The Next Generation of Consoles

[El Unicornio, mang]

I think needing the internet and wifi to be better and quicker will have to happen before we think about next-gen.

The technology for that is already there with fiber optic, it's just not readily available yet

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

More processing power could open the door for some kind of random/dynamically/procedurally[nb]delete as appropriate[/nb] generated content maybe. There's a bit on an episode of Consolevania in which that bald bloke from Microsoft says something along those lines with regard to creating trees on the 360, so presumably the nextbox could do a more sophisticated spin on that.

[HappyTree]

I think the next step for games is to make just about everything interactive. I mean, you have games in which interiors are really detailed and games in which exteriors are really detailed. In some you can jump over things, or climb, or fly or drive. But there is no game in which you can do everything. Or is there?

I'd like a game like a cross between GTA, Crackdown and Morrowind. In GTA you can't climb or jump very much, in Crackdown you can't get inside all the buildings. More processing power would allow you to have a game that's as good a driver as GRID, as good a super-power climber as Crackdown and as good a shooter as Halo. All with the interaction and speech of Mass Effect. So BluRay game discs would need to be standard to fit it all in, with insane draw distances, no pop-up, etc. To have all that photo-realistically too would be good. I think there's plenty of scope for future improvement. I mean, the ideal is to make a game that mimics real life with all its multitude of solutions to various problems, and then to enhance your abilities so you can dive off into fantasy.

[mobias]

The problem with truly gigantic games isn't so much that the consoles can't handle them its more that they would take forever to make. Playing Just Cause 2 at the moment and wishing that it was much more like GTA, in terms of detail, makes me wonder how long would it take to program it all. A very long time is the answer. Back when GTAIV came came a lot of Sony fanboys slammed it, and still slam it, for being just one city. They claim that the 360's lack of Blu Ray drive meant that Rockstar couldn't make it as big and as good as it could have been. A lot of games designers including Rockstar have indeed said the 360's lack of disc space has put limitations on cross platform games this generation but only up to a point. The fact of the a matter is we would probably still be waiting on GTAIV coming out if were the size of San Andreas but with Liberty City's level of detail. It would take them ages to render it all. At the end of the day although they can do clever things with procedural rendering and all that sort of thing they can't really make that work in a hugely regimented world like a city where there has to be a specific design.

Its pretty obvious that some of the games that are coming out now and that have come out in the last year or so are stretching the current consoles capabilities. Near the end of the last generation of consoles it was quite hard to imagine how much better the next gen of consoles were going to be, not including high definition, until you got a 360 or PS3 and got a decent game in it. I remember playing Motorstorm on the PS3 on the consoles launch day and being utterly blown away by the physics and particle effects, on top of the shiny and bright new high def graphics, it was just a world away from what the PS2 was capable of. Remember the PS2 had been out for a good couple of years longer than the superior  original Xbox and so had definitely become a pretty clunky old console by the time we got the PS3 in 2006/2007. MS brought out the 360 really quite shockingly quickly after the Xbox came out. If Sony do indeed announce and bring out the PS4 a good couple of years before MS, and I definitely think they will, it'll be really interesting to see firstly what its capable of and secondly just how much it shakes up the gaming industry.     

[waste of chops]

3D is not really a console led tech but a TV lead one, so thats not really something a PS4 would be able to do better beyond the PS3.

It's kinda console-lead in that the the console has render everything twice, once per eye, so compromises may have to be made in terms of framerate, resolution, detail levels etc. (similar to the compromises made to get split-screen multiplayer working)

From what I've read, there can be vsync issues too; the PS3 outputs a single image with the two images arranged one on top of the other; if the screen tears then it will only be in one of the images, leading to the odd effect of the image tearing in one eye but not the other.

So while the PS3 (and I think the 360 too to some extent) is technically capable of 3D, a PS4 should be able to do it better (but then again, unless Sony told devs that 3D performance must be exactly equal to 2D performance, I expect you'd have developers pushing the console to its limits and then scaling it back a little to get it running in 3D mode).

[Still Not George]

Mobias is dead on the mark. To give you an idea, building the visual, level and sound assets for Mass Effect 2 - a game based upon an existing IP, and therefore with a good bit less to do - likely involved around 60+ full time staff members over about 18-24 months at least. Not including testers, coders, and so on.

And Mass Effect 2 really isn't that open-world by modern standards. Creating the kind of detail you guys are talking about would take Squaresoft-level timeframes, only actually used for development (instead of spending 3 years doing concept art like Square do).

[HappyTree]

Yeah but it'd be wicked! Alan Wake took forever and was crap.

[Still Not George]

Alan Wake went through 3 virtually complete rewrites between inception and release. IIRC it also changed hands at least once.

It was crap, though, you're quite right about that.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

From what I've read, there can be vsync issues too; the PS3 outputs a single image with the two images arranged one on top of the other; if the screen tears then it will only be in one of the images, leading to the odd effect of the image tearing in one eye but not the other.

It'll bring a tear to your eye.

[small_world]

With things like map editors, and mods on PC games like (the later) Fallouts, I think it may be possible for developers to open up the creative side to the public.
A game like Oblivion could be released with a slightly smaller map, and could be expanded by players/designers over time. The levels would just require testing (also could be done by the public) before release. They wouldn't necessarily have to be linked to a story, or require characters, but simply be fully designed/rendered new areas. To which the publisher/developer could add the rest.

[Still Not George]

Giant cocks. Giant cocks everywhere.

Levels shaped as giant cocks which contain giant cocks.

That's what you'll get.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

And your problem is?

[Still Not George]

Sorry, misspoke there. I meant that giant cocks is ALL you'll get. Thousands and thousands of enormous erect phalluses.

[Jemble Fred]

I've never considered the equivalent for an RPG, but I've been boring folk for eons about my desire – which could only really be delivered effectively by a whole new generation of gaming, I reckon – for a new 'Vanilla' game franchise, ideally headed up centrally by the console makers, ie Microsoft. Customisation is far and away one of the most important things in gaming to me, and if they marketed a completely basic game package for the relevant genres – beat-'em-up, platformer, kart/racing game etc – with all the physics and controls and so on there, and solid as fuck, but left it to you to design the game however you want, I'd be over the frigging moon. So there's a dull but serviceable vanilla starting point, then you get to create characters, arenas, music etc, from a huge selection of options and variables, including using Kinect or the equivalent to put yourself and your friends in the game. The company then makes a further fortune by giving you endless different add-on packs to download, full of both original designs and great licenses, so you could make your own Muppet Kart game or whatever, or even have Kermit racing against James Bond against your next door neighbour, on a carefully fan-recreated classic Mario Kart track, and so on. Plus you'd have other online users checking your creations out, sharing their own, etc. That should be the future of gaming, for me. I want to be in control.

This could work for RPGs as well, like a 21st Century Theme Park – but that would be a lot of work. I suppose that's partly the appeal.

[Mister Six]

Smaller games, more multiplayer?

NOOOO! Not more multiplayer! Or at least not online multiplayer. The Halo and Call of Duty games already suffer from slender one-player games because the developers are more interested in mining that market. And if there's one thing I don't want to do it's listen to gobby American brats slagging me off while I try to enjoy a game. Or being blitzed by cunts with no jobs who can spend all their time perfecting their headshots. Or finding that I can't go back to a game because nobody's playing it any more.

Besides, multiplayer games always feel pointless to me. Without a narrative or end point it just feels like I'm repeating the same motions over and over and over again for no reason at all.

I'll make an exception for split-screen multiplayer. Left 4 Dead 2 and the isometric Tomb Raider game were both great fun when played alongside some mates. But those games are few and far between.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

If you can teach a computer to do the painstaking work for you, that may be the solution to how to make increasingly sophisticated games with the same amount of money and personnel.

[Still Not George]

If you can teach a computer to do the painstaking work for you, that may be the solution to how to make increasingly sophisticated games with the same amount of money and personnel.

Hahahahaha. Great joke there, good deadpan work too - for a moment I almost thought you were serious.

Oh, and can we please distinguish between developers, who generally don't have all that much creative control over franchises such as Halo and Gears, and publishers, who are the main drive behind the incessant retreads of the same old shit?

[Mister Six]

With things like map editors, and mods on PC games like (the later) Fallouts, I think it may be possible for developers to open up the creative side to the public.
A game like Oblivion could be released with a slightly smaller map, and could be expanded by players/designers over time. The levels would just require testing (also could be done by the public) before release. They wouldn't necessarily have to be linked to a story, or require characters, but simply be fully designed/rendered new areas. To which the publisher/developer could add the rest.

Unfortunately that makes buying the game when it comes out a waste of time, because it won't actually become any good until people have started to generate content. And even if you do get some good maps and additions (assuming it isn't all cocks all the time as SNG suggests) it'll be extremely hard to maintain any level of design/content consistency across all the new maps. All of a sudden your gritty post-apocalyptic America will take a detour into a gothic house where vampires are fighting werewolves, or turn into a Star Trek spoof. Or you'll get a well-designed map that rewards you with a completely game-unbalancing weapon.

It'll also mean lots of repeated assets and textures, plus amateur-hour voiceover work (not a lot of difference for the Fallout games there, granted...). Unless you want the spods to design their own graphics, at which point you can expect development to slow to a crawl as people who are - quite reasonably - more worried about their jobs/university courses/wanking procrastinate and take forever to churn out their models. Not to mention the problems with glitches and bugs caused by clashing additions to the game.

But the biggest problem will probably be that most user-generated stuff will be shit. I spent hours crawling through a mate's copy of Little Big Planet and found three (count 'em!) maps that were actually entertaining and creative. The last thing you want to do is try to integrate user content into the game proper.

The modding community is great and there are loads of ace mods out there, but it's best kept as an addition to the game rather than a replacement for professional development.

[Jemble Fred]

The modding community is great and there are loads of ace mods out there, but it's best kept as an addition to the game rather than a replacement for professional development.

I disagree with a white-hot violence. Besides, who gives a fuck what other people do? It's your own customisation and creativity that counts.

Unfortunately that makes buying the game when it comes out a waste of time, because it won't actually become any good until people have started to generate content.

Well yeah, that would be the whole point of the 'Vanilla' brand. That's like saying it's pointless to buy paper and pens, because nobody's written or drawn anything for you.

[Mister Six]

I disagree with a white-hot violence. Besides, who gives a fuck what other people do? It's your own customisation and creativity that counts.

Well yeah, that would be the whole point of the 'Vanilla' brand.

I was replying to Small Word, man. Bit harsh to start pulling me up on your points when I wasn't even replying to you.

[Jemble Fred]

Yes, but I was talking about something more interesting (LOL!), but closely related.

Point is, customisation, built on a solid game mechanism, should be the future. As it is, gamers are more often than not spoon-fed complete tripe. It's not enough to leave it to modders and bedroom coders, it's time for gamers to be given control. If full customisation was open to everyone, just imagine the things that could be created. It wouldn't all be giant cocks. It should also come to pass simply because it's a great money-spinner for publishers, charging for endless DLC. Everyone's a winner.

Besides, there would still obviously be full epic story-led non-customisable games and franchises, that goes without saying.

[Mister Six]

But since you mentioned it...

Customisation is far and away one of the most important things in gaming to me, and if they marketed a completely basic game package for the relevant genres – beat-'em-up, platformer, kart/racing game etc – with all the physics and controls and so on there, and solid as fuck, but left it to you to design the game however you want, I'd be over the frigging moon. So there's a dull but serviceable vanilla starting point, then you get to create characters, arenas, music etc, from a huge selection of options and variables, including using Kinect or the equivalent to put yourself and your friends in the game.

Yeah, that sounds fun. Although again, it's a bit of a gamble as to how well the user-generated content would turn out. Most LBP stuff is awful.

[Jemble Fred]

Ah yeah, but they're made by Sony gamers. (RUN!)

[Consignia]

I don't know. While I think it's great to have customisation available, and there is loads brilliant stuff out there which demonstrate this, basing an entire gaming experience around it isn't the best way forward. You make the tools too simple, you restrict creativity. You make the tools too powerful, you make them far less user friendly. I think Little Big Planet hits some nails on the head, but it's still difficult for most people, as the large amount of guff demonstrates.

[Mister Six]

Ah yeah, but they're made by Sony gamers. (RUN!)

It's more that they're made by 10-year-olds. Which is inevitable given how rudimentary the game is. So you end up with a trade-off: do you do an LBP and get a massive audience (thus big bucks) but end up wading through absolute shit to find something half-decent? Or do you provide tools that are as complex as the ones for Fallout 3, but reduce the potential audience to people who have the nous and skill to craft something bigger and better?

Obviously how complex those tools can get will depend on the type of game (I imagine a beat-em-up construction kit would be fucking rock hard, since you'd have to animate moves, combos, etc, while a kart racing sim would obviously be far less fiddly) but it's something that would take a lot of serious thought and planning. Good idea though.

EDIT: Balls. Basically what Consignia said but with far less eloquence.

[Still Not George]

LBP gets away with it because of the inherent simplicity of the game. Even then, the limited pallette means there's a practical limit to what can be made with it. The whole idea of a "toolkit game" implicitly requires a shallow experience, because complexity will put people off. There's a reason why the NWN Dungeon Mastering tools were so rarely actually used; they were insanely complex!

In short, what you need is procedural generation to take some huge bounds, because you're effectively asking for the whole game to be emergent. That leads us to something akin to Minecraft, which is the nearest thing that currently exists to what you're asking for.

On that topic, I'm actually mildly amazed there aren't already Minecraft clones, it would seem a no-brainer to implement the same concept in C++ and increase the fidelity level somewhat (Java really does restrict what the Minecraft author can achieve, unfortunately).

edit: Also what consignia said.

[Jemble Fred]

I still think LBP is irrelevant really, it's a completely different system to what I'm proposing. It also seems both patronising and restrictive to say "The problem is that people are twats and make everything massive cocks" etc. And as I say, it's what you can do that matters, sod everyone else.

I just don't think, besides the basic mechanism of a game not being borked, anything else matters as much as customisation – certainly when it comes to fighting, racing and sports games. And it would be no more taxing than any Create a Fighter (or, say, Fable character customisation) system is now – in fact, Kinect makes it easier than ever – it would just be better, with more options and DLC. A few menus, a few button-presses. You don't need anything more than that.

As I said at the start though, it is a suggestion for the next gen for it to really work well. Seeing it in terms of what can be done right now, yeah, the 'Vanilla' brand would probably be a bit weak.

[Still Not George]

Um. Did I read that right? Are you seriously suggesting that Kinect be used as a move editor for fighting games?

"SPAZ FIGHTER 2000" here we come...

[Mister Six]

I still think LBP is irrelevant really, it's a completely different system to what I'm proposing. It also seems both patronising and restrictive to say "The problem is that people are twats and make everything massive cocks" etc. And as I say, it's what you can do that matters, sod everyone else.

I just don't think, besides the basic mechanism of a game not being borked, anything else matters as much as customisation – certainly when it comes to fighting, racing and sports games. And it would be no more taxing than any Create a Fighter (or, say, Fable character customisation) system is now (in fact, Kinect makes it easier than ever), it would just be better, with more options and DLC. A few menus, a few button-presses. You don't need anything more than that.

Well in that case you're talking about something that wrestling games have been doing since the N64 - something that's considerably less complex and more restrictive then even LBP. And I can't see a game whose major selling point is that lasting for too long at all. Making a wrestler with a massive handlebar moustache and the same moves as Stone Cold Steve Austin then calling him TWATTY BUMSEX was fun for about 15 minutes when I was 14. But at the end of the day we were more interested in taking part in the Wrestlemania than scrolling through a thousand different moves to give our man the perfect elbow drop.

[Jemble Fred]

No. Move editor? Wha? You don't need one. Any more than you need to design every frame of animation for today's Character Customisation. The next gen software takes care of all that. The same goes for facial damage and so on. The system would be designed to make these things automatically fit with your own designs.

(making a wrestler with a massive handlebar moustache and calling him TWATTY BUMSEX and giving him the same moves as Stone Cold Steve Austin was fun for about 15 minutes but at the end of the day we were more interested in taking part in the Wrestlemania).

But that's just the offensive "it'll all be giant cocks" argument again.

EDIT: Funny you mention Wrestlemania. As it goes, I remember having an N64 Wrestlemania game with Character Customisation – me and my mates designed ourselves, had a ball kicking each other to bits, and I wondered then – why the fuck would anyone want to play as the dull as shit 'roided-up fighters you're actually given? When you can personalise everythign? That precise game is what triggered this ambition for greater customisation, and no built-in characters or locations.

In fighting game character and arena terms – Tekken is shit. Street Fighter is shit. Mortal Kombat is shit. Wrestlemania? Shit. Every single beat-'em-up, is fundamentally shit. So, you make your own. I don't see why this is hard to grasp. There are similarities with Avatar-based games already, but the next gen could really do the idea justice.

And yes as I say above, customisation has been around for eons, I didn't say I was suggesting anything revolutionary – I'm talking about the same concept, massively expanded and taken to its logical conclusion. I don't want to be spoon-fed the usual generic muscle men and big-titted lady fighters, I'll make my own muscle men and big-titted lady fighters, thanks.