Be Excellent To Each Other

And that! Devs are hitting the limit of what they can do, hence the abundance of 'more of the same' stuff coming out this year.

Or maybe the more of the same is because it sells so why bother changing it. You've bought 7 CoD games in 6 or so years, and that's far from unique (although it is one of the most shamelessly whored series). Why bother trying to create something new when churning out identikit games every year costs less?

And there is stuff that is not more of the same being released (Dark souls)

Also the cost of making a game continues to rise year on year, yet, astoundingly, the prices of games have been fixed for, what, twenty years?
So studios can't take a risk on something that people won't like, because it'll cost them a fucking fortune.
Add this to the sales of second hand games not getting them anything and the fact that every PC game is pirated by everyone (sub, etc) and sometimes it's hats to blame them for trotting out FPS8.

Actually, I've just looked, and it doesn't have a disk drive.
Or a hard drive, for that matter.

I wish I had done that free onlive console dealeo.

I've just had a look at how the Vita will work, and I'm not sure I get it. Games will be distributed using a VitaCard, which you can buy in sizes of 4GB to 16GB.
Err, what?

Dark Souls the sequel to Demon's Souls, yes?

They were literally handing them out at the Eurogamer expo.

How many of the "bestest games of 2011" aren't sequels, though? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

None, but I don't have a problem with that. A good game is a good game. A novel game with insipid gameplay is... well, LA Noire, I guess (although I liked that a good deal more than most.)

I'm really surprised at the resistance to new consoles possibly arriving in 12-18 months considering how long this generation has lasted so far. The current tech is creaking, I'm ready for more power.

Indeed it is. But's 1) its the first to be on the xbox. and 2) I suspect thats because we are at the point in the xboxes life where porting a niche mental, beautiful game that is unlike everything (bar one single game) is feasible.

Re: PC piracy. I reckon Steam and its ilk have proven what people have been saying all along, namely the fact people will buy games when they're cheap. Imagine if onelive teamed up with steam.

How has it proven that?

I bought sims3 on steam for £15 recently Doubtless it's £30 boxed, and then I'd either not have got it or yarrred it if three was no steam

Just who the fuck is Rudolph's Dick? I can't work that one out at all.

It did advance the game quite a bit.

But outside of those two games, is there any game doing the same thing? No.

Could the same be said about CoD, Gears, Racing game the 20th etc?

APoD. I have no idea why.

Is the current tech holding back devs, in any field other than visuals? To Dimrill's point, is weak AI a limitation of hardware or of lazy dev work because dev teams are instructed to work on immediate factors like visuals?

I specifically recall (using Ass Crud as an example again), the Ass Crud devs citing a lack of processing power as a major limit on their ability to take their cities any further. As in the 'living, breathing' aspect. Crowd AI and stuff.

Of course, that doesn't stop them being lazy too!

Yeah really don't give a toss. When I'm playing say Forza the game is a framework, the novel experiences happen inside it. In that respect some of the biggest games have become more akin to traditional games. Nobody demands that the rules of chess or golf or football be rewritten every year.

It's £15 at Play as well, which strikes me as am obscene amount of money considering its age.

But that doesn't mean Steam is converting pirates - PC game sales have continues to decline.

They have?

It's weak hardware. WTB has already quotes the Ass Crud devs, and I've seen numerous other quotes from plenty of other dev teams to the same effect. They have to balance the computational needs of render, AI, and physics threads, and they all suffer for lack of resources. This I why Forza 3 only supported 8-player multiplayer, for example -- lack of grunt to render more than 8 cars at once. Apparently they had to do some fearsome trickery to lift that limit to 16 for FM4.

Edit -- I'd also add that pretties can be more than skin deep. Draw distance in Skyrim, for example, can make the view from the top of a tall mountain much more jaw-dropping. Would the Agency Tower climb have felt as important without the views across all of the city?

Also -- I'd be happy to see less screen tearing, which afflicts most 360 games to one degree or another. I find it faintly nauseating.

Pfft.. Turbo Esprit had four living, breathing cities.

I think because the leap from the previous generation to the current was so significant what with the transition to quasi-HD visuals, people are having a hard time realising just how bloody ancient the current hardware is. As a result, the next leap is going to be fairly minimal in the eye candy department - mainly stabilising and bolstering what we already have with higher frame rates, proper HD resolutions and, as Rich mentions, possibly a bit of v-sync. However the most significant advances are going to be under the hood so to speak. Allowing developers to make advances behind the scenes with more sophisticated AI, plain-old MORE AI, larger game worlds, etc.

Really? I was expecting the graphics to look like that photorealistic PC GTA IV mod, and Forza 4's Autovista.

Every generation people always say there's nowhere much to go with graphics, and there always is.

To be fair, people were saying graphics had topped out when this...



... was state of the art. Graphics are very nearly photo-realistic now. To improve them beyond looking like a photograph, the underlying programs need to improve. The aforementioned AI is a factor, as is Physics.

I thought that during the PS2/Xbox generation.

The graphics will look much prettier, no doubt, but not as significantly as the last leap - certainly not in the eyes of the average consumer.

That's what I was getting at. I think we'll certainly notice the difference as people who take an interest. For example, a bit of antialiasing would do a lot of current gen games huge favours, and we'll likely see that next gen.

I reckon realism is less important than plausibility.

When I got a 360 I still had an SDTV. Forza 2 didn't look that much prettier than Forza 1 when I first got it. In fact, nothing really wowed me until the Xbox 360 was ~3 years old.

I thought that on the PS1 when I could make out the individual cobbles on the streets in Rage Racer. Man was I wrong, after looking back years later. And I'd be wrong again if I started thinking the same of this generation. Texture quality, shadow detail, lighting etc. can all be massively improved from where we stand now, and they stand to make a world of difference.

As for sequels, I like them. Few games are spectacular straight away, even if they start with a great idea; a sequel often gives a development team an awful lot of data to build upon and refine their ideas, hopefully coming out with a game that's better. It doesn't always happen, but there are plenty of sequels that are so much better than the original game(s).

Much more so than, say, films.

They just wan't them in with higher polygon counts and dolby surround.

Don't disagree. I wasn't saying that graphics are unimportant, but that they are given higher importance than perhaps they should because they're a much better marketing tool than great AI or an immersive story are.



Still don't know what that is, and am happier for it.

Would be impossible.

Depends on how expensive the lens used to take the photograph was.

Of course, it's the best marketing tool. The 'man on the street' will tend to buy new things for the 'shininess'. If he can't show his mates how much better the graphics are on Fifa 14 or Call of Duty 10, what's the point?

I think he'd prefer some mulled wine.

Chiming in on the graphics tip, I think there are definitely significant improvments to be made. I'm not a graphics whore in general and haven't played any really high end PC games for a while so it's not like I've even got that platform to make regular comparions with and still there are graphical flaws and issues with current Xbox/PS3 games that catch my eye and pull me out of the game now and again. The most recent example was playing the Rage demo on the PS3 last night, a game that I seem to remember was lauded for it's graphics, and not only was it filled with some really ugly textures it was rocking a sky box that looked imported from some decades old PC game. That and the fact that the game world didn't seem to move at all smoothly when you looked around made it genuinely annoying to play. Granted, there's no way of knowing for sure if these are symptoms of hardware limitations or just shit programming but given that we're talking about id Software I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Simialrly I also saw some pretty bad texture pop-in during Uncharted 3 of all things. No doubt someone's about to accuse me of needlessly caring about 'shinies' having read this but it's really not that, it's just that when you see something so jarring it really pulls you out of the experience in my opinion.

My point is it's possible to make a still scene look like a photo, but when things start to move, the uncanny valley opens up

I want more particles than the LHC and I want more memory than an Ipad and I want DX11 in my warm box now!

When I start to move your Mums uncanny valley opens up.

Hopefully the GPUs will have enough spare cycles to start rendering skin properly - I hear (from an ATI-driver-writer friend) the shaders exist now, but they're far too taxing on current target hardware, which is why we end up with plasticine. The details are the killer - maintaining 1080p/60fps will still be tricky when they start doing that stuff.

Plisskens Law: Any discussion of the infinite possibilities and improvements made available by new gaming technology will always end up as a discussion about graphics.

No matter what anyone says, looks actually are very important (at least initially. )

Maybe the next generation should concentrate on stimulating other senses, like pumping out pheromones during homo-erotic cut scenes, spraying us with the scent of rainbows or touching us though the magic of dildonics.

My issues with the next generation can be summer up in three points:

1) Worried about moving towards shit controls. Like the wii. And Kinect.
2) the time after release when there are few games and generally mediocre. And yet I'll still want it because I'm like that.
3)Wesley Crusher