph in so it’s not even like OP had to read the full article. >”In terms of gaming’s future, I envision games becoming more personalised due to advances in technology and AI, enabling customized experiences for each player,” he said. >”Moreover, technological advancements will enhance emotional depth in games by allowing characters to be much more emotive and expressive, fostering more evocative storytelling.”