Gameplay is King?: What Gameplay improvements can be achieved on the new consoles?

[onQ]

I have a few ideas but wanted to hear Beyond3D's thoughts on how gameplay can be improved by the new generation of consoles. I'm talking about the new generation as a whole so this includes the Wii U second screen & Xbox One's Cloud Computing.

For example smarter A.I using GPGPU /Cloud computing for things like path-finding.

 

[Cjail]

Well I think that "damage simulation" can be improved significantly.
For instance if a bullet hits the leg the character/enemy he/she/it should limp, bleed, and move differently.
Swords/blades should actually cut or dismember the enemy/character even at first hit and should not pass through objects/enemies as if they were made of air.

I liked what Rocksteady/WB did with MrFreeze in Arkahm City/Origins.
The idea that the same attack can't work twice on a enemy/boss it's very good IMO and possibly more feasible than develop an actual "learning AI".
It would be like playing against the Borg but without the hive mid that it's bad in games

Interactivity should be improve as well.
Manipulating objects in the the environment or even the environment itself it's something that too few games did.

"Organic HUD" should also be a nice improvement...yeah I know I said it already many times.
Dead Space, Crysis series, Syndicate, Ghost Recon:FS, Metro, MGS:GZ, The Division and lastly COD: AW all show that HUD can be done "organically" with not detriment for playability.

 

[Globalisateur]

More interactions (destruction, creation, shifting, modifications, enhancements etc.) with objects/structures/NPCs around the main character, and all interactions we have with those objects are saved in harddrives, now that both big players have standard hard drive it's really possible on multiplats.

So the big players really have to keep the HDDs mandatory now! no more supposedly cheap arcade or 12GB consoles versions please!

 

[Nesh]

What I want is high levels of organic looking interactions with both the NPCs and the environment and at the same time make NPC's react realistically and convincingly to unpredictable physics that other NPC's and the player generate

So far we havent seen anything like it. Its also the concept that made the E3 2005 pre-rendered videos at the Sony conference look so impressive. It wasnt simply the visual quality. Its how organic, immersing and convincing the world looked because of how everything blended and interacted together.

This is what I want to see in games. This is what will change the experience. Games on both current gen consoles and high end PC's still play like old games. Everything in the game world still exist as disconnected objects

 

[joker454]

What I want is high levels of organic looking interactions with both the NPCs and the environment and at the same time make NPC's react realistically and convincingly to unpredictable physics that other NPC's and the player generate

So far we havent seen anything like it. Its also the concept that made the E3 2005 pre-rendered videos at the Sony conference look so impressive. It wasnt simply the visual quality. Its how organic, immersing and convincing the world looked because of how everything blended and interacted together.

This is what I want to see in games. This is what will change the experience. Games on both current gen consoles and high end PC's still play like old games. Everything in the game world still exist as disconnected objects

You need cloud computing to do what you want, as there simply isn't anywhere near enough computational power in the consoles to pull off what you want in a convincing non repetitive organic way.

 

[function]

Bu bu bu cloud is a lie! It's just MS lies! To make up for not Cery power PS4!!?

... *cough*

Kinect could have delivered new experiences, easily. Loads of them. But .... *sigh*

VR could too, especially with eye tracking. But that's some way off, neither console is exactly a beast, and current VR doesn't have eye tracking anyway.

So ... memory and processing intensive simulation on the cloud is all there's left to get excited about on the "tech enabled" front. And it's not just scale, it's quality too. Things like AI awareness and speech synthesis.

 

[Nisaaru]

A more complex world simulation(animals, opponents, friends, weather effects) in open world games like FC4. And maybe dynamic maps so a replay would be really different.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Tough question. I'm not sure if gameplay is limited as much by tech as it is by development time constraints, conservative selection of projects and the old dual-stick controller. Indies seem to have no trouble inventing new gameplay concepts on limited devices. Pure computing power could open up ideas involving ai and physics, or dynamic environments. VR, motion control and cloud computing seem to have the most potential for something brand new.

 

[orangpelupa]

hmm, i think game will be able to offer more gameplay freedom that should follows the game logic.

for example, i'm a superhero on Final Fantasy 999. So a mere rubble on ground should not prevent me from going forward, when i jump to higher cliff, my character should react and not just giving the same canned jump animation. When i found a tree blocking a way, i should able to blow it up. when i talk to NPC, please stop repeating the same lines in baloon box.

or on GTA 999 and Watch Dogs 999, all buildings can be visited with proper iinteraction. For example going to restaurant, the foods on display can be interact, not just static polygon display.

or on BF5, when i see a wall i should be able to blow it. When i blow the structural columns, the building should colapse (actually DICE already done it in BFBC2 with all things made of concrete but they toned down the destruction since BF3)

but doing all of that manually seems will be a lot of hard work. Maybe procedural generation of area or AI that can learn can help.

Hmm, if MS allows game dev to tap to Cortana's API, or making DRIVATAR for NPC, maybe the conversation and behavior of NPC can be better.

 

[HTupolev]

What I want is high levels of organic looking interactions with both the NPCs and the environment and at the same time make NPC's react realistically and convincingly to unpredictable physics that other NPC's and the player generate

So far we havent seen anything like it. Its also the concept that made the E3 2005 pre-rendered videos at the Sony conference look so impressive. It wasnt simply the visual quality. Its how organic, immersing and convincing the world looked because of how everything blended and interacted together.

This is what I want to see in games. This is what will change the experience. Games on both current gen consoles and high end PC's still play like old games. Everything in the game world still exist as disconnected objects

Unless we move on to an entirely new control scheme (i.e. plugging our brains right into the computer and controlling characters just like how we control our bodies), I mostly wish developers would stop pursuing this. We don't currently have the granular control required to make this stuff result from player control in an immediate way, which means pursuing it effectively takes control away from the player. There is a ton of clunkiness in modern game controls as a result of this stuff, and no obvious way around it.

I remember reading the second paragraph of this section of Rockslider's thoughts on Halo 2 back in the day. I agreed with that. And now that it's 2014? I remember being overjoyed in Lightning Returns just because I made the player character run up a ladder fluidly and with minimally annoying mount and dismount animations.

 

[Shortbread]

I wish fighting games would improve on being more “realistic”. Instead of power-bars/meters; a percentage system that naturally tracks and ranks hits, combos, and bodily injuries. The data isn’t visible during the match, only after the fight is completed.

I’m a big fan of the MK series, but the X-RAY moves should render a person severely injured or dead… it’s like everyone is f****ing Wolverine or something.

 

[zed]

Bu bu bu cloud is a lie! It's just MS lies! To make up for not Cery power PS4!!?

hmm I dont think you understand what the cloud is its nothing special that only the xbone can do, 'the cloud' has been around for years any console even the wii u can use 'the cloud'
Here educate yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Kinect could have delivered new experiences, easily. Loads of them. But .... *sigh*

Obviously we wont be looking to you for these new experiences, as you were challenged to come up with a single idea but failed
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1848284&postcount=221

 

[function]

hmm I dont think you understand what the cloud is its nothing special that only the xbone can do, 'the cloud' has been around for years any console even the wii u can use 'the cloud'
Here educate yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

I don't think you understand this conversation.

Obviously we wont be looking to you for these new experiences, as you were challenged to come up with a single idea but failed
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1848284&postcount=221

You could make a marble rolling game.

As a simple point of understanding, it would be worth you knowing that someone not deeming your challenge worthy of any kind of response is not the same thing as them failing your challenge.

Glad I could help educate you again, zed.

 

[Commenter]

A world simulation so deep that possibilities for achieving objectives grow out the simulation instead of being fixed solutions thought up the developers. Although realistically that's probably not going to come for another few console generations yet.

 

[function]

A world simulation so deep that possibilities for achieving objectives grow out the simulation instead of being fixed solutions thought up the developers. Although realistically that's probably not going to come for another few console generations yet.

Aye. When you think about sandbox games this is the 'A' standard and the holy grail.

One of the practical problems with this is that it meshes badly with current story / narrative / character driven games, and that's why I'd like to see cloud powered simulation of highly aware NPCs (complete with understanding of natural language and speech synthesis) to help bridge this gap.

This is a huge technological challenge though, and at the opposite end of the spectrum to Arcade (and commonly Nintendo) style games that work based on a small set of super-perfected gameplay mechanics.

 

[Billy Idol]

I still think that the short demo of Eight Days showed really interesting gameplay.

Other than that: give me a new God of War game trimmed to hyper realism (in the sense of the 300 series), where weapons have real impact: when I use a heavy blade against a flesh based enemy, it should have a drastic impact. Problem is that this would bring gore to a new level...

 

[onQ]

A world simulation so deep that possibilities for achieving objectives grow out the simulation instead of being fixed solutions thought up the developers. Although realistically that's probably not going to come for another few console generations yet.

Not sure how deep the new consoles will go into world simulation but I remember it being a part of one of Cerny talks.

 

[rokkerkory]

depending on the game, dynamic environments for sure

 

[Cyan]

A world simulation so deep that possibilities for achieving objectives grow out the simulation instead of being fixed solutions thought up the developers. Although realistically that's probably not going to come for another few console generations yet.

I think your idea would need a lot of AI programming, and the cloud to process it --at least with nowadays processing capabilities

But I love the idea, because I love AIs no matter how they run. Maybe we will have a console so powerful some day that can not only run the graphics, but also thousands of NPCs, entities and events in real time. Plus it would need a perfect sound chip mixing thousands of channels in realtime.

Say you need to program rush hour at the mall human behaviour.

Still, power can help new gameplay mechanics, but it's mainly about imagination.

 

[Scott_Arm]

A world simulation so deep that possibilities for achieving objectives grow out the simulation instead of being fixed solutions thought up the developers. Although realistically that's probably not going to come for another few console generations yet.

The problem with that kind of complexity is someone has to test it to make sure it works and doesn't give ridiculous results.